Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation Summary

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to avoid using technology and the Internet in one's everyday life, so naturally many researchers want to explore the consequences of such lifestyle. One of them is a psychologist Jean Twenge who claims that the usage of smartphones has caused (or at least significantly influenced) higher rates of depression and loneliness in teens of, as she named it, iGen (which, according to her, encompasses everyone born between 1995 and 2012). By entitling her article "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" (2017), she leaves an impression that she believes that smartphones are having a severe deteriorating effect on younger generations. However, this is only one of the differences

She refers to research study which shows that unhappier teens are linked to longer time spent on their phones, but while she mentions that a correlation between screentime and depression or loneliness does not prove that one causes the other, in other parts of the text it is heavily implied that she believes it (Cavanagh, 2017). Contrary to this belief, several research studies maintain that this relation is bidirectional. In fact, Nowland, Necka and Cacioppo in their review "Loneliness and Social Internet Use: Pathways to Reconnection in a Digital World?" (2018) suggest that relation between Internet usage and loneliness depends on the way people use the Internet—whether they use it to stay in touch with their acquaintances and forge new relationships or to cut contact with their friends. Similarly, in the study "Loneliness and Social Uses of the Internet" (2003), Morahan-Martin and Schumacher claim that people who feel lonely are more inclined to use the Internet to "fill social voids", but by doing that they damage the relationships they have in real life and therefore their loneliness only increases. Moreover, Nowland, Necka and Cacioppo stress the importance of other factors (for instance, personality) that might affect this relation. Additionally, there could be other causes for either the increased screentime or increased mental problems. For example, while sole focal point of Twenge's research is teenage

While she claims that the rates of unhappiness are growing, Samuel (2017) reviews the data from Monitoring the Future which Twenge cites and finds that levels of unhappiness are steady throughout the years. What is more, Twenge writes that those who spend more that 10 hours a week on the Web are more likely to say they are unhappy, but Samuel shows that the highest level of unhappiness is among those who do not use social media at all. Furthermore, a study by Przybylski and Weinstein conducted on a large number of English teens in 2017 proves that moderate usage of the Internet and technology offers some advantages (e.g. possibility to showcase one's creativity), while overuse is only slightly harmful. Similarly, Cavanagh (2017) mentions Clive Thompson who tried to prove that technology can improve person's intelligence. All in all, there is evidently a need for more research on this topic before any definite conclusion can be