I come from a large family; I am the ninth of ten. Our parents were of the Silent Generation, born during World War II. Of the nine living siblings, six are of Generation X, and three of us are millennials. In many ways, my family is a microcosm of the divide between those two generations\u2014we millennials have lower expectations for income and status, we are more frugal, we have more diverse palates. Gen Xers might say that the first is a vice, that we are insufficiently ambitious, and that the food we eat is weird. But nobody really cares anymore. We millennials are entering middle age, and Gen X is joining the AARP.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One area where there is a sharp generational divide concerns our relationship with\u00a0new technology. The millennial siblings feel much more obligated to limit our children\u2019s use of screens and even keep them away from smartphones entirely. The Gen Xers in my family, by contrast, are more likely to see technological trends as a matter of fate\u2014skepticism is for the Luddites and the Amish. Their experience of\u00a0new technologies\u00a0growing up was\u00a0almost always\u00a0marked by improvements in their quality of life, and even as something that brought people together. Our experience as millennials, having come of age with social media, was more mixed, and we have seen more clearly how\u00a0new technologies\u00a0can also lead to division.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jonathan Haidt famously makes the case for reining in smartphones.<\/a>\u00a0In\u00a0The Anxious Generation,\u00a0he\u00a0argues<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0unfettered access to phones\u00a0gives\u00a0rise to four fundamental harms that help explain the mental health issues of youth in recent years: 1) social deprivation; 2) sleep deprivation; 3) attention fragmentation; and 4) addiction. For these reasons, it makes more sense to think of smartphones according to the paradigm of chemical technologies\u00a0than\u00a0of\u00a0ordinary electronics. Like beer, wine, liquor, cocaine, opiates, and tobacco, if it is addictive, we should\u00a0probably find\u00a0a way to use it, or not use it, depending on what is\u00a0truly beneficial\u00a0to us. Smartphones may be worthwhile for many people, but we should at least be aware that they are harmful when unmoderated, and,\u00a0as with\u00a0cigarettes, we should\u00a0probably keep\u00a0them away from our kids until they are adults.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there is another reason we should\u00a0limit\u00a0kids\u2019 access to\u00a0smartphones: their effect on our political culture. It is looking increasingly like smartphones and social media are leading our culture to a new kind of tribalism.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Back in the 1960s and\u00a0\u201970s there was\u00a0an\u00a0eccentric Canadian intellectual named Marshall McLuhan, who\u00a0wrote about technology and its effect on us. He was even\u00a0interviewed<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Playboy\u00a0magazine and appeared in the movie\u00a0Annie Hall. People\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0talk about him as much today. His ideas were condensed, polished, popularized, and applied to social criticism by Neil Postman, especially in his book\u00a0Amusing\u00a0Ourselves to Death.<\/a>\u00a0McLuhan himself was mostly indifferent to technological trends\u2014people like Postman saw in those same trends reason for concern.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStart your day with Public Discourse If you are like me, your response to reading McLuhan is like this: \u201cfalse; false; false; false; false; false; false; WOW, that is one of the most insightful things I have ever\u00a0heard!;\u00a0false; false.\u201d He was more gifted in intellectual creativity than discipline. But he would have insights you had never heard, and about things you had never thought\u00a0to consider. One thing he said that I am\u00a0convinced\u00a0is true is that literacy fundamentally changed society. There is almost zero chance that the growth of mass literacy in the West, after the invention of the printing press and the educational shifts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had nothing to do with the other radical changes that followed, from the development of modern constitutionalism to the industrial revolutions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Reading\u00a0changes<\/a> the brain. And one thing McLuhan said about it is that it tended to make us transcend our own tribe and take on a more individualist perspective. This was also what Postman tried to emphasize. Indeed, long reading, engaging deeply with the thoughts of others, especially those from very different times and places, tends to open our minds to diverse perspectives, drawing us from tribal thinking to a more cosmopolitan vision. Since the widespread use of smartphones, however, the data<\/a> shows\u00a0what we\u00a0(probably)\u00a0already knew:\u00a0that far fewer people are reading today. This should concern us.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is looking increasingly like smartphones and social media are leading our culture to a new kind of tribalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In fact, it was McLuhan\u2019s prediction that the trajectory of mass media was that of a return,\u00a0from the individualist mentality of the \u201cliterate man\u201d underlying modernity,\u00a0to new kinds of tribalism. With\u00a0television\u00a0and\u00a0radio, this tended toward a tribalism of a \u201cglobal village.\u201d But what McLuhan did not live to see was the internet, which has led to a different kind of \u201cretribalization,\u201d one that is far more concerning than the one we had with radio and TV. Who can look at the last fifteen years\u2014as the bonds of a common culture\u00a0dissolve\u00a0and people increasingly struggle to see their fellow citizens as compatriots with whom they share reciprocal norms\u2014and not wonder if that is what we are seeing?\u00a0<\/p>\n With social media, for instance, deep engagement in the many worlds of others is often replaced\u00a0by\u00a0memes and clips, slogans and knockdowns, and a strong tendency toward exclusive engagement with a highly particularized tribe. Ideas once dismissed as radical gradually come to seem normal as our little tribes embrace them. Little cults form and,\u00a0as we see in the younger generations, there exist soldiers of online tribes walking among us with almost no allegiance to our real-life communities. The internet has allowed misfits to find each other, which is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it.<\/p>\n
\nSign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n