OK, for perspective, I am an older GenXer. This will give context to my perspective.
Three main things:
1) I am extremely skeptical when someone blames a technology for ANYTHING. A hammer can build a house or bash in a skull.
2) Is it the phones, or is it social media? Is social media the medium that causes us to consume "too much screen" or "too much phone"?
3) The cure is going to upset some people, and send a bunch of sacred cows to be ground into White Castle sliders.
Over the last 40 years or so--really, as GenX moved into adolescence--the following ideas have become deeply rooted like weeds:
1) Adolescents and even 18-20YO young adults are incapable of making adult decisions. This has resulted in the progressive "legal ageing" of everything. Here's where the sacred cow goes to the slaughterhouse: young people have internalized this idea that they are incapable of "adulting", not just when it comes to vices but also the positive aspects of "growing up".
2) The world has become a progressively more dangerous place. This is utter B.S. and the statistics prove this out.
3) If harm befalls a kid, it's because of bad parenting, and perhaps the authorities should get involved. God bless Lenore Skenazy and her work.
The net-net result is a LOT less touching of grass, a lot less meeting in meatspace. Why deal with graduated driver's licenses and other restrictions and mall curfews when you can do your own thing online? My list of meatspace restrictions could go on for hours.
All of this needs to be rolled back, immediately. Yes, KIDS WILL DIE from injuries. Deal with it! Yeah, I said it. But it will help prevent kids dying from suicides and diabeetus and other metabolic issues down the road.
And all the safety whores (yeah, again I said it--no offense intended to sex workers, happy to come up with a better word) need to accept the blame for their misdeeds and "receive consequences". As usual, those in authority with the blood on their hands will escape blame.
Spot on about the over-protection and infantalization of kids, and the need to let them out of the house. That argument is a central theme of Haidt's book and I completely agree. And I agree that it's a major force pushing kids into phones.
When it comes to technology, I must take a different tact. The kids are certainly being pulled into them at the same time. The reason being, in a nut shell, is that everything we make are expressions of our human body and mind. Tools are extension of the human body, machines extensions of our processes, electronics externalizations of our minds. That's what automation is: take something we did, and get a machine to do it.
If something you used to do is now down by a machine, then it's an amputation of some aspect of yourself, and the technology a prosthesis. Phones are a necessity today, and as Ananda Coomaraswamy said noted in his essay The Bugbear of Literacy, “We may remark in passing that necessities are not always goods in themselves, out of their context; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous to men already maimed.” He goes on to cite The Phaedrus by Plato, where the inventer of alphabetic writing is told “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” This passage is central in media ecology, the field founded by McLuhan which I study.
Kids who have technology do for them things they never learn to do without it are in an even worse place than being amputated—they've never had the organ or faculty in the first place.
I see young people on the bus every day with staring intently at the map on their phone, watching the bus travel down their route. I often imagine that it's as though if they were to look away, they'd lose their relation to the world they're in. They're not looking out the window of the bus or enjoying the view—they don't know where they are and haven't a taste for caring. It probably makes some of them anxious—they're keeping their head down until they get to where they're going. The phone knows where they are *for* them. The phone knows their parents and friends phone numbers *for* them. They mediate their relation of the outer world through that map because they've never had a relation to the city and its streets that wasn't mediated that way. They've not taken up the adventure of exploring or getting lost, or if they had it's not one they want to repeat enough to actually learn the city itself and trust that they can arrive where they're headed on their own. The *need* for the phone is a pull—it's their prosthetic extension, integral to their functioning in the world.
Notice I'm not making an argument Haidt would make here. But it's the phone. Technology is not neutral, and it's not just a matter of "how you use it." Every new technology re-orients your entire relation to the body and the world, your senses, by, taking something out of you.
So, if I understand correctly, this is analogous to not using a calculator on an arithmetic test because it prevents one from learning the basic concepts and how to DIY and getting "a feel of the numbers", such as what learns from memorizing a "times table".
I guess the line then becomes when does technology become a "force multiplier", enabling people to do more than they ever could as a human being, versus becoming a crutch and preventing people from learning human-scale skills. To use a very simple analogy, a lever is a great tool for moving rocks that can't be moved by a human being, but we shouldn't use levers to pick up rocks that a person can pick up by themselves, albeit with some difficulty and (most importantly) learning about how to grasp heavy rocks.
