Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? (2017)

People change, generations are different. That's the way the world works.

Instagram, Twitter and all messengers are inherently mobile, not just in their design but at their core. Their pattern derive from mobile usage, as opposed to desktop patterns.

Twitter is clearly a byproduct of phones: same length as SMS, even worked through SMS at the start (when smartphones were mostly a cool concept or weird devices). There are tons of sources linking social media and smartphones, see for example https://marketingland.com/facebook-usage-accounts-1-5-minute...

I'm not convinced by either claim.

In my experience of working with teenagers over the last couple of decades, there is a general trend that they are now better at communicating their emotional needs and emotional state. If teens are more able to clearly and openly express the fact that they are sad, does that mean they are more sad? I think not.

Teenagers face far greater economic insecurity than before, and are more acutely aware of it. What will the workforce look like when they graduate highschool? Jobs that teenagers would have been invited to do are being replaced with automated checkouts and computer vision algorithms. Teenagers are required to go into more debt than ever, to escape this lack of opportunities via education.

The article identifies that today's teenagers: get in less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent - and presents this all as bad because it is different than what came before. Is it bad? Would people 20 years ago have thought this was bad?

The author expresses great surprise that people sleep with their phones beside their bed - whereas, it is a great surprise to me that she doesn't. It has an extremely useful function as an alarm clock.

I suspect that she would find that a vast majority of her generation of 47-year olds also sleeps with their phone within an arm's reach.

And a lot of it is interchangeable and repetitive - like all those Instagram photos taken in the same popular locations with the same few stock poses.

The same thing applies to music (generic watered-down techno with bass-drum-under-samples and maybe a bit of synth), visual art (digital paintings of pretty anime-influenced girls, lone heroic fantasy figures dwarfed by an impossibly huge menacing monster, relatively trivial generative code animations), and short movies (generic sci-fi settings and tropes, generic scripts, pro-quality CGI.)

Unusual talent, deep mastery of a medium with some awareness of its history, non-trivial content, and an original voice are very rare.

It's not that it's all terrible, but there's far more superficial trope mimicry than powerfully resonant original creative work.