It seems like every generation is destined to disparage the next generation. This is nothing new. Even the elderly Romans complained about how an easy life has made their successor soft. In the most recent entry of the new generation sucking we have an article wondering if smartphones have destroyed a generation:
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens.[…]
What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
Do you know what destroyed a generation? The printing press! When books stopped being written by hand by monks in monasteries, they become cheaper and more readily available. This lead to more people reading more frequently, which cause them to pass less attention to their social obligations.
That’s the same argument except it would have, and probably did, taken place in the 1440s.
Just as every generation is destined to disparage the next generation, every technological advancement that makes its way into the hands of consumers is destined to be accused of destroying the next generation. Television, video games, and computers were all accused of destroying a generation in recent times. The first generations the grew up with those technologies turned out fine just as the new generation will end up turning out fine. Adoption of new technologies are always disruptive to a point but it seems like humanity has a knack for discovering, rather rapidly, the positives and negative aspects and adopting the former while discarding or working around the latter. As today’s teenagers develop they too will discover the positives and negatives of smartphones and adjust themselves accordingly. Then they’ll be at an age where they can disparage their successors and whatever new technology is being adopted by them at the time.