Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In an age where your grandmother is more likely to slide into your DMs than send you a postcard, we find ourselves in an existential tango with technology. Jonathan Haidt, the man who once took on the Herculean task of battling cancel culture, now squares up against an equally formidable beast: the smartphone.
His argument, smartly wrapped in concern and statistics in The New York Times, suggests that these devices are corrupting the youth and coddling their minds. To be fair, those tiny screens are indeed where some dreams go to die; just ask anyone who’s ever tried to become TikTok famous. Let’s delve into Haidt’s repertoire and cue the drumroll for those deliciously ironic bullet points.
The Breakdown:
- The Pocket-Sized Pandora’s Box: Apparently, our smartphones are nothing short of the modern-day forbidden fruit. I for one, always suspected that Apple had a sinister Eden complex.
Specifics: Haidt posits that smartphones are the root of psychological mayhem among the young’uns, cleaving through their attention spans like a hot knife through butter.
- The Social Media Boogeyman: Armed with nothing but your thumbs, you too can unleash the dreaded doomscrolling monster and forget what sunlight looks like.
Specifics: The article hints that social media platforms are to blame for just about every teenage angst since acne, but apparently, it’s the smartphones that let the monster in.
- The iCoddling of the American Mind: Hey, isn’t it Haidt who talked about coddling university students? Maybe smartphones are offering too much of the soft stuff, emotionally padding our kids until they bounce off the walls.
Specifics: Haidt is not a fan of these mobile coddling contraptions turning kids into glass—easily shattered and tough to put back together.
- The Rise of Techno-Frankenstein: Are our kids turning into monsters, or are we the mad scientists stitching screen time into every aspect of their lives?
Specifics: Haidt seems to think the latter, fearfully eyeing the education system’s reliance on technology. Remember when a chalkboard and a sneeze were all you needed for a math class?
- The Distraction Contraption Reaction: Just when you thought multitasking was a marketable skill, along comes the argument that flitting about on your smartphone is chipping away at our collective intelligence.
Specifics: According to Haidt, we’re all just a few taps away from devolving into cavemen with really, really good thumb dexterity.
The Counter:
- The Digital Garden of Eden: Without our precious smartphones, how will we call our moms or Google whether it’s raining in Portugal?
Sarcasm: Look, it’s not the smartphone’s fault you can’t pry your eyes away long enough to tie your shoes.
- The Oracle of Apps: Like the Oracle at Delphi, smartphones merely relay information; it’s the users who choose to interpret “You will go on a great journey” as “Time to spend six hours on Twitter.”
Sarcasm: If we’re headed to ruin, at least we’ll be well ‘liked’ and retweeted en route.
- The Beacon of Boredom: Before smartphones, boredom was cured by staring blankly at walls. Now we have Candy Crush!
Sarcasm: Someone’s got to save those candies; it might as well be our nation’s youth.
- The Analog Apocalypse: Let’s just go back to rotary phones. Sure, it took six minutes to dial customer service, but it built character.
Sarcasm: Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a dial tone after you’ve painstakingly entered all 30 digits of your account number.
- The Survival of the Focused: Hey, if you can finish a novel on your phone while simultaneously avoiding human interaction and nurturing a burgeoning meme addiction, you’re evolving, not failing.
Sarcasm: Darwin would be proud, or at least he’d be too busy swiping left to care.
The Hot Take:
Let’s put it this way, boiling our societal woes down to these little rectangular glow machines is like blaming fire for everything from burnt toast to arson. Smartphones, like any tool—shovels, blenders, or Congress—can serve us or blight us. It’s the hands they’re in that make the difference. Our focus should not be on tossing smartphones into an insatiable volcano but on teaching the youth how to use them without falling in. Kind of like giving them a map to navigate the digital Serengeti without being eaten by the virtual lions.
The liberal fix isn’t to rid the world of smartphones; it’s to educate users about technology consumption, digital citizenship, and perhaps, above all else, the power of the off button. Because let’s face it, the only thing scarier than a teenager with a smartphone is a teenager without one, asking you what you’re doing every five minutes.
Source: First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones
