The Sour Aftertaste Of The Digital Age

Authored by Mark Bauerlein via The Epoch Times,

As one state and school district after another bans cellphones in classrooms, we should pause for a moment and appreciate what a remarkable reversal has occurred.

Recent books by Jonathan Haidt and Christine Rosen, among others, have succeeded so well by saying what only a few years ago would have pegged them as alarmists and reactionaries. Haidt has chronicled the emotional damage the smartphone has done to kids, while Rosen details the damage screens have done to the habits of daily life, habits which humanize and enlighten us. To have said so in 2012 would have run up against a tidal wave of enthusiasm for social media, Wikipedia, texting, Google, etc. Now, they receive praise and agreement, as they should.

What happened? What made the cellphone in a 12-year-old’s hand slip into disfavor? I remember educators treating those “Digital Natives” as pioneers and innovators. The tool was a knowledge producer, they believed, a window into art, history, politics, current events, and economics. Finally, the kids had a means of independent inquiry, we were told, a machine that was customized to their individual curiosity and aptitude, enabling them to escape the homogenizing routines of the 25-person classroom and to pursue their intellectual passions freely. Learning would take off. People who warned about other uses of the tool in the hands of the young—pornography, peer pressure, bullying, daily hours of video games, pictures passed back and forth at midnight, and so on—had no traction, not when everything seemed so new and promising.

No longer. Schools have been wired, 8th-graders given laptops, and reading and math scores have dropped. High school kids have had the universe of knowledge at their fingertips, and college teachers nonetheless complain that entering classes are ever more ignorant and a-literate (that is, they know how to read but don’t do it much). The promise has not been realized, though mountains of money have been spent. At this point, teens on the bus, in the restaurant, and at the mall with one another, all eyes fixed on little screens, have the opposite identity—not active intellects searching the world, but adolescents bantering and scrolling, gaming and filming, liking and disliking one another.

I wonder what those cheerleaders of old think now, the ones who pushed screens on schools with assurances of future miracles, now that a lot of those schools are saying, “Wrong!” I have yet to hear of a school that banned the phones admit three months later, “Uh-oh, things are worse, learning is slipping, bring back the handhelds.” That’s not going to happen. What Haidt and Rosen et al. document is a real problem empirically observed, not an ideology merely asserted (Haidt is a liberal, Rosen’s a conservative).

What phones have done and continue to do to the hearts, minds, and souls of the young is ever more distressing as the years pass. The bans are going to become universal, I predict, because the advantages of doing so will prove quick and decisive. I would wager that a lot of the fistfights that break out at the end of the day began with nasty messages. The young girl in the back corner, quiet and morose, knows that other girls are saying things about her at that very moment. The kids near the front trying to pay attention to the teacher can’t help fidgeting and looking down because they’re sure that the phones in their backpacks contain stuff more interesting than the math formulas on the whiteboard.

This is the problem. The teenager’s phone was never going to be an intellectual tool, at least not primarily. It’s a teen’s tool, a source and a mouthpiece for what teens care about most: one another. To have believed otherwise was to be utterly naive. This is no longer a debate. The verdict is in.

When I’m on the subway and spot every young face squinting or smiling or frowning at the little screen in hand, it’s depressing. When a kid with a little paperback book held up appears, it’s a happy exception. Does he know that he is escaping one of the evils of our age? Is he aware that his banal book habit marks him as a great refusal? Is it only the book that draws him, or does he realize that the other option, selected by all his peers, is a creeping addiction and must be resisted? Let us press the latter point as firmly as we did with cigarettes 50 years ago.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.