A century and a half ago, the visionary Henry David Thoreau declared people had become ‘the tool of their tools.’
In this device-driven age of smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence, few observations could be seen as more prescient.
Technologies, sold to help us, now surveil and sell us. Screens, to entertain us, steal the data of our daily lives.
And with increasing enthusiasm, we’re surrendering the souls of our children to Silicon Valley. The grotesque scene of a toddler addicted to a device may well become the defining image of our time.
Anxious generation
A new book released in recent weeks argues smart phones and social media are causing an epidemic of mental illness among the young. The Anxious Generation, by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has sparked reviews everywhere from The New York Times to The Australian.
It calls for urgent reforms in our homes, schools, and parliaments. In The Guardian it’s hailed as ‘an essential read’ and a ‘foundational text’ for those seeking solutions.
The book doesn’t hold back about the harms of a childhood wired to devices. Reduced face-to-face connection, sleep deprivation, fragmented attention, device addiction. It then links this rewired childhood to rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.
As for gender differences, girls are more likely to be crushed by the constant comparisons on social media, while too many boys are hooked by gaming and pornography.
‘By designing a firehose of addictive content… and by displacing physical play and in-person socialising,’ writes Haidt, the tech giants ‘have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.’
Gen Z – those born after 1995 – are for Haidt ‘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… and unsuitable for children and adolescents.’
Technopoly
These arguments are of course familiar to many readers, and broader concerns about new technologies are nothing new. A decade before Facebook, communications theorist Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly decried the ‘surrender of culture to technology.’
‘Technology is a friend,’ wrote Postman. ‘It makes life easier, cleaner, and longer.’
Yet it’s the kind of friend that asks for trust and obedience, but doesn’t invite ‘a close examination of its own consequences.’
Describing the dark side of this friendship, Postman warned ‘the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity.’
Sherry Turkle’s 2015 book Reclaiming Conversation was a call to restore those ‘vital sources’ of humanity. An expert on the relationship between people and technology, the sociologist Turkle described how simply having a smart phone present during a conversation – between friends or with children – fundamentally transformed and undermined this most important human experience.
She famously observed that the omnipresent phone means ‘everyone is always elsewhere.’
Like Postman and Haidt, Turkle’s critique is not anti-technology, but rather a call to urgently address the damage it’s doing.
Perhaps the most relevant book of all is Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 classic, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. If there’s anyone out there still infatuated with the freaks from Silicon Valley, Zuboff’s book offers a rigorous reality check.
She analyses in compelling detail how a small group of companies claimed ownership of the world’s private information – including children’s – as the new raw material for generating profit. Making monopolies, breaking laws, undermining democracy.
Reclaiming childhood
One of the most insidious aspects of this technological take-over is the view that it’s inevitable. It’s not. Human history is replete with examples of societies addressing the risks of new technologies. Think car safety, cigarettes, pharmaceutical regulation, ozone.
In our universities, scholars are increasingly trying to understand the impacts of living and growing in the device age. In some Nordic nations, educational curricula is already steeped in critical thinking about new technology. In the world’s capitals, tougher regulation is on the political agenda.
Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation also recommends reforms. Less time on screens and more unsupervised play. Genuinely phone-free schools. Lifting the legal age of access to adult content, and real verification of dates of birth.
I’m not endorsing Haidt’s work. Along with the acclaim it’s also been criticised – in the science journal Nature no less – for over-simplifying evidence on mental health impacts of phone-based childhoods. I also worry the book downplays other structural factors: climate change, casualisation of work, housing unaffordability.
But one thing’s clear. The debate about how to fix the dark side of our friendship with technology, and reclaim childhood in the device age, is well and truly underway.
• An honorary Assistant Professor at Bond University, Dr Ray Moynihan is currently part of a team at the University of Sydney studying social media.
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