LOL, at least they are not talking about Millennials this time. The author, by the way? Younger than I am, but not by much, making her a GenX like a few of us on here. Author Bio She is a PHD professor that writes 'news' articles on Millenials. And of course, she wrote a book blaming those damn kids.
And a Fluff piece about her is kinda interesting in that she is always on the lookout of signs of narcisism in society.
It seems inevitable that the old people yelling at clouds and blaming the youth are getting younger.
has the proliferation of clickbait through online news destroyed journalism let's find out
Yes. Boomers, we need to have a talk. You barely know how to open up anything that isn't text messaging on that S8. You're still sending group MMS messages to communicate with your family. Swype got enabled, you're not sure how, and now it takes you a life age to compose 'LOL :kissing-face: see u then' because you don't know how to turn it off again. So, please. Put the phone down. Your crossover is straddling the lane divide. Put the phone down. Isn't fiddling with the Sirius-XM enough to keep you entertained? Put the phone down. Put the phone down and drive.Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
Y'all need to make your viewpoints more clear in the title when you post these. I read this article with utmost seriousness and totally agreed with it 100% before checking the comments and I feel like I've been bamboozled.
You weren't bamboozled. The article isn't wrong. It isn't insightful, but it isn't wrong. Sherry Turkle made a career out of this, her first book coming out when this was a "handheld device": ...and her shit got increasingly alarming up to the point where she proclaimed we were all doomed, picked herself up off the floor and decided that maybe all wasn't lost after all and we could do something about it. Four years ago Microsoft paid danah boyd to look into the issue and her take wasn't that kids were diving face-first into smartphones because of their unavoidable siren song, kids were diving face-first into smartphones because their parents had them on such a tight leash that the only space they could find of their own was online and online communication beats the shit out of zero communication which is what their parents were going for because holyshit helicopterparenting is offthechain which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what Frontline has found, twice. Which, incidentally, bears out everything we know about parenting. The issue is not that phones are so fucking amazeballs that the kids would rather stare at them, the issue is - that kids have no money for gas or shopping - that school is taking up ever more time and extracurriculars are suffering - that parents are reefing down on childrens' freedom well past the point of reasonability - and that if it weren't for their goddamn phones, kids would be stuck at home staring at the goddamn television all day, which is what adults bitched about every goddamn day until the Internet came out, and then adults bitched about the internet, until phones came out and now they can bitch about Snapchat and Instagram in particular rather than the Internet in general. Fundamentally: kids will find their independence. If the only avenue for independence is snapchatting each other at 6pm on a Wednesday from behind their closed bedroom doors, they'll fuckin' do that. If they could go hang out at park together they totally would, but unless Janie's parents, Jodie's parents and Jill's parents are all cool with their kids hanging out at the park until dark unattended, that park hangout will never happen. Depression is an appropriate response to the circumstances.
Dude, you shouldn't let Hubski's mob mentality influence your opinions. It's not that I'm sure the author is wrong. But using a title like the one employed here screams, "I'm an out of touch alarmist here to chew out the young'n's and I'm going to use clickbait to do it!". Then, I get to: Dawg, wut? I can't continue taking any remaining analysis seriously, credentials be damned, because this person clearly lives in a perpetual state of fear. If this was my mom... wait, this actually does sound like my mom, and that's probably why I smoked a LOT of pot when I went off to college.More often, [13 year old] Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned.
unchaperoned
I'm being snarky. It's also probably not the best person to be reading these things, because anxiety and depression and 12 hours in front of a computer screen are my demons right now. Also social psychology and my research into internet addiction as an undergrad.
I'm on a 3 minute break from this exact thing, to tell you: word. This exact thing seeps into faarrrrr too many of my Hubski posts. Hang in there, we'll turn it out.anxiety and depression and 12 hours in front of a computer screen are my demons right now.
