Slashdot Mirror
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?
The theme repeats. :)
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Yawn. Used to be videogames. Before that it was TV. Before that it was miscegenation. There's always some old crank with too much time on his hands willing to grab onto whatever is shiny and proclaim it as evil.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Wait, I thought the problem was comic books. Or possibly trashy novels. Or was it radio. Or Television. Or video games. Or is it just that any time there's anything new and fun someone pretends to do a study that shows that it's destroying the current generation.
People have complaining about the youth having something wrong with them since before the trial of Socrates. There's always something to blame, be it a philosopher, books, video games, or smartphones. People will talk down about a generation until that generation gets old enough to have power in society. Then, they will in turn talk down to next generation. Circle of life I suppose.
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.
Better question: Will any generation not insist their children are going to inevitable ruin for the technology they adopt?
Happens every generation
Modern phones objectively allow folks to do things on the go, that they haven't ever been able to do before. Folks are still learning what NOT to do, but for the most part, they're safe, and much less dangerous than other similar disruptive technologies.
Flamebait article.
Ryan Fenton
You DO understand what a "Slashdot Asks" is, right? (of course not, I asked a question, and the law says "NO"!)
Yes
... it was rock & roll.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
Good ol' Betteridge.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I'm old enough to know the before/after here -
... and we'd come up with smalltalk and jokes to pick things up and get the conversation moving again which brings out people's personalities and depth
Before the smartphone I'd go out to dinner with family and friends and eventually the conversation would inevitably die and
Now? We check our smartphones.
The problem is nobody learns the basic smalltalk skills anymore and the people you're with are "real" and not as interesting and entertaining as the 50 people in your facebook friends list who can always keep you going. It breaks down "social structure" in lieu of a social artifice in the "virtual" world.
I'm not immune to this and have done it myself but I would've easily done the same thing growing up as a teen and probably never learned how to hold a conversation.
next generation really need to be raised with the mindset that you have no digital privacy, and that the mobile phone should be assumed an actively hostile signals interception/surveillance device.
This is a common misconception I see made by Bommers and Gen-Xers. See, the millenials and those that follow know all this already. They just don't care. And I'm not entirely sure I can blame them.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
"Kids these days are being distracted by too much screen time." -- Generation of people famous for leaving multiple TVs blaring in their homes 24/7.
I think it was videogames and just TV in general before that. I'll agree that kids nowadays need to get away from tech sometimes to learn actual life skills. But that's on the parents, too. Sooo, who/what is really to blame? I'd say the "adults" that are in charge. It's like everyone wants to blame inanimate objects and everything BUT the people, who seem to be the real culprit of flawed social upbringing (duh???).
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.
The mistake always made by those making this argument is assuming an unchanging world. My observation is that the under 30 folks are operating under completely different rules than what I grew up with. Interestingly, I am as locked out of their world as they are from mine. There are many millenial companies that basically won't hire folks over 30.
They may be less confident in in-person social interactions, but if that is not what dominates their world when they get to power (20-30 years from now when they are in their 50s and 60s), then it won't matter. And if that is not their skill, then it WILL NOT be what dominates their world. The "world" is adjusted by each generation to fit their skills and mindset when they take over the reigns. Those who do not have the strong electronic communications skills will be the ones kicked to the curb.
It's almost as though something in the way you post were *motivating people*.
I explained that on my Slashdot page: "There are 10 kinds of people on Slashdot."
Smartphones just distracted one a bit.
Major social changes can come from technological advance.
Some changes are more sweeping than others. E.g., the internet was a bigger improvement over the phone compared to the phone vs telegraph.
Even then, the computer was never inherently social because it could not be involved in most social activities. Now, computers, messaging, and the internet are pervasive in every aspect of our lives.
This represents a significant change, and moreover, a change that has no clear analog.
For the generation that was caught on the cusp of this change, this is hugely disruptive. The early socialization by parents, schools, etc is less relevant. There are new risks and rewards out there, and the new generation doesn't have good guidelines on how to handle them---especially if their parents are technologically inept.
In the absence of established social customs, there will be friction regarding appropriate use of the technology.
While I believe that the headline "destroyed a generation" is sensational nonsense, I can readily accept that the mobile revolution made life more complicated for some people. It was always tough heading into the adult years, and it can only be harder when you and your cohort have no models for a significant piece of your social life.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It's smartphones plus the Internet plus so-called 'social media'. All of these things, jointly, were supposed to usher in a new 'age of information', and 'bring people together' and 'connect people'. Instead what we've got is MIS-information, DIS-information, fantasies disconnected from reality, and outright lies; 'social media' gives people more reasons to stay apart than it 'brings them together', plus we now have to differentiate between 'actual' Friends, and 'internet' friends (whom you will never meet, and can't even be sure if they're REAL). Smartphones plus the internet has done more to enslave people to the device (and all the above) and make them obsess over it than it does to 'connect' them in meaningful ways; it more often than not is more like an 'electronic leash' than it is anything else, and what's worse is that it's used as a 'data collection device' (read as: surveillance device) by organizations that usually don't have the average citizens best interests at heart (read as: sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't want and probably don't need, 'profile' you, and otherwise stick noses where they don't belong). That's just the 'normal' stuff. Then there's the downright negative ways that all the above technology is used to hurt people (bullying, extremism, etc). I'm not sure if it's 'ruined' a generation, but I don't think it's helped them so much either.
