This is an opinion column
Sometimes big changes go unnoticed. Right now, believe it or not, I’m thinking about a young frog, a smartphone, and a proverbial frying pan. Obviously that requires some explanation.
I should tell you right off the bat I don’t have a Ph.D. in this stuff. I do have a strange big-picture view and a whole lotta reading, observing, and career experience (Led Zeppelin’s least-catchy tune) at the unique and lively intersection of media and education; I’ve been an educator and an education reporter, a health-science reporter, a schoolbook editor, a mentor, a coach, a stay-at-home parent, and a pre-cell-phone Teach For America corps member. Now that you know where this is coming from, which thoughtful readers know is important:
Kids don’t just stare out the window anymore.
Kids – and increasingly, people – rarely let their minds wander, that archaic pastime crowded out by screens, constant alerts, and dopamine-delivering phone-checks. What was that old-fashioned word, “daydreaming”? Thanks to the addictive-by-design gadgets in our pockets, “paleo-pondering” might be more accurate. There’s little time for it and even less inclination.
We ancients remember being cooped up in the house or the back of a car, just looking out the window, with maybe a book but nothing buzzing in our hands, observing the world, which sometimes triggered thoughts, memories, connections. Yes, many young people’s lives today are “overstructured,” but research shows that’s not the main culprit in the death of mental downtime and the literal rewiring of a generation’s brains. The main culprit is our average almost ten-hours-a-day of screen time, and the increasing lion’s share of that, especially with younger people, is smartphone use. The devices and their social-media apps are designed to be convenient and to exploit our “salience network,” the adapting, variable-weighing, brain-region-spanning ability to determine which of thousands of sensory inputs we consciously attend to. Put another way, the technology is designed to short-circuit something complex, mostly unconscious, and utterly fascinating: our ability to filter out so much and focus.
Please note, this is not “this new thing is bad just because in my youth it was different, now get off my lawn.” Nor am I saying smartphones and social media do no good. People always decry new technology, sometimes wrongly (typewriters will destroy careful writing), sometimes reasonably (nuclear weapons). And yes, people made similar claims about television, which has remade our minds and culture, by the way. So much so, in fact, that we don’t see it because, like the air, it’s everywhere and what most of us were born into. (If you don’t see it but want to, read Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.) And smartphones exert even more influence than television, simply because people don’t walk around with TVs in their pockets almost unconsciously checking them every few minutes.
As vaccines and microwave ovens and nukes and plastic oceans show, there are new things, beneficial and harmful, under the sun. Smartphones are new things, and more than 10 billion have been sold. Besides our landfills, they’ve remade and are continuing to remake our daily lives and our minds, with growing young minds the most malleable.
As writer Nicholas Carr puts it in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “… a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act … Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.” Then later, in his 2020 second edition, “The smartphone is something new in the world … With smartphones, all time is prime time. Because the gadgets are always at hand – whether we’re at home, at work, at school, or walking down the street – they are always intruding on our thoughts.”
Common sense and numerous studies show that smartphones – even when visibly turned off, though it’s worse when they’re on – significantly hamper our abilities to focus, learn, remember, and empathize.
Before anybody cries wolf about me crying wolf, let’s unfriend, block, and ban that bad logic right now: just because alarmists have been wrong before doesn’t mean people who worry about current trends are destined to be wrong, in every case, for all eternity. That’s pitifully poor thinking. Just because some scientists once thought we were heading for a new ice age does not mean global warming isn’t happening. Reality – cold (or warm), hard, objective reality – is what matters, not the fact that human beings have been wrong in the past. What everyone forgets about the boy-who-cried-wolf story is that the last time the boy cried wolf, the wolves were real.
So here we are: A growing body of research shows that, besides sleep disruptions and bullying and “FOMO” and misinformation and inappropriate content and related mental health issues, the constant distraction of youthful smartphone use also leads to shorter attention spans, poorer performance on cognitive tests, trouble forming memories, and difficulty empathizing with people IRL (“in real life,” as the kids say, that necessary distinction perhaps driving home the scope of the problem). I’d add that the constant distraction deletes from our days something that had been part of being human for the vast majority of our existence as a species: stretches of time when the mind wanders, when connections are made, and even when inspiration or revelation sometimes strikes.
I’ve been lucky enough teach in environments where phones were banned during classes and even for a week of wilderness camp. As with any addiction, it’s hard at first for most kids to kick the habit, but witnessing their imaginations, their conversations, their attentiveness to the world and to each other expand and blossom was nothing short of joyous. It felt like something vague and unarticulated but painfully absent had been restored.
I’ve also been lucky enough to know and teach a few exceedingly rare middle- and high-school students whose parents had banned social media or smartphones entirely. Those kids are a different breed. Their brains are literally different: Plastic human brains are constantly wired and re-wired based on use and experience. (That’s how synapses work – previous connections are strengthened and new connections are made according to activity; “use it or lose it” applies here too). Those students seem to have more ability to focus, to imagine, to create, to attend to the real people right in front of them, and to empathize deeply. But ironically, and sadly, they’re increasingly isolated, their normal human need to connect trumped by the latest TikTok video and peers who’ll watch it while the non-phone kids are telling them about an argument or a bad grade or a sports victory or a great trip or feeling sad all the time. They’re trumped by peers who are unwittingly but literally rewired in ways that make just paying attention – let alone real empathy – significantly harder.
And on a larger scale, with impaired empathy, why would people struggle and sacrifice to solve painful and complex problems like climate change or hunger or forced relocation until it affects them directly, which could mean it’s too late, as they struggle with more immediate concerns? Or, even assuming the ability to listen for more than 10 seconds, why listen to “the other side” of any debate? Noticed our politics lately? And is there even a chance of solving the abovementioned problems if our ability to learn is increasingly compromised?
And finally, what happens for the species – and this is new under the sun – if imagination itself becomes an endangered species, if people simply don’t let their minds wander? Missed opportunities for creativity, for new ideas, for new neuronal connections on a mass scale? Certainly. Beyond that, I don’t know for sure. But we’re finding out.
I’m almost at the point where I’m going to have my students and my own children occasionally just spend an hour doing nothing. Literally nothing. “Structured unstructured time.” No goals, and most importantly, no devices.
Our kids, for our sake and theirs, need to just look out the window sometimes. To stare. To daydream. To wander. To “connect.” We all do. It’s really okay to put the phone down. It won’t hurt. I mean, it will hurt at first. But it’ll get better. It has to.
Dan Carsen is a … well, you read much of it above. Share your thoughts about smartphones, daydreaming, or anything else with him at CarsenWords@gmail.com.
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September 19, 2021 at 09:30PM
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