It seems as if generational comparisons are a stalwart of human nature, each new crop of parents and grandparents lamenting the laziness and unpreparedness of the young growing up under their watch. The past decade, then, has done nothing to dispel this notion: the newest generation, whether seriously or in jest, is often cast as a herd of introverted, socially awkward tech addicts, more keen on interacting with tiny screens than with fellow members of society. Jean M. Twenge's recent article in the Atlantic, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" simply throws gasoline at this fire.
Her piece starts with an account of what seems like a typical thirteen-year-old, detailing some of her social routines and interactions. After reciting her research credentials, Twenge sets out the premise of her article:
"Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it."
No less than three paragraphs later, she defines what she calls the iGen:
"Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet."It merely takes a few paragraphs for the first glaring contradiction to spring up in Twenge's argument. If she so adamantly demarcates 2012 as the year that abrupt shifts in teen behaviors changed, and insists that the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 was an important catalyst in this shift, how can she feasibly purport to say that the effect of such technology is even remotely similar for the children born on opposite ends of the date the iPhone was released? This grouping is arbitrary and methodologically questionable. I got my first smartphone in high school; I've worked with kids that got theirs in early elementary. Surely our experiences with smartphones, and the way they will mould us into adults, are enormously different.
Twenge's prose gets considerably more irresponsible shortly thereafter, when she plainly states that "the allure of independence... holds less sway over today's teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents." If anything, teens going out less represents a much longer and more statistically substantiated trend of restrictive parenting and fears of neighborhood security. That a psychology professor can seriously claim that teenagers even mildly disregard independence is startling; surely this is the basis upon which much of the fundamental 'teenage struggle' occurs.
And if 'teen independence' is something easily measured by rates of teenage smoking, drinking, driving, and going out, as the author implies, she might be surprised to hear that the vast majority of students I knew at Garfield High School, during the time I studied there, had smoked weed at least once.
Unfortunately, much of the article follows the above pattern. The author recites a broad statistic, with little to no reference of where the data comes from or how well it measures the phenomenon being discussed. She then draws a causal relationship between smartphone usage and this statistic, or at least tries to bring it back to said topic, no matter how unrelated the data is.
This is best illustrated in the next section of the piece, where the author cites drops in teens' rates of sexual activity, dating, driving, and working. To explain this, she, to her credit, initially puts forward a reasonable explanation:
"Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job."She ignores this theory just a paragraph later, however.
"So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed."Despite pulling statistics from everywhere but smartphone usage itself, Twenge finds it appropriate to essentially establish a causal relationship between reduced rates of almost every single 'typical teen' activity and smartphone usage. Additionally, although she describes 'steep' changes in the graphs of these activities, many of the post-2012 sections of the graphs in her article are clearly continuations of trends that have been going on for much longer.
It is baffling to think that a Ph.D. has no issue in insinuating that there is a causal relationship between these data without mentioning other possible explanations. Maybe reduced driving rates are the product of shifting attitudes about safety, sustainability, and convenience, not to mention increasingly viable transportation alternatives. Or the fact that driving a car is, in many ways, more expensive than ever, with gas prices significantly higher than those of previous generations. Or that, with the increasing wage gap, most families simply don't have the money to pay for another person's gas, repairs, and insurance, especially with the increasing suburbanization of low- and middle-income families, increasing gas expenditures even further.
Perhaps teens get less sleep and are more distressed because of the increasingly scary prospects of inheriting a world considerably worsened by their predecessors in so many ways: climate change, an economy where mobility is increasingly becoming a pipe dream at best, and so on. Maybe it's because getting into increasingly selective colleges, often incurring catastrophic amounts of debt, is viewed as the indisputable way to have any chance of a decent job for years to come.
I don't disagree with the proposition that increased use of smartphones and social media is involved in noticeable changes in teen behavior; in fact, I wholeheartedly understand the link. But the author's scapegoating of smartphones is arbitrary, and ignores so many other potential factors. None of the explanations above are inherently more feasible than increased smartphone usage, but from the content of the article, they are just as justified. Furthermore, blaming smartphones as an entity is a blank argument that has no insight whatsoever. Smartphones are a means to a set of behaviors and interaction patterns; the valuable insight lies in their usage, which the author almost completely ignores, not in their existence.
Twenge, to her credit, provides some good points later in the article. She mentions how social media can exacerbate the feeling of being left out. She provides solid, quantitative data that shows a very strong correlation between screen time and depression. She illustrates how cyberbullying is all too common and easy through today's social media, especially among girls. She laments the replacement of real social interaction and conversation by mindless scrolling and texting. These are excellent, if uncreative, points which go beyond her blanket criticism of smartphones and social media.
Shouldn't these observations be the foci of her argument? Many of the above specifics seem to be aimed at problems social media, not the prevalence of smartphones, are helping to exacerbate. Social media and smartphones are not the same thing, yet she dangerously groups the two in her argument. Sure, smartphones might facilitate the problems social media are worsening, but Facebook and Instagram are just as pervasive in our computers' Internet browsers.
Blaming smartphones for the failings of an arbitrarily defined 'generation' with obviously widely ranging experiences and involvement with them is irresponsible and lazy, kind of like the obvious copy-pasting of almost entire paragraphs from the same author's new book, iGen. Perhaps Twenge's tome more fully enlightens us as to why these devices are the bane of all kids born from 1995 to 2012.
Her entire thesis is massively uncreative, broad and vapid, and it too audibly echoes the current, most popular 'Old Man Yells at Cloud' rant: 'These kids and their Tweeter and SnapChat!' Surely, we can solve the issues of the next generation by blaming the inanimate objects that 'iGeners' use to broadcast themselves to the world. Why focus on the actual behavior and societal issues beyond the screen? That would be so difficult.