They are depressed because they see the world they're meant to inherit giving them no meaningful opportunities.
They are lonely because depressed people have difficulty connecting with others and generally make bad company anyway.
They are immature because they are deprived of socialization in their formative years.
To attempt to remedy all of this, they turn to smartphones, because we've told them that this is what communication is for.
Cue the usual ... "every generation says that!" ... in other words, don't question my vices :)
I'm very glad that my kids don't have Internet connected pocket computers. For all sorts of reasons.
(And screen time was a concern before smartphones and tablets. And it should remain a concern. )
My memory is lousy now. I used to know things, because I had to. Now I pull out my phone and google for the answer. Need a phone number? It's on the phone too. I cant ever remember my best friends phone number and he has had the same one for over 15 years.
If I ever lose my phone, I am so screwed.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
The parents spend 8 hours of a workday in front of desktop computers, and then complain when their kids spend more than 2 hours with a tablet. I'm not sure if all of that adult work is more important, but perhaps there's more to screen time than a single number.
I'm pretty sensitive to interruptions, so something like Facebook in my pocket would totally ruin me. This IMHO is what separates today's tech from the video games and movies of past -- constant presence and lack of focus. When I do stuff on a computer, I like to focus on it, and when I go out I'll leave it home. (Some of my best programming takes place while walking.) In "social" media and "smart"phones, I see a culture of interruptions and multitasking, neither of which are good for getting anything important or interesting done.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Hey look, its a Slashvertisement for a generation-baiting article from an author that makes money selling books about generation-baiting.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
no
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
... said Adam to Eve.
The reason kids like spending all this time with their smartphone is the cost is negligible. Think about all the ways kids used to spend money:
1. Eating out at the mall + cafes + Denny's
2. Driving Around
3. Telephone Calls, back when they used to cost something.
4. Going to amusement parks.
5. Outdoor activities that use expensive sports equipment.
6. Going to movies.
7. Alcohol
Now kids just stay home and mess around on the smartphone and computer and spend almost no money at all. I recently got Grand Theft Auto IV on my phone and probably spent 60 hours on it over a few months for a cost of $2.99! As long as they're getting some regular exercise and eating healthy, studying, etc. it's not such a big deal, IMHO. I do think some memetic immunization might help, like reading about "skinner boxes" and such used in online gaming and the basics of social psychology.
Drug, alcohol, tobacco (including vape) use and teen pregnancy are at all time lows. What's wrong again?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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...
I think this is stu... wait, I got a Facebook alert. Back in a sec.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Complaining about too much screen time misses the point.
The problem has never been 'too much video games' or 'too much facebook'. The problem is 'Not enough meaningful activities that improve ones quality of life". As long as any given individual is doing something that is personally fulfilling, and as long as they put enough time and effort into those things, it really does not matter how they use the rest of their time.
But if a random person has few friends, no hobbies, and lacks the means and opportunity to find and pursue something of interest to them, they are going to be depressed and isolated.
END COMMUNICATION
If you want them off the phone, you'll have to let them hang out somewhere away from their parents so they feel like they can be themselves. That used to be the mall, but these days malls kick the teens out if not accompanied by parents. Parks and other recreational areas like to close at the first hint of sunset.
Worseridge in this case
since every previous generation is full of assholes trying to screw the next one and make them work harder for less. Every now and then a generation notices this and pushes back. So the think tanks (used to be Philosophers & preachers) fire up and beat the little brats back into place.
The Millennials grew up during the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression. Hell if our Government had sat on it's thumbs like they did in the 30s it would have been a second Great Depression. Unlike folks who grew up in the 30s the Millennials have enough information to know who was really at fault (the ruling class). So yeah, they're a little different. They're fucking pissed off.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Poor/disinterested parenting and lack of discipline (first parental, later self discipline) is what makes people/society shitty/depressed/immature/etc.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
When I was growing up, I was perfectly capable of being lonely, depressed, and immature without any of this new-fangled technology!
...full fucking telepresence and not before.
Until then, the aperture through which the world and human experience flows through will be constrained by keystrokes, emojis, the limitations of the application used, the limitations of the devices used, and the dwindling creativity of their addicted users.
