Donna Cantor

English 100: Basic Composition

Essay #1: Online All the Time

Rough draft: due Monday 4 ½ pages-

Readings: Sherry Turkle’s “The Flight from Conversation”

Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

Your rough drafts and final essays should always be typed and double-spaced in MLA style with one-inch margins, a 12-point Times New Roman font, with your last name and page numbers in the upper right-hand corner. ** Late rough or final drafts will receive a grade reduction. Do not skip lines between paragraphs.

Sherry Turkle, in “The Flight from Conversation” is concerned that technology is causing many of us to lose human connection. Jean Twenge in “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” worries about “compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy” (4). Considering the ideas in the two texts, answer the following: What role does technology play in influencing the ability to mature and form deep relationships with others? (In other words, how does the use of technology change how we interact with others, and impact how we reach adulthood?)

I will evaluate your paper by looking at:

1. Your thesis (project): You should express and support your own ideas about the assigned topic and use textual evidence from the readings to help develop and support your claim.

2. Your use of textual evidence and protocols: Choose relevant quotations and examples to further your project.

3. Your organization: Paragraphs should focus on one idea, build upon each other logically, and work toward the development of the total project. Each body paragraph should have
two
quotations, one from each writer.

4. Your sentence clarity and correctness: Proofread your essay for spelling and grammatical errors.

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The Flight From Conversation
By SHERRY TURKLE

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we
have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during
board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on
dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye
contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to
hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned
that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only
what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled,
we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to
be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because
the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used
to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests
them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another,
even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to
talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too
busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth.
I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do
things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully,
“Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on
the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech
start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble,

furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law
firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies:
laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like
pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the
office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people —
carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep
one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it
as a Goldilocks effect.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can
edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body.
Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of
cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part
of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over
time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of
real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places
— in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not
substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am
thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work
as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we
tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move,
together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see
things from another’s point of view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate
on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of
online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another
simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important
matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have
said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight
from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These
days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation

to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s
hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem
almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of
computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he
wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating;
he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me
they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced,
“she” will be more and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology,
I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps
explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides
so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of
us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the
world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to
children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of
these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older
woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into
her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about
dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this
enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and
collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of
compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss
with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost
confidence that we will be there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn
to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of
relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we
will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we
never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem
that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here
connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to
connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing
our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want
to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to
connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the
capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as
though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are
unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be
alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At
home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars
“device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And
we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often
don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for
casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all,
we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to
one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in
which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes
that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at
the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their
heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on
their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor atM.I.T. and the author, most recently, of “Alone Together:
Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
El theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
Jean M. Twenge August 3, 2017

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston,
Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if
she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what
she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,”
I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free
hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom
and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I
have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends
spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who
might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat,
the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They
make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have
Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous
pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using
her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room
with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to
know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual
people.”

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old
doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation
appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply
continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but
individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped
out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys.
Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes
of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive
characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of
generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a
series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest
difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world;
teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time.
The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that

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came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great
Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials
trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the
proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked
with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the
smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them ¡Gen. Born between 1995
and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram
account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The
Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all
times, day and night. ¡Gen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was
introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A
2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing
about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been
fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The
arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the
nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young
people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among
teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where
there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and
troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way
things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are
positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a
car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re
markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their
predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen
depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe
¡Gen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this
deterioration can be traced to their phones.

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an
outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation.
Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things
matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a

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magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the
devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and
making them seriously unhappy.

In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the Sweetheart
Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of
peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no older
than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away
from their parents and inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and
make out in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at
Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if, perhaps
especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones.

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X, smoking had
lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to
get our driver’s license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned
16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood.
Asked by our parents, “When will you be home?,” we replied, “When do I have to be?”

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over
today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is
stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently
as 2009.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called
“liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation
that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might
start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for
Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-
graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent
since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11 th grade, a
full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many
see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time
low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from
Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly
all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year;
more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and
Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me
everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego
told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep
driving me to school.” She finally got her license six months after her 18th birthday. In

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conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be
nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous
generations.

Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas, or for that bottle
of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or
prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But ¡Gen teens aren’t working (or
managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors
worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of
eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the
Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability
has.

Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an ¡Gen innovation. Gen Xers, in
the 1990s, were the first to postpone the traditional markers of adulthood. Young Gen Xers
were just about as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as young Boomers had been, and
more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But as they left their teenage years behind,
Gen Xers married and started careers later than their Boomer predecessors had.

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started
becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and
continuing with ¡Gen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being
delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-
year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds.
Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of
adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information
economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined
to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in
turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious,
but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend
time with their friends.

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and
12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the
early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount
of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such
as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the
decline in working for pay, this means ¡Gen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens
did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and
often distressed.

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Jasu Hu

One of the ironies of ¡Gen life is that despite spending far more time under the same roof as
their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than
their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,”
Athena told me. “They just say Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t
pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so
she can focus on her phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but
nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with
actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint of my body.”

In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every
day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially
steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time
simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and
rich kids, С students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the
local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the
web.

