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| DATE | 2017-08-04 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] smartphones and the death of teen rebellions
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer,
physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of
a mental-health crisis.
Jasu Hu
Jean M. Twenge September 2017 Issue Technology
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One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who
lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone
since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about
her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do
with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop
you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s,
when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I
go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and
walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going.
I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”
Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena
and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned.
Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying
up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the
smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that
quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which
show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other.
Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of
friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m
not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer
hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her
generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life
without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like
actual people.”
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I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting
when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the
characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and
along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply
continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly
individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since
the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown
accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and
valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
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.
The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds
less sway over today’s teens.
At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted,
across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes
weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the
Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world;
teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in
how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are
radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a
few years before them.
What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was
after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and
had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a
sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of
Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors,
and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it
became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the
concomitant rise of social media. I call them 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. The Millennials grew up with the
web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all
times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when
the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the
iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000
American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
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.
To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may
seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is
not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to
understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive,
some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms
than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than
teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car
accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their
predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials
were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011.
It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the
worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be
traced to their phones.
Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in
the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no
single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to
change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But
the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an
earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever.
There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young
people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making
them seriously unhappy.
In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of
portraits at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In
one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps
stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no
older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place
where kids could get away from their parents and inhabit a world of
their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the
backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers
gaze at Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own
choices—even if, perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they
were the right ones.
Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of
Generation X, smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was
definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to get our driver’s
license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we
turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our
suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, “When will you be home?,”
we replied, “When do I have to be?”
But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations,
holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the
house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015
were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of
courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”),
kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers
texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a
while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school
seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number
was about 85 percent.
The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop
is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually
active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average
teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a
full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has
contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in
recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67
percent since its modern peak, in 1991.
Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American
popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,
has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school
students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year;
more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high
school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no
urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never
complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego
told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because
she could not keep driving me to school.” She finally got her license
six months after her 18th birthday. In conversation after conversation,
teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by
their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous
generations.
Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for
gas, or for that bottle of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in
great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or prodded by their
parents to learn the value of a dollar. But iGen teens aren’t working
(or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of
high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the
mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work
for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the
Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though
job availability has.
Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an iGen
innovation. Gen Xers, in the 1990s, were the first to postpone the
traditional markers of adulthood. Young Gen Xers were just about as
likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as young Boomers had been, and
more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But as they left
their teenage years behind, Gen Xers married and started careers later
than their Boomer predecessors had.
Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its
members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults
later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence
is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across
a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised—
18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds
more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the
responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? 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. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this
homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their
social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to
spend time with their friends.
If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data.
But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less
time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school
seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of
time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend
on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed
little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay,
this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in
their room, alone and often distressed.
Jasu Hu
One of the ironies of iGen life is that despite spending far more time
under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said
to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were.
“I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,”
Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on
their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers,
Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her
phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but nearly
all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone more than
I’ve been with actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint
of my body.”
In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with
their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000
to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a
matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply
hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks,
poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the
basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been
replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces
because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The
Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug
Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked
12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried
eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy
they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various
activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social
interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such
as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could
not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen
activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time
than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less
happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.
Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56
percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less
time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those
who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent
more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even
less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an
above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent
less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a
below-average amount of time.
The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are
to report symptoms of depression.
If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this
survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the
laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of
course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes
unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online.
But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular
social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college
students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone
over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five
times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook.
The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling
unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.
Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends.
But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a
lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites
every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most
likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I
often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good
friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained
high since.
This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend
more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.
Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with
their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social
in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the
generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less
time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.
So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is
unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more
likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are
heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27
percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even
do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.
Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35
percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a
suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching
TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’
growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate
among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens
have started spending less time together, they have become less likely
to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for
the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the
teen homicide rate.
Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly
not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the
1990s, long before smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as
many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often effective in
treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.
What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological
distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link
kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen
concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and
spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they
document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook.
Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the
number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age
groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out
has been swift and significant.
This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent
more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared
with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving
them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see
their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media
levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she
anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena
posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people
think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a
certain amount of likes on a picture.”
Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among
today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from
2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as
much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although
the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old
girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many
boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they
use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.
These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in
the fact that they’re more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend
to bully one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by
undermining a victim’s social status or relationships. Social media give
middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style
of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around
the clock.
Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one
degree or another have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their
various motivations are, to say the least, complex. A recently leaked
Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting to
advertisers its ability to determine teens’ emotional state based on
their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint “moments when young people
need a confidence boost.” Facebook acknowledged that the document was
real, but denied that it offers “tools to target people based on their
emotional state.”
In July 2014, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of
something burning. Her phone had overheated and melted into the sheets.
National news outlets picked up the story, stoking readers’ fears that
their cellphone might spontaneously combust. To me, however, the flaming
cellphone wasn’t the only surprising aspect of the story. Why, I
wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone beside her in bed? It’s not
as though you can surf the web while you’re sleeping. And who could
slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?
Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University
what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a
profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it
under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s
reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to
sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the
morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their
phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the
first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of
the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the
language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,”
one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone
as an extension of their body—or even like a lover: “Having my phone
closer to me while I’m sleeping is a comfort.”
It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep:
Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that
teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is
getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived.
Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991.
In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed
to get seven hours of sleep.
The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most
teens got a smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend
three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more
likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer
than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are
19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived. A meta-analysis of studies
on electronic-device use among children found similar results: Children
who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less
than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as
likely to be sleepy during the day.
I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping
her way through an iPad.
Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong
ability to disrupt sleep. Teens who read books and magazines more often
than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep
deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book
down at bedtime. Watching TV for several hours a day is only weakly
linked to sleeping less. But the allure of the smartphone is often too
much to resist.
Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised
thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high
blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are
prone to depression and anxiety. Again, it’s difficult to trace the
precise paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep,
which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression,
which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor could be causing both
depression and sleep deprivation to rise. But the smartphone, its blue
light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.
The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough
to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down
their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a
policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited
his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.
What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant
presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood.
Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become
depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing
social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face,
they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we
may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but
not the right facial expression.
I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to
impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all
times. My three daughters were born in 2006, 2009, and 2012. They’re not
yet old enough to display the traits of iGen teens, but I have already
witnessed firsthand just how ingrained new media are in their young
lives. I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently
swiping her way through an iPad. I’ve experienced my 6-year-old asking
for her own cellphone. I’ve overheard my 9-year-old discussing the
latest app to sweep the fourth grade. Prying the phone out of our kids’
hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my
parents’ generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh
air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone
responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill
in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on
both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day
on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half
hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep
kids from falling into harmful habits.
In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves
are beginning to link some of their troubles to their ever-present
phone. Athena told me that when she does spend time with her friends in
person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. “I’m
trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at
my face,” she said. “They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking
at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel like, when you’re trying to
talk to somebody face-to-face and they’re not looking at you?,” I asked.
“It kind of hurts,” she said. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation
didn’t do that. I could be talking about something super important to
me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”
Once, she told me, she was hanging out with a friend who was texting her
boyfriend. “I was trying to talk to her about my family, and what was
going on, and she was like, ‘Uh-huh, yeah, whatever.’ So I took her
phone out of her hands and I threw it at my wall.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a
pretty good arm?” “Yep,” she replied.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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