I have often said, "When the emotional spectrum of our youth is only expressed within the bounds of mad face and smiley face icons, don't be surprised when their experience of life is diminished accordingly."
Even now I notice how incredibly addicted people are to these infernal devices. Just try leaving yours off for a day and see what happens. Someone you know will never forgive you. Someone will think less of you. People might even wonder if you are a drug addict.
All because your electronic tether isn't firmly attached. You loose the bonds for just a little while and the others will turn on you.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Some comments are about the similarity with TV for previous generations. In my opinion, smartphones are much more social game changers than TV.
For a teenager, the smartphone is now the entry point for social interaction. It follow kids all the time, always request attention, and punish by social isolation the one that will not use it enough. It is both compulsory for social interaction and the destroyer of social interactions.
Teens today are more likely to be lonely
Maybe physically lonelier. But if it is lonely as in "starved of human relationships", I'm not convinced. Internet communication is still communication.
depressed
Because depression is now better diagnosed and taken seriously.
and immature
If we define maturity as the ability to act as a grownup, then yeah, it probably takes longer to happen. But that's because there is more to learn in order to become a grownup. The world is more complex than ever and studies are longer.
The average teen is ineligible for credit and does not earn enough money to buy an unsubsidized phone + monthly prepaid voice/data plan. Jobs for teens are scarce. In my town, half of them don't work at all. Maybe the problem is not what teens do with a smartphone, it's how they get to make the choice of owning one without the requirement to earn one. Mom and Dad hand over a $700 piece of hardware and spend another $500 annually on service plans, while the teenager's part of the bargain is little more than exclaiming "Hurray! Free stuff!". Then they turn 18, graduate from high school, and borrow other people's money to go to college. Student loans are not free, but to a person who has learned to expect handouts, it sure looks that way. Smartphones are the entry level of perpetual entitlement and dependence. If we have destroyed a generation, it's mostly because parents waited too long to introduce the concept of financial self sufficiency.
This thing seems wery much lik X whitch I did not have when growing up (grr) hasruined the generation the kane after me an had it, jelus much ;).
Now get of my lawn, medlin kids whith their smsrtphones
To me there is no doubt that the "age of cyperpunk", as I like to call it, is upon us and one of the most notable and heavy impacts it has is on society and the way modern humans can (not) function socialy. The most notable thing to me is to see a stark increase in people (surprisingly girls/women too) that are more nerdy than me. Not neccessarily in what they are interested in (I was into science fiction, fantasy, pen & paper roleplaying and your type A 80ies computer kid) but in their somewhat clumsy way in which they socially interact and in their shortcomings of experience in dealing with certain social situations.
I'm a *very* late bloomer in that regard but a diploma in and a talent for performing arts, raising a daughter, ~10 years of lots of social dancing, starting a psychoanalysis and a few other stretches of systematic work have brought a mid-40ies guy like me finally up to the point where I can say that I can meet a 25 year old woman and feel comfortable and at eye-level with her. I just had this experience in a 7-week romance with a lady I met earlyer this year. She had an ususal background aswell and had come to terms with her quirks which did help the experience. Likewise I see imaturities in others instantly, recognising myself in them and inmediately putting any problems in social interaction with that person into a level-headed perspective. An amazing experience that probably is some sort of wisdom that comes with age.
Modern times and technology have brought the age of cyberpunk upon us and one of it's most impactful effects is a full tilt of cultural borders from the vertical to the horizontal. Cities around the world look more and more the same due to globalisation and a melange of evergrowing sprawls and the allways-online culture have brought upon us what I would call an ongoing and more or less complete disintegration of society and social life as we know it. I just (finally) installed Tinder yesterday and am testing if it can remedy my loneliness a little (very meh results so far). Just think about that app and all that comes with it for a moment and what this says about society and where we are headed. Note I'm an old school geek, so I hate FarceBook & WhatsCrap with a passion, rather using IRC, Usenet and forums like /. .
A complete change is happening to which even todays abrahamic revelation cults ("religions") as some people still pratice them don't really have an answer either. The countermovement to what is happening is/will be what we all know already from reading Gibson and Stephenson: Newly formed tribal communities, orthogonal to the 'society' around them, and "quasi national entities", minimalist subcultures with their own rituals and the encounter between people turning into an emphasised religious liturgy with once again a victorian-style strict set of rules of engagement. ... People paying other people to feel their touch (look at Japan people - the future of things to come) and a permanent media-driven attack on the self, our identity and humanity. Not just by smartphones, but by everything.
I've been seeing this happening ever since my teens. What bothers me the most is that now that I have come to terms with these changes I see people all around me struggling with the same problems only at a different stage because they arrived in this so much later than the nerds like us. This is perhaps something we nerds will observe more of in the future - that we, believe it or not, are actually well equiped to teach a new generation on how to punch trough the veil of tech towards other people because we ourselves were the first ones that had to fight this battle.
