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Slashdot Asks: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? (theatlantic.com)
Teens today are more likely to be lonely, depressed and immature than any previous generation, according to analysis published in The Atlantic. According to the professor of psychology who did the analysis, who also has been researching generational differences for 25 years, the culprit is the smartphone. From the article: The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of "screen time." But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers' lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone. What do you folks think?
My kids were introduced to cell phones and tablets and a young age, and I noticed withing a few months that they started to be less confident with social interactions than they should be for their age. For example, slight fear to talk to the lady at the drive-through for a cheeseburger.
As soon as I noticed the deficiency, I made immediate changes to their phone/tablet time and forced them into social interactions that would be suitable for their age. The changes helped significantly. As time passed, and phones/tablets became more prevalent, it became clear to me which parents had devoted any attention to how the devices were impacting their children.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Facebook opened up to everyone around the time the iPhone came out, and increased Facebook/social media usage has been correlated with loneliness and depression. Many people use their smartphone to access social media. It might be that social media usage doesn't cause loneliness and depression, and it's only a correlation, but only a correlation was found between these and smartphone usage as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
While this is true, this does not prove that there is nothing wrong now and never will be.
I think it's the rapid adoption that's the problem, not the smartphone itself.
If in some alternate timeline smartphones had taken 20 years to become affordable enough for mass adoption, we probably would have merged them into our lives differently and more thoughtfully, better avoiding or adapting to some of the negatives associated with them.
But instead, they were adopted by nearly everyone simultaneously, along with a land-rush of novel social applications, and we're not necessarily done sorting out what are good uses and not so good uses, in addition to re-structuring our social habits to align with the capabilities of a smartphone.
It's kind of like liquor and indigenous populations that have never been exposed to it. Europeans and other alcohol-informed cultures had millennia to adapt to alcohol consumption, and for the most part have -- structuring social rituals and institutions to more or less train people on how to handle alcohol. Indigenous populations had none of these things and then their culture adopted alcohol all at once, and it was disastrous for them, as you might expect any addictive and toxic drug given to an uninformed population might be.
I'm all for having real data and robust analysis, but it doesn't take a science paper to tell me not to experiment with walking off a cliff or holding my hand in a fire. It also doesn't take a science paper to tell me that it's not a healthy situation when a generation of young people are so obsessed with their phones that they don't get proper sleep, can't concentrate on anything important, lack even a basic level of fitness, and would rather spend a huge proportion of their lives communicating with their "friends" in short messages punctuated by emoticons than doing anything more constructive.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
it doesn't take a science paper to tell me ...
If any of the things you insist are "obvious" were actually true, then it would be easy to support them with actual data ... yet you can't.
The state with worst obesity and lowest academic test scores is Mississippi. The state with the lowest ownership of smartphones is ... Mississippi. Many of the ills you describe are not even correlated with smartphone use.
Their real name is portable TELESCREENS; the way Oceania monitors and controls the population using a software tool called FACEBOOK. And this sort of thing was predicted decades in advance.
I know everyone is making themselves feel good by pointing out the obvious that every generation thinks their descendants will be the ruin of the world. I've heard plenty of it.
But I'm not so sure they aren't at least a little right about smartphones and smart devices. And the reason I think this is because it doesn't just affect the "new generation". I've seen entire families, from eldest to youngest, all glued to their screens at dinner, outside, everywhere. Times when you would be interacting, thinking to yourself, using your mind, etc. It allows you to be force fed stimulation, like a foie gras of the mind. It is turning us into "push" consumers, allowing material, content, and even values and principles to be pushed on us, willingly. It seems every new invention of technology ups the ante on this just a little bit more.
The stimulation is addicting. Your mind gets accustomed to a certain level. And once it drops below that, you reach for your phone. You know there's a silly meme, a new snapchat, and goofy video, a mindless game, a funny video, all just waiting to amuse you.
Now days, if you are sitting alone somewhere in quiet contemplation and you AREN'T swiping away at your cell phone, you look like the one out of place. Balk all you want, but I'm not sure this a good thing this time, folks...
No, it doesn't.
Your approach is simplistic borderlining retarded, and I don't try to be offensive (but I might succeed, that's entirely your opinion).
There's a gazillion differences between past "disruptive" inventions and smartphones.
1. Past inventions were not close to you everywhere. Books arguably could have been, but they were never considered disruptive.
2. Past inventions were very far from having the level of interactivity smartphones have.
3. Past inventions were not actively begging for your attention (aka notifications).
4. Past inventions wouldn't actively punish you if you would stop interacting with them, and this is a BIG issue with smartphones, or rather the games residing on them. Most games do punish you if you don't play them, and that's plain evil. "Play every day or you'd lose this bonus", "Your villagers miss you", "Planet X will soon start a rebellion because you haven't logged in today", etc.
5. Past inventions weren't all-in-one replacements for a multitude of activities. You couldn't interact with your neighbor Jack through TV, radio or a book. Now you can, through your smartphone.
There you go, some of the many reasons that make smartphones a lot more dangerous to people's development than past inventions.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
My gut instinct was something like that but specifically, think of Everquest 17 odd years ago. Surely Everquest and other MMO's zombified a good number of teenage/20 something year old males. It's a pretty common refrain, complaining about time lost to social activities in highschool and college.
But realistically, video games and the like only had that deleterious (subjective) effect on a relatively small portion of the population (middle class males between 15 and 30).. but smart phones and the like, well just about everyone has them.
Do they hinder social development ? probably. will society adjust? sure.
I think the issue is that the smartphone has accentuated the problem that TV was starting to cause.
It's easy as a child to mindlessly watch TV if nobody tells you not to. Even easier with smartphones because you can take them with you.
If you have nothing guiding you, and you don't have much ambition as a result, this loop is an easy one to get trapped in, and you end up wasting your life away like so many people do.
I tend to rant.
I think the take-away is not so much that smartphones are making a generation miserable, but rather that for whatever the reason, we're seeing radical changes in mental health and other aspects of development that we should at least be concerned with. If everything turns out fine, and the next generation is smarter, wiser and healthier than we, then great. But whenever there is rapid change, we should at least be watching so that we can help the next generation should they need it.
(Yet, other commenters are pointing out that smartphones are qualitatively different than preceding technologies (like television), which some of us were never convinced were harmless either...time will tell. We'll see if as time goes on, young people are electing better leaders, managing their money and lives more wisely and so on.)
1. Past inventions were not close to you everywhere. Books arguably could have been, but they were never considered disruptive.
Apparently, you'd be surprised at what was once considered disruptive:
Fanatically anti-fanatical