Death to the smartphone?
The Atlantic ran an interesting piece by Jean M. Twenge about the long-term effects of the smartphone on kids. It’s an interesting read and worth your time even if you don’t have kids, because as a group we all reap the benefits and consequences of long-term structural changes in society.
The piece talks about some of the negative, unintended consequences that seem to be emerging since smartphones became ubiquitous. The key impacts Twenge cites are around mental health, with the rise of ubiquitous smartphones linked to higher rates of suicide and lower rates of life satisfaction. Social media, she argues, is playing a role in part because teens are spending less time together in person and more time perpetually watching others’ “perfect” lives unfold while sitting at home. This is happening even as they are going out less and “safer” in the way my generation would have had that defined for us at our age — loitering less, having sex less—but the cost is that they are more often feeling “alone and distressed.”
The notion that smartphones are “destroying a generation,” as the headline put it, is powerful. All the more reason to be cautious about how we absorb Twenge’s piece, because it is more nuanced than the headline would suggest.
We should take care that our takeaways from Twenge’s piece are not solely focused on technology, in this case the smartphone or the social media apps themselves. Communication technology is not just products and hardware. It is embedded in social relationships, ones that have formed over lifetimes but also are governed by norms attached to the technology forms we’ve used. Consider how long, for example, society has had to adapt to the printed book to the point to the point where a teenager laying on their bed in their room reading a book isn’t considered abnormal or antisocial for the most part. Replace that book with a mobile device, though, and reactions change for many. At its core, it’s still media use, a communication tool that comes between two humans communicating face-to-face. Yes, a book is one type of thing whereas a mobile device is a tool for using different types of media, but my point is society has over time come to accept certain forms of media as better than others mostly as a function of experience.
The upshot here is I read Twenge’s work as unsurprising. The mobile device isn’t the problem so much as what the mobile device is doing to norms and communication patterns that have been established for decades, even centuries. Much of the criticism I read about phones, for example, mirrors work on historical critcisms of TV and radio after those forms of media became widely available. It doesn’t just apply to platforms either. Music, a form of cultural communication, is another example. When old forms are broken and new forms emerge, the new is always dangerous and subversive. I remember growing up during the time hip-hop and rap emerged in the 1980s, and how the genre was criticized as being associated with cop killers, drugs, gangs, and urban violence. Those of you who are older likely heard similar arguments that attached danger and corrupt youth to rock and roll. I specifically remember school assemblies and afterschool specials on TV that warned us of the mental illness dangers of heavy metal music. The first reaction to new forms often is fear, and the easy entry point is some random news story about a person doing said new thing while committing some awful deed. It’s a form of informal correlation that is amplified by fear, and the blowback soon follows.
Go back further and read some of the histories of the printing press. Until mass printing was available, the only way to get a book was to commission a hand-copied version. As the only way to acquire a book, this made bound works a scarce commodity available only to elites because of the huge production costs involved, and this limiting of books only for elites meant that books were associated with certain types of class behavior. When books suddenly were widely available, elites decried how the press was turning this precious resource into something vulgar. In the 1490s, one Catholic official decried the press as a “tool of the Devil” because it turned the printing of books from something that required deliberation and thought for the hand-copier into a mindless activity done by machines rather than human hands (oh, so many linkages to the world of automation about to be unleashed on us).
In 2017, we probably get bewildered by that line of reasoning because books are just …. books. But it’s instructive to see that any new communication technology that disrupts societal forms is going to get similar treatment. The effects of the printing press were profound; turning information and knowledge from a scarce to more-abundant commodity had transformative effects on religious, economic and governmental structures for centuries. But it’s important to see that not all effects are bad, and some of the overworrying about the negatives is less about the change in how we communicate and more about the renegotiation of power and control in societies, families, and in our own personal lives.
These arguments are at least hundreds of years old. They get recycled and repackaged in ways that are both subtle and obvious, but at their core they are the same old line of reasoning.
This is not to say there aren’t important side effects to explore as it pertains to mobile technology. We should take dips in mental health seriously. But even if we can prove causality (and it’s important to note that even Twenge herself doesn’t make this claim; we are talking correlations here), we have to be careful to separate technology from the practices and norms that govern how we use technology. It might well be that this dip in mental health is happening because our social norms are wired for particular ways of doing things, and the phone is disrupting that. If that’s the case, of course we’re going to see problems, but that doesn’t mean these problems are forever.
