iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

by Jean M. Twenge

Apparently, texting and posting to social media instead of reading books, magazines, and newspapers are not a boon for reading comprehension or academic writing. That might partially be due to the short attention span that new media seem to encourage. One study installed a program on college students’ laptops that took a screenshot every five seconds. The researchers found that students switched between tasks every nineteen seconds on average. More than 75% of the students’ computer windows were open less than one minute. This is a very different experience from sitting and reading a book for hours.

I think this needs to go even further. iGen’ers need textbooks that include interactive activities such as video sharing and questionnaires, but they also need books that are shorter in length and more conversational in their writing style.

“The dog, like, got into something—have you

ever seen when a dog is in trouble and they know they did something and they’ll kind of, like, try to smile? The dog was, like, smiling, and [the video] had this weird, sympathetic music. I was in love with that video for two days in January—I couldn’t, like, not watch it every five minutes.” These types of short video clips are very popular and have been since YouTube debuted in 2006.

We have the most complete and instant access to information in all of history, and we’re using it to watch funny cat videos.

Online videos have replaced some TV time for teens, although the declines in TV watching are not as steep as those in reading. Teens watched about an hour a day less TV in 2015 than in the early 1990s (see Figure 2.7). Even with new TV options such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, funny cats are winning.

So: iGen is spending much more time online and texting and much less time with more traditional media such as magazines, books, and TV. iGen’ers are spending so much time on their smartphones that they just aren’t interested in or available to read magazines, go to movies, or watch TV (unless it’s on their phones).

Although TV presaged the screen revolution, the Internet has hastened the demise of print. The printing press was invented in 1440, so for more than five hundred years words printed on paper were the standard way to convey information. We are living, right now, in the time when that is changing.

iGen’s future—and all of ours—will be shaped by ...

If teens are spending more time communicating with their friends online, how much are they seeing their friends in person? Has electronic interaction replaced face-to-face interaction?

In Person No More: I’m with You, but Only Virtually

when I ask him what makes his generation different, he doesn’t hesitate: “I feel like we don’t party as much. People stay in more often. My generation lost interest in socializing in person—they don’t have physical get-togethers, they just text together, and they can just stay at home.”

iGen’ers spend less time interacting with their peers face-to-face than any previous generation—it’s not just parties or craziness but merely getting together with friends, spending time hanging out.

iGen’ers were seeing their friends in person an hour less a day than GenX’ers and early Millennials did.

An hour a day less spent with friends is an hour a day less spent building social skills, negotiating relationships, and navigating emotions.

Some parents might see it as an hour a day saved for more productive activities, but, as we saw in the previous two chapters, the time has not been replaced with h...

Teens also go out with their friends ...

Activity after activity, iGen’ers are less social than Millennials, GenX’ers, and Boomers were at the same age. As we saw in chapter 1, iGen’ers are less likely to go out or to go on dates. They are also less likely to “drive around in a car just for fun”—the activity at the center of teen movies of previous eras such as Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti

Graffiti (see Appendix D). A night at the movies has been a standard teen social activity for generations (what would adolescence be if it didn’t involve some immature throwing of popcorn?), but, as we saw in chapter 2, iGen’ers are less likely to go to movies. iGen teens are less likely to go to bars and nightclubs—even since 1988, when the drinking age was raised to 21 nationwide, the number of high school seniors who went to bars or nightclubs has been cut in half. In 2006, the New York Times documented the new trend of nightclubs for teens (called “starter clubs”), with some for teens under 18. By 2016, however, the Times and other newspapers noted that many dance clubs were closing.

Athena has spent a lot of time by herself lately: after her summer of Netflix, texting, and social media holed up in her room, “my bed has, like, an imprint of my body,” she says.

As her summer activities illustrate, there is one activity that iGen’ers do more than their predecessors: they spend more leisure time alone (see Appendix D).

Although we can’t say for sure, it’s a good guess that this alone time is being spent online, on social media...

Instead, they are communicating electronically. For example, see Figure 3.4. Its conclusion is inescapable: the Internet has taken over. Teens are Instagramming, Snapchatting, and texting with their friends more, and seeing them in person less. For iGen’ers, online friendship has replaced offline friendship.

Some maintain that all of the uproar over screen time is misplaced; teens are just connecting with their friends online, and the rest of their lives have stayed the same. This graph strongly suggests that that is not true: with the advent of social media and smartphones, teens’ social lives shifted decisively away from in-person interaction. They spend much less time with their friends in person than teens in previous decades did—about an hour a day less.

But on average, today’s teens are spending less time with each other in person and more time online than teens did five years ago, fundamentally changing the lives of adolescents.

Darnell, the 20-year-old college student in Georgia, explicitly connects iGen’ers’ smartphone use with their disinclination to see people in person. “The last generation always wants us to be in person, and a lot of us are not like that,” he says. “We’re more of a technology-based generation. Without my phone I literally would be lost. I have my calendar, I have my email, I’ve researched different things, I’m always reading about something.” Twenty-year-old James, a student at the same college, says it’s just easier to use social media instead of meet up in person. “It’s

so

tempting to just text someone or ...

social media and like someone’s photo and comment instead of calling and being, like, ‘Hey, do you want to go and get something to...

The Screens Go Dark: Mental Health and Happiness Many people have argued that teens’ communicating with their friends electronically is no big deal—they’re connecting with their friends, so who cares how they do it? In this view, electronic communication is just as good as in-person communication. If so, it would be just as good for mental health and happiness: teens who communicate via social media and text should be just as happy, be just as likely to dodge loneliness, and be just as likely to avoid depression as teens who see their friends in person or engage in other activities that don’t involve screens.

The results could not be clearer: teens who spend more time on screen activities (the black bars in Figure 3.5) are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time on nonscreen activities (the gray bars) are more likely to be happy. There’s not a single exception: all screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.