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them
happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the
National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked
12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-
graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their
leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person

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social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social
media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend
more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who
spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all
nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more
hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those
who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who
spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are
unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person
interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person
are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average
amount of time.

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be
straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that
does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen
time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent
research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause
unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short
surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link
five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more
they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead
to more Facebook use.

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of ¡Gen
teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-
networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to
agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I
often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have
remained high since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are
lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more time on social media
also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more
social in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the generational level, when
teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions,
loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time
teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27
percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than
the average teen cut their risk significantly.

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Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely
to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the
risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’
growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has
declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time
together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In
2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide
rate.

Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one.
And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed.
Then again, about four times as many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often
effective in treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.

What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this
generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also
exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer
parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document
their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come
along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached
all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out
has been swift and significant.

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often
felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media
more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their
friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the
teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes.
When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think
and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a
picture.”

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’
depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50
percent—more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls.
Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed
themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still
higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close
the gap.

These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the fact that they’re
more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully one another physically, while girls
are more likely to do so by undermining a victim’s social status or relationships. Social media
give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they
favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

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Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one degree or another
have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their various motivations are, to say the least,
complex. A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting
to advertisers its ability to determine teens’ emotional state based on their on-site behavior,
and even to pinpoint “moments when young people need a confidence boost.” Facebook
acknowledged that the document was real, but denied that it offers “tools to target people
based on their emotional state.”

T H E S M A R T P H O N E G E N E R A T I O N :
A S T A T I S T I C A L P O R T R A I T
The constant presence of the internet, particularly social media,

is changing the behavior and attitudes of today’s teens.

Not Hanging Out With Friends
Times per week teenagers go out without their parents

2.7

2.5

2.3

2.1 — 12th-graders
— 10th-graders
— 8th-graders1.9

1976 1980 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

In No Rush to Drive
Percentage of 12th-graders who drive

90%

85%

80%

75%
— Drove at all in the past year

70%

1976 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Less Dating…
Percentage of teenagers who ever go out on dates

90%
80%
70%

60%

50%
— 12th-graders

40%

30%

1976 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

4
… And Less Sex

Percentage of high-school students who have ever had sex

2007 – iPhone released

12th-g raders 11th-graders
— 10th-graders ■ — 9th-graders

1991 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

More Likely to Feel Lonely
Percentage of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders who agree or mostly agree with
the statement “I often feel left out of things” or “A lot of times I feel lonely”

— Often feel left out
— Often feel lonely

Less Likely to Get Enough Sleep
Percentage of 8th- 10th-, and 12th-graders who
get less than seven hours of sleep most nights

35%

30%

25%

1991 1995 2000 2005 2015

In July 2014, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of something burning. Her
phone had overheated and melted into the sheets. National news outlets picked up the story,
stoking readers’ fears that their cellphone might spontaneously combust. To me, however, the
flaming cellphone wasn’t the only surprising aspect of the story. Why, I wondered, would
anyone sleep with her phone beside herin bed? It’s not as though you can surf the web while
you’re sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?

Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with
their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with
their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach
of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their
phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm
clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing
they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up
looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t
help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone as an
extension of their body—or even like a lover: “Having my phone closer to me while I’m
sleeping is a comfort.”

It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than
seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a
night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-
seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years
from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most teens got a
smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on
electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those
who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19
percent more likely to be sleep deprived. A meta-analysis of studies on electronic-device use
among children found similar results: Children who use a media device right before bed are
more likely to sleep less than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as
likely to be sleepy during the day.

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Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep.
Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less
likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at
bedtime. Watching TV for several hours a day is only weakly linked to sleeping less. But the
allure of the smartphone is often too much to resist.

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning,
susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who
don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety. Again, it’s difficult to trace the precise
paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or
the phones could be causing depression, which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor
could be causing both depression and sleep deprivation to rise. But the smartphone, its blue
light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.

The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that
more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick
Bilton has reported, it’s a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited
his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of
smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode
of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for
developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have
fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know
just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation
of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. My three daughters were born in 2006,
2009, and 2012. They’re not yet old enough to display the traits of ¡Gen teens, but I have
already witnessed firsthand just how ingrained new media are in their young lives. I’ve
observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad.
I’ve experienced my 6-year-old asking for her own cellphone. I’ve overheard my 9-year-old
discussing the latest app to sweep the fourth grade. Prying the phone out of our kids’ hands
will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents’ generation to get their
kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to
use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our
children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep
time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends
about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could
keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves are beginning to link
some of their troubles to their ever-present phone. Athena told me that when she does spend
time with her friends in person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. “I’m
trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at my face,” she said.

10/11

“They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel
like, when you’re trying to talk to somebody face-to-face and they’re not looking at you?,” I
asked. “It kind of hurts,” she said. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could
be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”

Once, she told me, she was hanging out with a friend who was texting her boyfriend. “I was
trying to talk to her about my family, and what was going on, and she was like, ‘Uh-huh, yeah,
whatever.’ So I took her phone out of her hands and I threw it at my wall.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a pretty good arm?” “Yep,”
she replied.

This article has been adapted from Jean M. Twenge’s forthcoming book .¡Gen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids
Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What
That Means for the Rest of Us.

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