Another example that comes to my mind is when I got my engineering degree in the late 80s, we had to do probability and statistical analyses on paper, using a "regular" scientific calculator like a TI-30 and consulting tables in the backs of textbooks. This was a horribly inefficient process as it was--it would have been even more inefficient to the point of being impractical to do all the arithmetic by hand--and was often rife with arithmetic errors, even with a calculator. When I got my MBA in the early 2000s, we did prob and stats all in an Excel spreadsheet. I could whiz through this as I had learned all of the principles involved and the "feel of the numbers", and Excel eliminated the arithmetic errors, but I wondered if my fellow students were really learning what was going on versus how to write Excel formulas.
Ironically--the irony comes from the fusion of old and new technology--I used Facebook yesterday to repair an issue with a 60+ year old tube stereo console (or valve radiogram, for some of the international readers out there). Something I couldn't have done by myself.
Again, the line seems to be when does technology become a force multiplier--a lever of sorts--and when does it become a crutch for the abled?
Yes that's exactly right, I'll affirm that with quote from Turkle's essay, Simulation and its Discontents:
“It was September 1977, my first week on the faculty at MIT. Trained as a psychologist and sociologist, I was finding my bearings in a sea of scientists, engineers, and designers. A colleague in civil engineering took me to lunch to give me the lay of the land. He jokingly told me that I had come at a good time but had missed a golden age: ‘This place is going to hell.’ At the heart of the decline as he saw it: students used calculators instead of slide rules. With slide rules, he explained, the user had to know the number of decimal places that made for a meaningful answer. With calculators, this was no longer required. Students, he reported, had lost all sense of scale. In his classes, answers were coming back wrong by orders of magnitude. Moreover, students couldn’t manipulate numbers in their heads the way they used to. ‘And the calculator thing is small potatoes,’ he said.”
The thing about force multipliers is that, absent the firm grounding—having worked the path from doing-for-one's-self to automating it—you are as vulnerable as the last fire-fighter holding the hose when everyone else has let go; you are likely to be blasted off into the air and thrown; perhaps even into the fire.
I use the computer to follow up all the references in the books I read instantly. I've got hundreds of physical books and hundreds of .PDFs. Without the internet, I'd have to live in the largest university library on the continent to do half of what I do, and I'd be forever hunting around aisles and manually skimming pages. But everything I do *is* in fact analogous to what I'd do were this all done in a real library. The stacks of open windows of .PDFs on my screen are coterminous with the stacks on my actual desk.
Compare that to the sort of learning that goes on with people clicking between wiki articles and YouTube videos going down rabbit holes all night. There is no grounding in their "research," whereas I'm following an established methodology, a tradition.
So what you're calling force-multipliers arise when one has a tradition rooted in history and good method, and you know how what you're using the tool for is part of that larger, human context. You remain a whole human, extensions and all, within that longer tradition.
It's a crutch when established tradition is lacking, or is alien to you, and you couldn't put it on if you had to—much like literacy under the conditions of colonialism in India Coomaraswamy was discussing.
Two other examples that come to mind are automobiles (and, indeed, other forms of motorized transport)--we can work or vacation in places not reachable in a reasonable amount of time, but we also lose a good grasp on our immediate communities, and also suffer the physiological harms of avoiding short walks or other human-powered transportation.
On a much larger, geopolitical scale, more powerful weapons have caused our leaders to result to the (for them) easier path versus what Churchill called "Meeting jaw to jaw". If you're not the one doing the fighting and in harm's way, "war-war" with fancy weaponry is sometimes easier than the "jaw-jaw".
I’m always excited to see when Clinton posts. And this review certainly delivered. We’re going to sound like old maids banging on about the history of technology, but it seems so crucial to open the historical window into the 20th century. Heck, even the 19th. Educating adults on the historical development and commentary on technology is crucial, but I wonder - how are schools tackling this subject? Where is the k - 12 curriculum covering “digital literacy”? Has it been mandated in any jurisdictions? This feels like a critical piece of education for any subject of a technological society. I suppose the lack of adult education in these subjects delays the implementation of education reform that targets digital literacy. Let’s hope Haidt’s book has the intended effect and gets the mass educated reader to take some action in that general direction.
