Correspondence - Non-Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

be “raised by” iPads. “Get offline. It is not alcohol, it is not porn, it is not weed, it is not blah blah, it is being online. Get offline,” wrote a Reddit user on Not so long ago, the default position, if one were an internet-savvy older person beginning to feel queasy when noticing groups of kids bent over their phones, was to say to oneself, “Well, that’s life; once, Socrates feared print’s effect on memory, and now, I fear this.” One definitely didn’t say out loud, online, “The kids shouldn’t have phones,” unless one were writing for the Atlantic. A weary “it has always been thus” pose toward the topic was in order—television, Walkmans, rock music, the youths are always up to something the adults think is stupid. Some of the resistance to wagging a finger at kids and phones was a totally fair allergy to generational analysis; another part of it was probably self-defense. “Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized,” Taylor wrote in a follow-up Substack analyzing the replies to her recent “it’s the phones” provocation on X. “Others may think they appear smarter by highlighting other issues, that they can see above the fray and observe the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers.” It’s not the phones; it’s the lack of third spaces, the omnipresent car culture, the inequality. That defensive pose? I know it well, because I was adept at it—in 2019 I described concern over teens and social media as “alarmist.” Things are different in 2024. Yes, we have new data on the shape of the mental-health crisis among teens, and especially teenage girls, and how it’s worsened since phones got front-facing cameras and platforms became dominant. But the biggest shift doesn’t come from looking at new data; it’s from experience. More and more people have a boomer relative who was radicalized on Facebook, a grandma who won’t look up from her phone during family visits, or a Gen X partner adept at the art of phubbing. We, who are supposed to enjoy grown-adult levels of impulse control, have had trouble sleeping due to doomscrolling, spent Zoom meetings looking at Instagram, or gotten into weird fights with strangers on Reddit that derailed us emotionally for far too long. We, ourselves, with our developed brains, have felt like flies on sticky paper when it comes to social media; of course, children, still forming their selves and navigating the pitfalls of pre-adulthood, may be affected by it too. “Kids probably shouldn’t have smartphones” has lost its generational sting. It has come to look more and more like common sense. Into this apparently promising moment comes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Its compact thesis: 7