To the contrary of many of the commenters who found this piece overly dramatic or crazy, I found that it largely matches my experience. I am a new college-graduate this year, so I’ve had ample opportunity to observe my peers and those slightly younger in their interactions with technology. I found that this piece rung true with my experience and observations. Two points hit close to home for my personal experience as a human. First, the passage about constant attachment to the phone, using it until sleep at night and first thing in the morning, felt like it was describing me and most of my friends. Second, the passage about ignoring those who are physically present in favor of an electronic device describes almost perfectly the behavior of my younger sister (rising sophomore in college). I disagree with the bulk of commenters here who dismissed the piece as mere clickbait. Yes, the style of the headline and article tone was that of clickbait. But it almost self-consciously pointed out that the point of generational analysis should not be to make value judgement, but rather to observe characteristics. And I think that at its core it did make a valuable observation about the current generation, and even if the piece itself ought not make value judgments about generational behavioral trends, its observation can act as a springboard for self reflection. At times I wonder if the trade off I’ve made by using a smartphone improves my life on balance. Avoiding the pitfalls of constant connectedness requires mindfulness, and I think pieces like this can inspire it.
I am skeptical of the assertion that these teenagers have so little freedom. I'm waaaay out of touch with that age range, but from the little I've gotten to see, they do spend a lot of time on their phones, but they also do extracurriculars and drive places with their friends. I've seen kids skateboarding. I've seen them in loud groups at malls and bookstores. It doesn't look so different from my teenage years, except they have smartphones instead of IM, Starcraft, Xanga, and MySpace. Then again, this is just an anecdote vs. actual data.
I thought I was so cool pontificating on it when I was 15. Then I looked at it at some point in college... Dear God it was barely legible. I mean it was bad. More 2000-style internet abbreviations and text smileys than actual words. It was totally better than Facebook though, because you got to read what your friends were really thinking, and they read yours. Friends on Xanga were really your friends. Or your frenemies. Nowadays people aren't willing to read more than a sentence before they get distracted.
I made it about a third of the way through this piece before giving up. It seems as though the problem is fear-mongering on the part of media and parents eating that shit up. Smartphones are just a convenient alternative to whatever kids before. And the last two generations of kids were said to not play outside either, but there was a different bogeyman to blame then. Same shit, different decade. But it gets the knowing nods of approval and agreement from older folks.
They're too young to come up with their own name. When they do, they'll make the 'boomers eat shit, as every generation after the 'boomers has so succinctly done. They tried call Gen X "latchkey kids" and then they tried calling them "the MTV Generation" and then Strauss and Howe showed just how little attention they were actually paying to those kids and called them I-shit-you-not the thirteenth generation until Coupland told them to eat shit with "Generation X" and then the 'boomers were so cowed they tried calling Millennials "Generation Y" until Strauss and Howe actually got something to stick (probably because they were talking about their kids, rather than that annoying generation they didn't raise) and now they're trying real hard to make the current generation of kids "Generation Z" because fuck you, that's why. You watch. They'll come up with something like "The Resistance" but cooler. Generally when your parents spend your entire adolescence worrying that you're going to amount to nothing because you suck so hard you aren't allowed out, you aren't allowed freedom and they think you're going to kill yourself because The Snapchats are the only thing you care about, you backlash hard against their patronizing bullshit. The kids are all right.
It's typical for older generations to look down on younger generations, right? It's a pattern that's been continuing for millennia? What about the opposite, the general perspectives of older generations? Maybe it's just the circles I follow, but I see nothing but disdain for the boomers. Is there any kind of new trend there?
Keep in mind: when you're arguing on generational timescales your sample size goes way down. Tony Judt argues in Postwar that the 'boomers were literally the first "teenagers" in the history of mankind - semi-adults that lived as children but had adult money, adult drives and childish pursuits. Think about that: 'boomers represent something like 1 in 3 of all the "teenagers" (as a demographic, not as an age group) that ever lived. Also keep in mind that we've only got eight generations since the Civil War and eleven since the Revolutionary War. And economically speaking, the Industrial Revolution was a period of upheaval that tore down old social structures and created entirely new ways of life, largely for the better (in the long run at least). This trend continued through the long boom, the period of american exceptionalism that effectively capped American world dominance... ...but came to an end right about the time the Baby Boomers took over. Generation X was famously the first generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents, and Millennials are famously worse off than Generation X. Generation Z, whatever they call themselves, are already worse off than the Millennials. Now - did the 'boomers cause this? Debatable. But they didn't do any fucking thing about it, and they continue to hold themselves harmless and their offspring as shiftless. Thus, hard to point at a trend. But easy to point at a cause.