In 2012, the satirical Onion News Network ran a faux TV story about a smartphone-obsessed teenager capable only of rolling her eyes and texting. The reporter intoned: “Caitlin Teagart was a beautiful, lively girl who loved laughing and playing outside, but all that changed when she was 12.” Now, hooked on technology, the girl is pallid and unresponsive. Caitlin’s parents have decided to have her euthanized. “We can give her eyes,” says the actor playing her father, “to someone who would actually use them to read a book.”
The timing of the video was excruciatingly apt. Smartphones had become ubiquitous, apps were proliferating and childhood itself was in the final throes of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the great rewiring.”
In “The Anxious Generation,” Mr. Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online. For this cohort, the first to go through puberty with constant access to the internet, it was not merely that playing and socializing had shifted to phones, tablets and gaming consoles but that real-life pleasures and risks were also disappearing: rough-and-tumble outdoor activities, opportunities for physical independence, unsupervised recreation. Free play had been in retreat and technology on the march since the 1980s, Mr. Haidt observes, but it took the invention of the smartphone, which permits users to be online 24/7, to complete the mutation of childhood from “play-based” to “phone-based.” In words that chill the parental heart, he writes that giving smartphones to young people en masse constitutes “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.” The experiment has been a disaster.
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Author: Ruth King
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