Of course, this might be because iGen’ers get all of their news online. However, the decline in news consumption among teens didn’t begin with iGen; even before the Internet arrived, teens were less likely to pay attention to the news with each passing year. That suggests that Internet news consumption isn’t the only social trend afoot. In addition, the decline in watching TV news is about twice the size as the decline in watching TV in general. For iGen’ers, online news is just about the only game in town. It can be a good one, if you go to the right places. The problem, as far as I could tell in the interviews and surveys I did with teens, is that few knew about those places.
Sofia, the 18-year-old college freshman from California we met in chapter 9, looks confused when I ask her if she reads news online. When I ask her if there are any national or world events she is interested in, she says, “Like, um, like what?” I ask what she might click on if she were browsing an online news site. “I don’t know,” she says and then begins telling me about a paper she wrote for a psychology class. Emily, the Minnesota high school freshman we met in chapters 1, 2, and 9, watches TV news in the morning with her family. But when I ask her about online news sites, she says, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
In the SDSU freshman survey, most students said they were “not interested” in the news. “I’m not a huge news fan,” wrote Marisol, 19. “A lot of news is depressing.” Another noted, “I don’t have the patience for the news.” When I asked the high school students I interviewed whether they kept up with current events, the most common response was “I look at that if I have to for a class.” Ashley, the high school junior we met in chapter 7, was confused when I asked about what national or world events were interesting (saying “Hmm—I don’t know. Like, what do you mean?”). She did say that Yahoo! News was her home page, but when I asked what stories she would click on, she said, “Usually my mom watches stuff, and she’ll, like, tell me about something that happened—usually if there’s, like, an accident or something major.”
Political apathy and political polarization may have the same root cause: the Internet. Many hoped the Internet would usher in a new era of civic engagement, making it easier to gather information and organize protests and demonstrations. Writing to politicians has certainly become easier; most have a form on their website. Yet, compared to the days when writing to a public official involved looking up the address at the library, typing a letter, and mailing it, fewer young people contact their elected representatives. iGen’ers are finding new ways to move for social change, from changing their Facebook profile picture to an equality sign to hashtagging a tweet about a cause. It might not be marching in the streets, but—as the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage showed—such pervasive awareness can start to shift the opinions of average Americans and eventually the law. Much of the awareness of Black Lives Matter spread online. That is where iGen’ers shine—not in traditional political action but in spreading the word about a new issue. Sometimes that changes things (as in the case of same-sex marriage) and sometimes it doesn’t (as with the “Kony 2012” video, which garnered millions of views but produced little action).
What types of political candidates will appeal to iGen? The Internet, and iGen’s individualism, pulls for authenticity above all, that cardinal value of “being yourself.” iGen’ers want someone who is seen as consistent in his or her views and does not change them for others. This was the key to Bernie Sanders’s appeal to iGen’ers and the Millennials and likely to Donald Trump’s appeal as well. “Although you may not agree with Bernie Sanders, at least respect him for his compassion and authenticity,” wrote University of Massachusetts student Emilia Beuger in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “. . . He is authentic. He sticks to his beliefs and he is not afraid to express those beliefs. He is not going to let people tell him what to believe . . . . He does not let anyone tell him what to say or think.” Similar words could be written about Donald Trump; many people liked that he seemed to say whatever he wanted. It’s probably not a coincidence that Republican nominee Trump, seen as authentic, won in 2016, while Republican nominee Mitt Romney, seen as overly programmed, did not in 2012.
In the future, I can see a politician much like the presidential nominee Will Conway in the Netflix series House of Cards appealing to iGen voters: someone who is young, straightforward, and casual. In one episode, Conway live streams video from his house with his family, speaking without notes and seemingly completely relaxed. He turns out to not actually be that authentic, but his image is. iGen’ers, even more than the Millennials before them, have little patience for traditional political candidates, whom they see as dishonest, untrustworthy, and part of the large institutions they dislike.
Yet iGen’ers still have strong beliefs, mirroring the political polarization of the country as a whole. The downside of our online culture is that social media sites connect people to their personal cocoon of friends and family, allowing people to cluster with others who think as they do, further polarizing their views in an echo chamber. As a result, more young Americans hold strong political views, yet fewer are interested in staying informed or taking part in political life. We may see more candidates resort to the politics of celebrity to get iGen’ers’ attention, with fame and bombastic proclamations the key to leading in the polls. Rising politicians trying to appeal to the next generation will not only have to accommodate iGen’ers’ polarized views and libertarian values, they will also have to overcome their shrinking interest in politics overall—until a politician becomes a meme.