My argument isn’t that Twenge is off base, it’s just that there isn’t a simple line from technology to user here (to be fair, I don’t think she’s making that argument either so much as the armchair psychologists on Twitter). For example, one side effect of the social internet that I’d argue is good is that it’s created an expectation of people having their say. From comments on stories, to blogs, to social media posts, we are rewiring the relationship between discourse and media use. Those concepts were less directly connected than they used to be, but emerging media is closing and in some cases eliminating that gap.
The results are dizzying. It’s created a public form of awful behavior in the forms of trolling and abuse, but it also has forced institutions to be more nimble and react in real time to complaints. Entire old ways of doing things in the areas of (here we go again) religion, economics and government are under assault, for good and bad. Feelings and ideas are less hidden, but it comes at a cost when social or family dynamics are built on the idea of passive aggressive silence. Like many social changes forced by changes in communication technology, it’s a mixed bag, and we are having to rethink the norms that govern use in a world where public feedback is a given.
This is evolution. Change a major component of social communication (in this case mobile computing) and it changes how society works, how relationships are done, and how we think about our place in society. It’s possible the changes Twenge is noticing are in part because our norms and parenting styles haven’t caught up to these changes. Sociologists such as Robert Putnam argued that television, for example, created a decades-long pattern of civic disengagement and decline and isolated us from each other, but it turned out that wasn’t a permanent feature and in fact it was way more complicated than merely blaming TV use. Why they were watching, what they were watching, and who they were watching with turned out to be much bigger factors than mere watching.
So it’s easy to blame the new technology without fully understanding its impact. What can we do in the mean time? The easiest one is to practice moderation, not because smartphones are bad but because moderation is usually good habit in general — for kids and adults.
In addition, I’d argue there are five things we can be doing now.
First, we have to figure out the things that are good about this change in communication technology, the emerging new behaviors that are positive. Twenge herself notes some of the positives, such as safer kids. I just noted another, a more robust discourse. There are more, and they should be documented by research because we should know what progress we are holding back if we’re going to cut mobile use among teens, or perhaps think through whether it’s possible to rethink for a mobile experience that preserves these positives.
Second, we have to recognize that we have fairly nostalgic ways of thinking of older media forms that have an impact on how we see this new data on smartphones. Books and traditional TV are more accepted because they are older technologies, and to some degree we have idealized them (reading a book is seen as growing your mind, watching TV with others is being social even though they’re just staring at a screen). We have to resist the idea that what is new is necessarily bad, or the cause, and instead think about behaviors and motives around mere use. People have always misbehaved and done horrible things. Technology is a tool. It takes humans to misuse it.
Third, we need to see this problem not as one of technology but of living our values. What are the things we value and want to impart to the next generation? That—not grabbing the phone out of their hands—is a more measured way of figuring out how to parent in the age of mobile. Telling our kids to turn their phone off is a blunt instrument and doesn’t do much to teach how to port our values into online living. Instead, teach them how to behave online. Address FOMO by talking to them about how media tends to present a fake perfect ideal. Encourage them to think about what it means to have real, fulfilling relationships and think through how online relationships can both help and harm this goal.
Fourth, we need to grapple with the reality that these kids are living online and offline lives that are parallel and distinct from one another, and yet interdependent at the same time. Older parents who came of age pre-Internet and social media feel it ourselves, but it’s a learned behavior for us. As our kids enter the social world, it will feel more and more like the way things have been. To learn how to talk with them about it, we need to figure out for ourselves what it means to have this dual self, and to articulate ways of navigating it for our kids.
By extension, if we look at the smartphone as a thing disrupting social communication patterns, we can ask how our kids are using it in ways that are negative. This allows us to pick patterns of use and parent around that. Maybe, to use Twenge’s example, it’s a good thing to tell them to stay off Instagram on Friday night if your kid’s friends are out without them. Save the FOMO for a day later, when the sting is less. You can’t erase it anyhow. We had FOMO when I grew up in the ’80s and all we had were pagers.
Finally, we need research, and lots of it. Twenge, to her credit, was careful to note these were demonstrated relationships between mobile use and the mental illness trends, but there is not yet support for causality. Social science research is difficult because there often are other factors in play. We need to keep trying to unlock this puzzle.
Humans evolve and adapt. The problems Twenge describes are real, and I don’t doubt mobile communication is playing some part here, but it’s important to explore whether this is partly a side effect of changing how we communicate. Whether it’s the phone or a permanent structural change in our communication, neither would particularly solvable. But we can grapple this better as parents, teachers, and as a society if we take the time to explore this question at a systems level.
