Techno BABBLE
HAVE SMARTPHONES MADE OUR KIDS DUMB? THAT’S JUST STUPID.
My smartphone, an out- of- date and memory-challenged iPhone, is so far and away the most incredible thing I’ve ever owned that I wouldn’t know how to pick a runner- up. I might never own a better camera, except in a replacement. It tunes my guitar vastly better than my guitar tuner. It moni tors me from space and guides me to my destination, adjusting the route for traffic congestion. I speak English into it and it translates back in any language I want. It streams more entertainment than I could ever consume. If 21- year- old me could see 41-year-old me today, he would wonder ( a) how I could possibly afford the thing, and (b) how I ever found time to stop gawking at it and go to work.
Ah, but at what cost? The social media are abuzz over the The Atlantic’s September cover story. Its headline asks: “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”
The author, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge, marshals evidence that today’s adolescents are lonelier, more depressed and more anxious than their forebears. They don’t go out with their friends any more; they don’t date; t hey don’t want a driver’s licence and the independence that comes with it; they don’t have jobs.
“Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011,” Twenge writes. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen” — her not- very- catchy term for people born between 1995 and 2012 — “as being on the brink of the worst mentalhealth crisis in decades.
“Much of this deterioration,” she writes, “can be traced to their phones.”
If you’re i mmediately skeptical, as I was, you certainly can’t accuse Twenge of glossing over opportunities for skepticism. For example, she notes — far too cursorily — that “depression and suicide have many causes.” No kidding. Adolescent bullying is one of nature’s ghastliest forces, and smartphones afford both perpetrators and victims instant, 24-7 access to it. But Twenge notes that teen suicide rates were higher in the 1990s, “long before smartphones existed.” She might also have noted that America’s suicide rate has been spiking since the turn of the century in every age group under 75.
If you look at the helpful charts depicting concerning changes in various indicators, you will certainly notice a steepening trend post- 2007, when the first iPhone landed. It’s difficult not to notice, however, that many trends began accelerating in the directions in question l ong beforehand. Not all of the trends are quite as dire as they appear: check out the Y axis on the plummeting “going out with friends” metric, and you’ ll find 12th Graders went out from about 2.7 times per week in 2007 to about 2.3 times per week in 2015. Even in the mid-1970s it was less than three times a week. If anything, it seems remarkable that hyperactive modern parenting hasn’t knocked the figure down much further.
Tellingly, Twenge cites evidence that “teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person” — i. e., “highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.” That highlights one of the central tensions here: How much of this is about kids, and how much of it is about their online activities? Twenge provides some evidence of causation: for example, one study found participants’ Facebook use predicted subsequent unhappiness, but their unhappiness did not predict future Facebook use.
For any parent it would be foolish to focus on smartphone screen time over a child’s phone usage per se. If she’s doing well off-line she’s probably doing well online, and vice versa. “If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on ( the data in question), it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something — anything — that does not involve a screen,” Twenge writes.
Really? Every parent? Every adolescent? I can think of some kids from my school days who seemed utterly miserable, profoundly out of place, all but friendless. A smartphone or a tablet or a computer and all the non-traditional social opportunities it offered — used healthily — would probably have been a Godsend. Surely you have to be some kind of Luddite weirdo to blame “t he smartphone” i t self for everything we’ve done wrong with it.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs here. Maybe “the smartphone” is a useful shorthand for “the smartphone and all the dumb self- destructive stuff we do with it.” But I’m not comfortable with that. I feel like it lets wealthy, comfortable people off the hook for how bad we are at parlaying wealth and comfort into happiness.
If you’re that skeptical about your smartphone, I’d suggest finding someone in the Third World to donate it to. She likely wouldn’t look this miracle in the mouth. More likely, she would use it to make miracles of her own.
HOW MUCH IS ABOUT KIDS, HOW MUCH ABOUT ONLINE ACTIVITIES?