Conclusion
* * *
Understanding—and Saving—iGen
Thirteen-year-old Athena is on a roll, telling me about how she thinks technology has affected her generation. When she hangs out with her friends, she says, they are often looking at their phones instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look At. My. Face,” she says, emphasizing every word in the last phrase. “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 ask.
“It kind of hurts,” she says. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could be talking about something superimportant to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”
Once, she says, a friend of hers was texting her boyfriend while they were hanging out in person together at her house. “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 out loud. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a pretty good arm on you?”
“Yep,” she answered.
Athena’s story intrigued me, not just because she actually did what many of us have fervently wanted to do (but lacked the gumption and the volleyball arm). At 13, Athena has not only never known a world without the Internet, but she can barely remember a time before smartphones. This is the only world she has ever known—yet she’s not sure she wants to live in it.
In this chapter, I’ll lay out some ways we can make things better for iGen. That necessitates striking a balance between solutions and acceptance. Cultural change is always a trade-off: with the good comes some bad. The trends that have shaped iGen are the usual mix of good and bad, with a healthy amount of “it depends” thrown in. Sometimes I wish we didn’t have to label any generational trends as good or bad—they just are. Yet as a parent and educator, I also understand the urge to discuss “what we can do about it.” For some trends, this arguably isn’t necessary: with fewer teens drinking alcohol and having sex and fewer getting into car accidents, we can pat ourselves (and teens) on the back and call it a day. Teens are physically safer than ever and are making less risky choices than generations past. It’s part of a larger picture of growing up more slowly rather th
an an overall shift toward responsibility, but it is still undeniably good that they are safer.
Other trends are more troubling: How can we protect our kids from anxiety, depression, and loneliness in our digital age? What can parents and colleges do to ease the transition from high school to college when fewer students have experienced independence? How can managers get the most out of the newest generation in the workforce?
In this last chapter, I’ll discuss some possible ways forward. In many cases, I’ll rely on the words of iGen’ers themselves to point the way. Like Athena, many iGen’ers are acutely aware of the downsides of their uniquely digital era. This is where the data give way to more subjective interpretation and opinion, so I’m grateful so many young people have made their views on these issues known.
Put Down the Phone
“Ever since my younger sister got her own Instagram and Twitter accounts, she has spent our car rides silently scrolling, head down, her face lit up with the blue-white of the 5.44 by 2.64-inch cellphone screen,” wrote college student Rachel Walman in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “I try to engage in conversation with her, and she responds with absent-minded, one-word answers. I don’t blame her for this, because I know I’m guilty of doing the same thing. Rather, I’m saddened by the fact that our online lives have become more important than our real ones.”
iGen’ers are addicted to their phones, and they know it. Many also know it’s not entirely a good thing. It’s clear that most teens (and adults) would be better off if they spent less time with screens. “Social media is destroying our lives,” one teen told Nancy Jo Sales in her book American Girls. “So why don’t you go off it?” Sales asked. “Because then we would have no life,” the girl said.
Based on the research presented here and plenty more, it’s best to put off giving your child a cell phone as long as possible. There’s really no reason for an elementary school child to have his own cell phone, so that’s an easy one. By middle school, with kids in more activities and more likely to ride a bus, many parents buy phones for their kids for convenience and safety. However, that phone doesn’t necessarily need to be a smartphone complete with Internet access and the ability to text. Instead, you can buy your child a phone with limited functions—for example, an old-school flip phone (also known as a “dumb phone”) without Internet access or a touch screen (which means that texting involves hitting the same key several times to get different letters—remember that?). When my friend’s son headed off to our local middle school recently, she bought him a flip phone. I plan to do the same in a few years when my oldest will be riding the bus to middle school as well—though I might not even go the flip-phone route until I see how the first few weeks go. After all, kids rode buses for decades before cell phones existed. We’ll put off the phone for as long as possible.
Why wait, if “everyone else” has a smartphone, and your kid really wants one? Some people make the argument that teens will be on social media eventually, so you might as well get them a phone early. However, that ignores the collision between early-adolescent development and social media. Middle school has always been a fraught time for identity finding and bullying, and combining those with social media can create a tinderbox. That’s why the links between social media use and depression are strongest among the youngest teens. Older teens, who are more certain of themselves, are less likely to be emotionally affected by social media. Given the emphasis on sexuality online—the butt selfies, the requests for nudes, and the likes on the sexually provocative Instagram posts—it makes sense to spare young teens that pressure for a few years. If they want to be on social media, there’s an easy solution: sign them up, but from your computer. They can check in on their friends briefly and communicate about getting together, but it’s not constantly in their pockets and hands like a smartphone. Sporadic use is unlikely to be harmful; electronic device use was linked to unhappiness and mental health issues only after more than two hours of use a day.