Good to see you Raven. :) All the education on computer literacy I see is how to avoid being cybercrime and how to avoiding "misinformation." The later is basically just thinly-veiled political ideology, nothing close to understanding the technology through understanding its history. Which is why I feel so duty-bound to write and do the work I do—somebody has to! You're right, any real change in these areas will come from adult education, which means the whole "the children will lead us, they are the future" crowd needs a very rude wake-up call.
Big pet peeve of mine. I've noticed an uptick in it, too-- not so much re-sharing conventional wisdom, which feels evergreen, but extremely, extremely stale criticisms (of the Internet specifically) being repackaged as not only a novel conclusion but somehow uniquely applicable to Gen Z. After years of being on the same page as Clinton and Haidt, I'm now fighting against the impulse to be contrarian.
As a parent, it's very difficult to not have your kid have a smartphone. My oldest child almost FAILED a class last year because the teacher assumed that all kids would have one and had an in class multiday project that required the use of smartphones. They were in SIXTH GRADE.
Plus all her different school activities share updates and times and other important info via various apps and group chats that they expect the students to have access to. "You should know that, we posted it on the app." We caved and bought her a phone (and highly limited her ability to use most of it -- she doesn't have any social media at all. I don't mind being able to contact her easily about picking her up from activities but the fact that she HAD to have a smart phone because of school really frustrated me.)
But leaving aside the school system, overall screen usage would be a lot easier to reduce or eliminate if more people worked in the community they lived in. It's very difficult to get my kids together with friends because they may not live far away, but trying to get anywhere after school is a freaking nightmare because there's just so. much. commuter. traffic. One of my kids is lucky because our neighbors have sons around his age and they can just get together and run around outside, but the other two are SOL on that front. And even in our neighborhood, there's a lot of traffic and no sidewalks so the neighbors ACROSS the street also have kids my sons age, but he's too young to just go over there. It still has to be something the adults coordinate. And I hate that for the kids, I wish it was safer for them to just be neighborhood kids together without worrying about the bazillion cars.
They complain, complain, complain that they want more time for video games or TV, but when they're able to get together with friends they'll spend hours doing anything else and not even think about it. So I think a lot of kids would naturally and without complaint reduce their screen time usage if it were easier for them to get together with friends...not all of them would, but a lot.
I completely agree—institutional pressures to have a device, or use certain software, are horribly invasive into one's lifestyle and privacy. For kids at school, especially—and I imagine that the remote learning that was going on these past few years has made it worse. This is something that comes up over and over again at LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation's annual convention. Erin Rose Glass' presentation last year on this was full of good advice. https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/education-and-the-future-of-software-freedom/
I remember feeling impacted by not being able to watch certain TV shows, which became a main topic of discussion among my classmates. So, not being on social will be difficult.
Something else I think is unfortunately very true is that "the smartphone is downstream of the highway" -- moderating use and not disconnecting yourself from your peers / their culture is hard. I tend to think one compromise (since re-building IRL community is a tall order, and a long process) is raising the barrier to entry with computers. Forums or newsgroups over the feed. More-difficult-to-navigate laptops and smartphones. Kids *will* learn and that's why Millennials and Gen Z "feel" different. Millennials KNOW more about computers. Urbit was supposed to do this, but I'm not holding my breath.
As a long retired clinical social worker - with grade school aged digitally connected grand children - I've been anticipating Haidt's new book having read his earlier work. However, your historical framing in this article was immensely helpful in allowing me to "pull back" a bit and to consciously take a broader meta-perspective regarding the much larger forces at play beyond simply "adolescent use" of "smart-phone social media apps." I'll certainly add Sherry Turke’s "Life on the Screen" to the reading list, and I'll look forward to part two of your analysis. Thank you.
OK, for perspective, I am an older GenXer. This will give context to my perspective.
Three main things:
1) I am extremely skeptical when someone blames a technology for ANYTHING. A hammer can build a house or bash in a skull.
2) Is it the phones, or is it social media? Is social media the medium that causes us to consume "too much screen" or "too much phone"?
