Where Are The Positive Visions?

The introduction of social media and smartphones caused teenagers’ happiness to drop like a rock. At least, that’s a narrative that’s gaining widespread adoption. In Honestly, it's probably the phones, Noah Smith offers a compelling and terrifying summary of the research supporting this narrative.^[1]

We’re seeing increasingly aggressive calls to ban phones from schools nationwide and raise kids without smartphones. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the calls don’t sit well with me. Maybe it’s a sense that the whole project is hypocritical. Almost no adults are willing to cut phones out of their own lives.

Whether it’s alcohol, casual sex, marijuana, or pornography, a significant fraction of adults abstain from all sorts of commonplace stuff that can be damaging. Hell, some people even skip almost entirely on TV or junk food. But I can’t think of an adult I interact with in my daily life who abstains from smartphones.

The calls to remove phones from kids’ lives all rely on forcing kids to give up phones. If overuse of phones turns kids into sad, anti-social losers, shouldn’t it be easy to convince them?

Positive Visions

I spent a lot of my childhood glued to screens. Exploring fantasy worlds in video games I played with my older brother. Texting cute girls that I was too scared to ask out on dates. Rambling in big group chats with my friends. Sure, some of it was a waste of time. But much of it was exactly the stuff that makes life worth living.

I’m not arguing for dogmatic techno-optimism. In a bunch of ways, the critics are correct. Our brains didn't evolve for a world where we get an endless stream of engaging news about people and events that have nothing to do with us. When friends and I camp in remote areas without cell service, everyone feels more present. There’s no question that social media can be a waste of time or actively harmful.

But we’ve got to be realistic. Despite all its downsides, we like our technology. It’s not going away. We need better visions for how to fit phones and related technology into our lives.

Footnotes

[1] - I take the argument seriously. It’s plausible. If correct, the scale of the harm is enormous.

That said, I have a few qualms. There’s been massive shifts in the zeitgeist over the last twenty years. Perhaps most importantly, there’s been a huge shift in how people, especially young people, acknowledge and identify with mental health issues. Phones and social media likely played an important role in these shifts, but something feels wrong about placing technology, rather than the zeitgeist shifts themselves, at the center of the story. Maybe I’ll have to say about this topic in a later post.