I’ve kept in touch with one of my former colleagues who retired from the college where she taught French for thirty years. She is close to eighty now. She told me she was already starting to feel a lack of engagement in her classroom at the end of her teaching days in 2016. Even though phones had to be turned to silent and be stowed away during class, she felt that the kids were just waiting until class was over to get back to their phones and social media. Their brains had changed, their attention spans had been truncated, and they needed to be constantly entertained.
“Edutainment” was already influencing the way we teach, but the situation grew worse. Now, the addiction to screens has sucked the students into a black hole. Without their phones, they are detached, disengaged, and sullen.
It is a cliche that old people are annoying as hell because they are prone to reminisce about a golden age while lecturing the modern world for its recently acquired pathologies. They wax nostalgic for some mythical past that was full of grotesque prejudices, ignorance, and chicanery. To be a scold telling the world that you came from a better place is to be a pompous ass and a bore. I will concede all of that. But objectively speaking as someone who has taught over five decades, I can say there was a Before Times when life in the analog world wasn’t in competition with the digital world. Objectively speaking, something gets lost when we vacillate between the analog and the digital worlds. Public intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Jaron Lanier have made it clear that the digital landscape has become about commerce, addiction, loss of privacy, surveillance, fragmentation, and outrage. In other words, the Internet has had dehumanizing effects on us.
Parents who saw their children lying in bed scrolling over TikTok videos during the pandemic can tell you their children have been damaged, and that nothing makes them happier than to see their children hanging out with other kids–without their phones–and hanging out at the park, playing sports, taking walks at the beach, and finding respite from their screen existence. Parents wept with relief.
I enjoyed my youth without screens and curating my life on social media. Every summer between 1975 and 1979 when I was a high school teen, my family and ten other families and friends made the sojourn to Pt. Reyes Beach where the Johnson’s Oyster farm provided us with what seemed like bottomless truck beds of oysters. From noon to sunset, hundreds of us ate an infinite amount of barbecued oysters served with garlic butter and Tabasco sauce, thousands of loaves of garlic bread, and colossal slices of moist chocolate cake. Ignoring warnings of nearby great white shark sightings, we’d punctuate our feasting with forays into the waves before emerging from the ocean. Our muscular pecs shiny with rivulets of salt water, we returned to the picnic tables and had another serving of barbecued oysters. In the summer of 78, I opted to have my parents drive home without me. I got a ride home in the back of a truck with a bunch of random people I had met that day. Full from a day of feasting and feeling like King Neptune, we stared into the stars with our glazed lizard eyes and entertained each other with crazy stories. We had a healthy disregard for chronicling our experiences on social media, for monitoring the enormous food we consumed, and for time itself. Those were happy days indeed and pointed to an era gone and lost forever.
I would not have had that memory had I lived such a life with a smartphone. My memories would have been filtered through a prism of digital curation and a rewired brain that needs to filter my experience in such a way. We don’t grasp the depth of our brain’s rewiring because, like fish, we don’t know we are wet when all we know is the ocean around us. We have been rewired for this new oceanic environment.
The screen has rewired the brains of young people. They don’t read. Many college instructors don’t assign books, or if they do, the books are on the short side. In the place of books, instructors assign short essays. When it comes to writing assignments, some high schools and colleges don’t assign essays anymore. They have the students hand-write paragraphs in class.
Of course, as you get older, you don’t want to be a bore and lecture the world on the way things were during Before Times. At the same time, if you taught in the 1980s to the 2020s and have seen the way technology has affected the human brain, self-esteem, addiction, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills, you may have a lot to offer by contrasting the Screen Brain with the Pre-Screen Brain. You can can write academic books about this subject full of graphs and statistics, or you can give anecdotal narrative accounts, or some combination of the two, but it would be absurd to keep your mouth shut because you feared being reduced to the grumpy old person on the lawn arms akimbo screaming that the world is going to hell. Better to risk sounding like a crank than to watch silently as an entire generation scroll itself into oblivion.
Cinemorphosis 