I tell younger ones I don't like to use Facebook because I consider it a global mental illness rather than anything like a social network. I do get weird looks, but sometimes I sense they somehow get what I mean.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is it every time the human civilization stands on the brink of change, people get scared saying it's the end of the world? Sure we have no idea what we're changing into, we have no idea what our kids are changing into, but that's evolution bitches. That's how it fucking works. The environment changes, and we change with it. If we stagnate, we die for sure. The only way to survive is to continously mutate the species so that it may adapt. If technology is the answer to all our problems, we will know in a hundred years. If it's not, then we'll also know in a hundred years. Why is it such a big deal to worry about it now? Why spend all your time and energy worrying about things that aren't real?
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
"The earliest instance known to QI of this prototypical claim was printed in the August 1908 issue of a periodical for bicyclists called "Bassett's Scrap Book". A short item contrasted the modern age to ancient times and presented a variation of the epigraph:
> The "good old times" seemed as bad to the "good-old-timers" as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation on an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:--
>> Naram Sin, 5000 B.C.
>> We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book."
But see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The lament for Sumer and Urim or the lament for Sumer and Ur is a poem and one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"â"dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess.
The other city laments are:
The Lament for Ur
The Lament for Nippur
The Lament for Eridu
The Lament for Uruk
In 2004 BCE, during the last year of King Ibbi-Sin's reign, Ur fell to an army from the east.[1] The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in the lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate"[2]
The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated (e.g. by the Hittites, Hurrians and Canaanites), and the world-renowned expert in Sumerian history, Samuel Noah Kramer, wrote that later Greek as well as Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them."[3] Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the bible (e.g. "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on the mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)."[4]"
Part of what is going on in various ways in cities expecially for millennia "like moths to a flame":
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Related books maybe of interest (all easier read than done):
* "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online" by Mary Aiken
* "Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age Paperback" by Richard Freed
* "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time Paperback" by Victoria L. Dunckley MD
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
No doubt about it. With their faces in their "Smart" phones every minute or less of every day it's a wonder how these people survive in the real world. Visit a college and watch them walking between classes, sitting in the cafeteria, the library, the lounges, their cars. It's so pathetic. They can not go longer than 30 seconds to a minute without looking at these phones. They are indeed zombies. I still use a flip phone and I'm not on facebook. I have a life.
Do the one about losing weight by buying a new scale after ten years of not realizing you were maxing out the scale at the gym next. I love that one, it's a hoot!
https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/2017/07/18/losing-ten-pounds-with-a-digital-bathroom-scale/
Some do, but there is definitely social pressure not to care.
Cheap storage VM.
I don't see anything out of the ordinary on that list opinionated people tend to be self righteous, condescending, and smug. I'v also seen posts indicating empathy and desire to help others. The constant barrages keep creimer on the defensive, so you'll naturally see more posts slanting towards the former.
I enjoy creimer's input and hope he continues to participate int the slashdot community. If there was one thing I think he needs to learn, it's "don't feed the trolls", but I think he gets a kick out of it. Sometimes it's fun.
Cheap storage VM.
1) Your inability to tell a consistent, truthful story;
Adding details to my stories confuses the hell out of my adoring trolls.
2) Your self-righteous & condescending attitude;
The hallmarks of a college education.
3) Your smug self-importance which is well out of proportion to your accomplishments in life;
The alternative is failure. I would rather be known as a successful failure than someone who never tried to be successful.
4) Your physically impossible self-delusion about your body composition, weight, and health;
I weighed 357 pounds this morning, down 13 pounds from 13 weeks ago.
5) Your blithe acknowledgement that you defraud your employer by working on your "side business" during working hours;
I suggest you never work at eBay, where every employee is encouraged to have their own eBay storefront. You may not like the idea that the person in the next cube over is grossing $1M in sales on PEZ dispensers.
6) Your frequent inability to construct a coherent English sentence without glaring errors;
Someone has to neuter all the grammar nazis on Slashdot.
7) Your spamming of amazon affiliate links into any conversation you can find a way to do so, while providing little to no actual interesting content to wrap them in;
Casey Neistat did a video about "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline because Steven Spielberg is turning the book into a movie.
8) Your off-topic posts which add nothing to the conversation;
I'm always fascinated by what topics my adoring trolls troll me on. The more technical the topic, the less likely I get trolls responding.
You don't agree with me? Then I'll wager you're a zombiephone addict.
Do you read, and maybe answer texts
while driving?
while eating?
while having sex?
Can you go *anywhere* without it?
Addict.
(And no, I have a flipphone, and no, I do not have it on me most of the day.)