Have you ever wondered if smartphones and social media are as wonderful for us as they are cracked up to be?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #185 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
For those of us over 30 years of age, the idea of a cell phone is still a tool of wonder. We can remember B.C.P., before cell phones. We can also remember B.I., before Internet. While the internet was used in academia during the 1980s, most of us didn’t encounter it until the mid-1990s during the Clinton Administration.
I remember my first car phone in the 1990s and my first mobile flip phone not long thereafter. I remember cell phones first being shown on television shows in the 1980s, like Miami Vice, when Sonny Crocket would pick up a phone the size of a brick.
We remember we had a life back then. We communicated, just differently. We researched information and learned, just differently. We listened to music and radio, just differently. If you’re over 30 you remember all this.
But it is in the 2000s that internet and cell phones became foundations for what we now call smartphones. The smartphone hit the market in 2007. (p. 32) You may also remember sensing the emergence of “a widely shared sense of techno-optimism; (the belief) these products made life easier, more fun, and more productive.” (p. 3) This technological, commercial tsunami launched what scholar Jonathan Haidt calls “the Great Rewiring of childhood,” based upon a rapid introduction of new handheld techno wizardry. His book—The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness—"tells the story of what happened to the generation born after 1995, popularly known as Gen Z, the generation that follows the millennials.” (p. 5)
Was embracing smartphones wise? Was it safe? No one knew. New York University Professor Haidt noted, “We don’t let kids buy tobacco, or alcohol, or go in casinos,” but we ignored the harmful effects of the overuse of smartphone technology. (p. 5)
Professor Haidt says “happened to the generation” because American youth were handed a powerful new tool or toy that captured hours of their time each day, literally transformed how they thought and learned, engaged them with an unknown online set of contacts mislabeled a “community” while disengaging them from family, friends, recreation, and the great outdoors, thus introducing a massive wave of social detachment. Smartphones exposed the minds of youth to personal and world problems through a daily immersion of the worst news. (p. 39)
MIT professor Sherry Turkle described life with smartphones this way: ‘We are forever elsewhere.’ (p. 34) So not long after this new tech access is it any wonder a global teenage mental health crisis exploded?
The Great Rewiring via smartphones “hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge. Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable.” (p.6)
“While girls' social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones.” (p. 35)
Interestingly, “there was little sign of an impending mental illness crisis among adolescents in the 2000s. Then, quite suddenly, in the early 2010s, things changed.” Two mental disorders skyrocketed among adolescents in the 2010s: anxiety, depression. For example, “E.R. visits for self-harm increased 188% 2010 - 2020 for girls. 48% for boys.” “Suicide rates increased 91% boys and 167% girls 2010-2020.” (p. 30-31)
“Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, (Professor Haidt) argues, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.” (p. 44)
“The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).” (p. 139) This results in social deprivation – less time with real human contact – sleep deprivation – yielding “depression, anxiety, irritability, cognition. deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.” Then attention fragmentation – not able to focus and stay on task, and addiction – with social media companies using behaviorist techniques to “hook” youth into being heavy users. (p. 140)
From this social psychologist’s point of view, “social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. It lures people in with the promise of connection and communion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time with a few close friends in real life. This may be why loneliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual.” It makes girls more vulnerable to stalking, or boys in their school pressuring them to share nude photographs of themselves. It makes boys more vulnerable to cyberbullying and pornography. (p. 173)
Where does religion if not biblical Christianity fit in this smartphone social media Great Rewiring?
“Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as ‘there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.’ (p. 215) The scholar-author Jonathan Haidt states that he agrees with Pascal but in an earlier book Professor Haidt tried to explain the source of this God-shaped hole in the human heart by drawing on Darwinian evolutionary theory. “Many of my religious friends, (Haidt says) disagree about the origin of our God-shaped hole; they believe that the hole is there because we are God's creations and we long for our creator. But although we disagree about its origins, we agree about its implications: There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn't get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s. It matters what we expose ourselves to.” (p. 215-216)
Religion, particularly Christianity, teaches us that to be “slower to judge and quicker to forgive are good for maintaining relationships and improving mental health. Social media trains people to do the opposite: Judge quickly and publicly, lest ye be judged for not judging whoever it is that we are all condemning today. Don't forgive, or your team will attack you as a traitor. From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure.” (p. 211)
Professor Haidt observes, “There is a ‘God-shaped hole’ in every human heart. Or, at least, many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life often fills that hole with trivial and degrading content.” (p. 218)
To combat the effects of the Great Rewiring, Professor Haidt concludes his seminal work with “four foundational reforms:
- No smartphones before high school
- No social media before age 16
- Phone-free schools
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.”
This is a scholarly book. It is thorough, well-documented, current, and loaded with common sense. Parents should heed the warnings and recommendations in this book, as should church youth groups, and certainly all educational institutions.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. Or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers for more podcasts and video.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
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