3) The cure is going to upset some people, and send a bunch of sacred cows to be ground into White Castle sliders.
Over the last 40 years or so--really, as GenX moved into adolescence--the following ideas have become deeply rooted like weeds:
1) Adolescents and even 18-20YO young adults are incapable of making adult decisions. This has resulted in the progressive "legal ageing" of everything. Here's where the sacred cow goes to the slaughterhouse: young people have internalized this idea that they are incapable of "adulting", not just when it comes to vices but also the positive aspects of "growing up".
2) The world has become a progressively more dangerous place. This is utter B.S. and the statistics prove this out.
3) If harm befalls a kid, it's because of bad parenting, and perhaps the authorities should get involved. God bless Lenore Skenazy and her work.
The net-net result is a LOT less touching of grass, a lot less meeting in meatspace. Why deal with graduated driver's licenses and other restrictions and mall curfews when you can do your own thing online? My list of meatspace restrictions could go on for hours.
All of this needs to be rolled back, immediately. Yes, KIDS WILL DIE from injuries. Deal with it! Yeah, I said it. But it will help prevent kids dying from suicides and diabeetus and other metabolic issues down the road.
And all the safety whores (yeah, again I said it--no offense intended to sex workers, happy to come up with a better word) need to accept the blame for their misdeeds and "receive consequences". As usual, those in authority with the blood on their hands will escape blame.
Spot on about the over-protection and infantalization of kids, and the need to let them out of the house. That argument is a central theme of Haidt's book and I completely agree. And I agree that it's a major force pushing kids into phones.
When it comes to technology, I must take a different tact. The kids are certainly being pulled into them at the same time. The reason being, in a nut shell, is that everything we make are expressions of our human body and mind. Tools are extension of the human body, machines extensions of our processes, electronics externalizations of our minds. That's what automation is: take something we did, and get a machine to do it.
If something you used to do is now down by a machine, then it's an amputation of some aspect of yourself, and the technology a prosthesis. Phones are a necessity today, and as Ananda Coomaraswamy said noted in his essay The Bugbear of Literacy, “We may remark in passing that necessities are not always goods in themselves, out of their context; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous to men already maimed.” He goes on to cite The Phaedrus by Plato, where the inventer of alphabetic writing is told “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” This passage is central in media ecology, the field founded by McLuhan which I study.
Kids who have technology do for them things they never learn to do without it are in an even worse place than being amputated—they've never had the organ or faculty in the first place.
I see young people on the bus every day with staring intently at the map on their phone, watching the bus travel down their route. I often imagine that it's as though if they were to look away, they'd lose their relation to the world they're in. They're not looking out the window of the bus or enjoying the view—they don't know where they are and haven't a taste for caring. It probably makes some of them anxious—they're keeping their head down until they get to where they're going. The phone knows where they are *for* them. The phone knows their parents and friends phone numbers *for* them. They mediate their relation of the outer world through that map because they've never had a relation to the city and its streets that wasn't mediated that way. They've not taken up the adventure of exploring or getting lost, or if they had it's not one they want to repeat enough to actually learn the city itself and trust that they can arrive where they're headed on their own. The *need* for the phone is a pull—it's their prosthetic extension, integral to their functioning in the world.
Notice I'm not making an argument Haidt would make here. But it's the phone. Technology is not neutral, and it's not just a matter of "how you use it." Every new technology re-orients your entire relation to the body and the world, your senses, by, taking something out of you.
So, if I understand correctly, this is analogous to not using a calculator on an arithmetic test because it prevents one from learning the basic concepts and how to DIY and getting "a feel of the numbers", such as what learns from memorizing a "times table".
I guess the line then becomes when does technology become a "force multiplier", enabling people to do more than they ever could as a human being, versus becoming a crutch and preventing people from learning human-scale skills. To use a very simple analogy, a lever is a great tool for moving rocks that can't be moved by a human being, but we shouldn't use levers to pick up rocks that a person can pick up by themselves, albeit with some difficulty and (most importantly) learning about how to grasp heavy rocks.