If these limits sound antediluvian, consider this: many tech CEOs strictly regulate their own children’s technology use. When New York Times reporter Nick Bilton talked to Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs in late 2010, he asked Jobs if his kids loved the iPad. “They haven’t used it,” Jobs said. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bilton was shocked, but he later found that many other tech experts also limited their children’s screen time, from the cofounder of Twitter to the former editor of Wired magazine. So even people who love technology—and make a living off it—are cautious about their kids using it too much. As Adam Alter put it in his book Irresistible, “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: Never get high on your own supply.”
Many parents wonder if we really need to worry about this stuff. Some argue that the flurry of concern over smartphones resembles the panic over previous advances in media, such as radio, music albums, TV, or even novels. That might be true, but it’s not particularly relevant. Social media and electronic device use is linked to higher rates of loneliness, unhappiness, depression, and suicide risk, in both correlational and experimental data. Novels and music are not. TV watching is also linked to depression, and sure enough, more Boomers (the first TV generation) were depressed than previous generations that had grown up without TV. Just because an argument has been made before does not mean it’s wrong; the “panic” over TV turned out to be somewhat justified. Thus an argument about whether a “panic” about media has happened before seems trivial—our kids need help now.
Another argument is that social media and texting are just teens interacting with one another just as they always have. Perhaps, but electronic communication is linked to poor mental health, whereas interacting in person is linked to good mental health. The two types of interaction are not the same.
Finally, there’s the argument that people (including adults) like social media, so it can’t be bad. That’s clearly not true. Lots of people love junk food, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for our health. Keep in mind: social media companies are run by people looking to make a profit. Every time a new app catches on because teens stay up all night using it, those companies make money. It’s just our kids who lose.
That might be especially true for girls, who are the primary consumers of social media and also the primary sufferers of the mental health issues they have wrought. Parents, teachers, and girls themselves have to do something, because social media companies are not going to. “The social media companies aren’t going to do anything about it, as long as it’s driving traffic,” says Paul Roberts, the author of The Impulse Society. “Oh, your daughter’s on Tinder? Well, she’s just meeting friends. I don’t think it’s necessarily a cynical, let’s destroy women thing—it’s how can I get my next quarter’s bonus?”
I am not suggesting that teens (or adults) give up smartphones (or even social media) entirely. If you or your teen limits your use to an hour a day, there may be no ill effects. In short doses, this is useful technology that enhances our lives. But things have clearly gone too far. Psychology journals are filled with articles on Internet addiction. Many teens communicate with their friends electronically far more than they do face-to-face, with as-yet-unknown consequences for their budding social skills. We already know that depression and anxiety have risen at an unprecedented rate and that twice as many young teens commit suicide as just a few years ago. It seems abundantly clear that screen time needs to be cut.
All of us, including adults, have to find a place of moderation for how much that phone is in our hands, how much our eyes are on that screen, and how much time we spend communicating digitally instead of in person. Melissa Nilles, a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, captured this reality as only iGen can. “I had a terrible nightmare the other night,” she wrote in the UCSB student newspaper. “Instead of meeting for a quick cup of coffee, my friend and I spent 30 minutes texting back and forth about our day. After that, instea
d of going in to talk to my professor during his office hours, I emailed him from home with my question. Because of this, he never got to know who I was, even though he would have been a great source for a letter of recommendation if he had. I ignored a cute guy at the bus stop asking me the time because I was busy responding to a text. And I spent far too much time on Facebook trying to catch up with my 1000+ ‘friends,’ most of whom I rarely see, and whose meaning sadly seems to dispel even more as the sheer number of ‘connections’ I’ve made grows. Oh wait, that wasn’t a dream. This technological detachment is becoming today’s reality.” Technology, she writes, is “slowly ruining the quality of social interaction that we all need as human beings. So what are we doing with 3000 friends on the Internet? Why are we texting all the time? Seems like a big waste of time to me. Let’s spend more time together with our friends. Let’s make the relationships that count last, and not rely on technology to do the job for us.” Life is better offline, and even iGen’ers know it.
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