Personally, I believe that technology is not good for younger generations. It really is not the best for any generation. While I realize that that can be a very bold and controversial statement, I believe it wholeheartedly, at least when speaking about cell phones. The social media on these cell phones is a huge problem. Similar to drugs, it is addictive and harmful to your health. Jean M. Twenge, author of “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation”, claims in her paper, “Psychologically, however, they [teenagers of today] are more vulnerable than Millenials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011″(4). This is important because over the years many many teenagers have tried to tell people that even though they look happy and look like they are doing quite alright on the outside, on the inside, they are dealing with self-doubt and thoughts that they are not as good as the next person they saw online with a supposed perfect life. This can in turn affect how attentive we are to certain tasks, which is where Sam Anderson quotes Merlin Mann, a “lifehacking expert” in his piece “In Defense of Distraction”, on the source of our attention problems: “many of our attention problems are symptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry. “I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist, but I’ll tell you, I think a loft of it is some form of untreated ADHD or depression”(10). Basically what Mann is saying here is that the reasons for us not being able to focus include being depressed or on edge, similar to what Twenge is saying when she writes that teenagers are showing more signs of depression and that the suicide rates are going up. Therefore, both authors support me in the sense that the technology of people’s phones are causing more harm to our health than is beneficially gained from it.
Jessy Shore
Be the change you want to see in the world