Another example that comes to my mind is when I got my engineering degree in the late 80s, we had to do probability and statistical analyses on paper, using a "regular" scientific calculator like a TI-30 and consulting tables in the backs of textbooks. This was a horribly inefficient process as it was--it would have been even more inefficient to the point of being impractical to do all the arithmetic by hand--and was often rife with arithmetic errors, even with a calculator. When I got my MBA in the early 2000s, we did prob and stats all in an Excel spreadsheet. I could whiz through this as I had learned all of the principles involved and the "feel of the numbers", and Excel eliminated the arithmetic errors, but I wondered if my fellow students were really learning what was going on versus how to write Excel formulas.
Ironically--the irony comes from the fusion of old and new technology--I used Facebook yesterday to repair an issue with a 60+ year old tube stereo console (or valve radiogram, for some of the international readers out there). Something I couldn't have done by myself.
Again, the line seems to be when does technology become a force multiplier--a lever of sorts--and when does it become a crutch for the abled?
Yes that's exactly right, I'll affirm that with quote from Turkle's essay, Simulation and its Discontents:
“It was September 1977, my first week on the faculty at MIT. Trained as a psychologist and sociologist, I was finding my bearings in a sea of scientists, engineers, and designers. A colleague in civil engineering took me to lunch to give me the lay of the land. He jokingly told me that I had come at a good time but had missed a golden age: ‘This place is going to hell.’ At the heart of the decline as he saw it: students used calculators instead of slide rules. With slide rules, he explained, the user had to know the number of decimal places that made for a meaningful answer. With calculators, this was no longer required. Students, he reported, had lost all sense of scale. In his classes, answers were coming back wrong by orders of magnitude. Moreover, students couldn’t manipulate numbers in their heads the way they used to. ‘And the calculator thing is small potatoes,’ he said.”
The thing about force multipliers is that, absent the firm grounding—having worked the path from doing-for-one's-self to automating it—you are as vulnerable as the last fire-fighter holding the hose when everyone else has let go; you are likely to be blasted off into the air and thrown; perhaps even into the fire.
I use the computer to follow up all the references in the books I read instantly. I've got hundreds of physical books and hundreds of .PDFs. Without the internet, I'd have to live in the largest university library on the continent to do half of what I do, and I'd be forever hunting around aisles and manually skimming pages. But everything I do *is* in fact analogous to what I'd do were this all done in a real library. The stacks of open windows of .PDFs on my screen are coterminous with the stacks on my actual desk.
Compare that to the sort of learning that goes on with people clicking between wiki articles and YouTube videos going down rabbit holes all night. There is no grounding in their "research," whereas I'm following an established methodology, a tradition.
So what you're calling force-multipliers arise when one has a tradition rooted in history and good method, and you know how what you're using the tool for is part of that larger, human context. You remain a whole human, extensions and all, within that longer tradition.
It's a crutch when established tradition is lacking, or is alien to you, and you couldn't put it on if you had to—much like literacy under the conditions of colonialism in India Coomaraswamy was discussing.
Two other examples that come to mind are automobiles (and, indeed, other forms of motorized transport)--we can work or vacation in places not reachable in a reasonable amount of time, but we also lose a good grasp on our immediate communities, and also suffer the physiological harms of avoiding short walks or other human-powered transportation.
On a much larger, geopolitical scale, more powerful weapons have caused our leaders to result to the (for them) easier path versus what Churchill called "Meeting jaw to jaw". If you're not the one doing the fighting and in harm's way, "war-war" with fancy weaponry is sometimes easier than the "jaw-jaw".
I’m always excited to see when Clinton posts. And this review certainly delivered. We’re going to sound like old maids banging on about the history of technology, but it seems so crucial to open the historical window into the 20th century. Heck, even the 19th. Educating adults on the historical development and commentary on technology is crucial, but I wonder - how are schools tackling this subject? Where is the k - 12 curriculum covering “digital literacy”? Has it been mandated in any jurisdictions? This feels like a critical piece of education for any subject of a technological society. I suppose the lack of adult education in these subjects delays the implementation of education reform that targets digital literacy. Let’s hope Haidt’s book has the intended effect and gets the mass educated reader to take some action in that general direction.
Good to see you Raven. :) All the education on computer literacy I see is how to avoid being cybercrime and how to avoiding "misinformation." The later is basically just thinly-veiled political ideology, nothing close to understanding the technology through understanding its history. Which is why I feel so duty-bound to write and do the work I do—somebody has to! You're right, any real change in these areas will come from adult education, which means the whole "the children will lead us, they are the future" crowd needs a very rude wake-up call.
Excellent. Best thing I have read this year.
Thank you Hollis
This was fantastic, thank you. We do seem to constantly starting conversations over, needlessly.
Big pet peeve of mine. I've noticed an uptick in it, too-- not so much re-sharing conventional wisdom, which feels evergreen, but extremely, extremely stale criticisms (of the Internet specifically) being repackaged as not only a novel conclusion but somehow uniquely applicable to Gen Z. After years of being on the same page as Clinton and Haidt, I'm now fighting against the impulse to be contrarian.
Long live the contrarian impulse!
Even as the answers stay the same, renewed appreciation for the gravity of the questions will keep us blabbing about them for a long time.
Go outside and touch grass is great advice. Or something similar in a city.
When I did my Tumblr interviews, touching grass is what 'cured' most people. Internet Overexposure Syndrome is too real.
As a parent, it's very difficult to not have your kid have a smartphone. My oldest child almost FAILED a class last year because the teacher assumed that all kids would have one and had an in class multiday project that required the use of smartphones. They were in SIXTH GRADE.
Plus all her different school activities share updates and times and other important info via various apps and group chats that they expect the students to have access to. "You should know that, we posted it on the app." We caved and bought her a phone (and highly limited her ability to use most of it -- she doesn't have any social media at all. I don't mind being able to contact her easily about picking her up from activities but the fact that she HAD to have a smart phone because of school really frustrated me.)
But leaving aside the school system, overall screen usage would be a lot easier to reduce or eliminate if more people worked in the community they lived in. It's very difficult to get my kids together with friends because they may not live far away, but trying to get anywhere after school is a freaking nightmare because there's just so. much. commuter. traffic. One of my kids is lucky because our neighbors have sons around his age and they can just get together and run around outside, but the other two are SOL on that front. And even in our neighborhood, there's a lot of traffic and no sidewalks so the neighbors ACROSS the street also have kids my sons age, but he's too young to just go over there. It still has to be something the adults coordinate. And I hate that for the kids, I wish it was safer for them to just be neighborhood kids together without worrying about the bazillion cars.
They complain, complain, complain that they want more time for video games or TV, but when they're able to get together with friends they'll spend hours doing anything else and not even think about it. So I think a lot of kids would naturally and without complaint reduce their screen time usage if it were easier for them to get together with friends...not all of them would, but a lot.
I completely agree—institutional pressures to have a device, or use certain software, are horribly invasive into one's lifestyle and privacy. For kids at school, especially—and I imagine that the remote learning that was going on these past few years has made it worse. This is something that comes up over and over again at LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation's annual convention. Erin Rose Glass' presentation last year on this was full of good advice. https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/education-and-the-future-of-software-freedom/
I remember feeling impacted by not being able to watch certain TV shows, which became a main topic of discussion among my classmates. So, not being on social will be difficult.
Something else I think is unfortunately very true is that "the smartphone is downstream of the highway" -- moderating use and not disconnecting yourself from your peers / their culture is hard. I tend to think one compromise (since re-building IRL community is a tall order, and a long process) is raising the barrier to entry with computers. Forums or newsgroups over the feed. More-difficult-to-navigate laptops and smartphones. Kids *will* learn and that's why Millennials and Gen Z "feel" different. Millennials KNOW more about computers. Urbit was supposed to do this, but I'm not holding my breath.
As a long retired clinical social worker - with grade school aged digitally connected grand children - I've been anticipating Haidt's new book having read his earlier work. However, your historical framing in this article was immensely helpful in allowing me to "pull back" a bit and to consciously take a broader meta-perspective regarding the much larger forces at play beyond simply "adolescent use" of "smart-phone social media apps." I'll certainly add Sherry Turke’s "Life on the Screen" to the reading list, and I'll look forward to part two of your analysis. Thank you.
Turkle changed my life, I second Clinton's recommendation. I hope the rest of this blog helps illuminate the mindset of the Terminally Online.
This was excellent.
Thank you for reading!!