Because adolescence is a vulnerable period of brain development,
social media exposure during this period warrants additional scrutiny.
—the U.S. Surgeon General
We’re rearing a nation of passive, sedentary, and constantly distracted people.
—Shane Trotter
Anyone who knows me or has read my work knows my thoughts on digital technology—and especially social media! Unlike my students, I do not watch three TikTok videos simultaneously during every free moment I have, and unlike many in the generations in between, I do not have an Instagram or Snapchat account or a Facebook page that notifies me with constant insistent alerts. In fact, I only possess a smartphone reluctantly because during the renovation of my kitchen, I discovered every business model in America assumed everyone was carrying their own personal computer around with them at all times, and it was no longer possible to function in our society without a ridiculous degree of aggravation and inconvenience without such a phone. But I have no apps on it that didn’t come preloaded, and I still use actual physical maps and atlases in my travels.
I will confess to using LinkedIn occasionally to track down someone from my past with whom I wish to get in touch (as I did just the other day with a former student to see if she will be attending her hall of fame induction this fall), and I have created and managed numerous websites over the years (including this one) as a means of disseminating various types of information. However, I delete every attempt by WordPress to get me to “re-tweet” or “share” even this website, leaving it to others to decide for themselves if they want to engage with its content. I will and do employ technology, but like maintaining a healthy food diet, I do so thoughtfully, with deliberation, and only actually as needed.
What’s more, I did not arrive at my relationship with technology willy-nilly. Like fellow educator, Shane Trotter, I remember well the initial rollout of my school’s one-to-one laptop initiative back in the early 2000s and how it:
was driven by a vague, yet unassailable belief that technology was “the future” and, thus, that any measure that brought more technology into classroom instruction was inherently good. According to the prevailing wisdom, new technologies were sure to unleash a cascade of new teaching superpowers. And teachers needed to utilize these superpowers as soon as possible because “students were different now.” They would no longer learn well from the old teaching methods like lecturing, reading, and writing. The only way to reach the 21st-century student was to integrate a steady stream of new tools into every lesson.
And, like Trotter, I remember well the message from the administration (one of whom, in full disclosure, is a follower of this project) that we were to find ways to employ these new tools proactively in our teaching, to rethink our lessons with student access to their laptops front and center in our planning. We received significant professional development to aid us in this process, and most of my colleagues gamely did their best (or as Trotter puts it, “that year, teachers tried everything”).
However, I was not among them. Having been coding since high school and with two websites already designed, created, and managed by then, I was well versed in the technology now available to both my students and myself on a daily basis. Including what it meant to have full wi-fi internet access! Therefore, I took a more skeptical and cautionary approach—doing so precisely because I understood that while the worst I’d had to confront prior to the laptops were students who “would have had nothing better to distract them than doodling on notebook paper or passing notes between each other” (something I already knew how to combat with highly engrossing learning), I would now be competing for their attention “with all the world’s entertainment and the attention-hacking efforts of Silicon Valley’s most brilliant minds” (Trotter).
That is, I would be competing for said attention unless I firmly delimited the usage of their devices in the teaching process. Hence, while excited to have the nearly infinite “library” of the internet available when researching about a topic, I knew that “screens down” needed to be the norm rather than the exception when working in the classroom.
Sadly—even frighteningly—the intervening decades have demonstrated the value of my caution as the digital realm has enmeshed itself deeper and deeper into all our schools at a greater and greater cost to both individuals and society. Again, I like Trotter’s words:
In its desire to embrace technology, our school district failed to recognize the social devolution that was taking hold of society. The iPad Initiative came right as smartphones became virtually ubiquitous among American teens and adults…and at this crucial juncture, we decided to begin allowing students to use smartphones throughout the school day. These students would not know how to set boundaries for how they used their phones. They’d have no understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities that tech companies exploited—no training in how to use their phone without it using them. Most of all, they’d have no environment where they could be free from the incessant psychic drain that had come to define their world. Oblivious to any responsibility to help students or their families adapt better, our schools helped facilitate the community’s descent into becoming screen-addicted, constantly distracted people whose cognitive skills and attention spans were being chipped away rather than cultivated.[1]
What’s more, in the latest news from our tech-dysfunction, people are apparently losing the ability to remain engaged in anything challenging or discomforting, even when doing so is critical to their well-being. Researchers Tracy Maylett and Tim Vandehey have demonstrated that “we’re [now] accustomed to programs that do what we call ‘reality switching’ in a very short time instantaneously and unconsciously, [and so] rather than stick things out, it’s much easier to impulsively say, ‘I don’t like this in the moment, and I’m done.’ ” We then simply swipe on our devices to the next potential distraction, and that, they argue, is causing our brains to become “masters of swiping” rather than masters of achievement.
And that’s because achieving goals of any kind requires practice and patience, as well as what David Rock and Emma Sarro describe as “creating space for the quiet to reach the surface.” And since significant numbers of us are no longer developing the skills of practice, patience, and quiet as we bounce from one interuption to the next, we find ourselves in a society swiping its way through our days in almost nihilistic narcissism.
Yet as Trotter writes so eloquently:
I fear we’ve been engulfed in this world for so long now that the obvious solutions will sound extreme. You cannot allow an infinite device like the smartphone in the classroom and expect students to cultivate academic capacities that require an attention span. You cannot allow smartphone use throughout the hallways and cafeterias and expect students to develop social skills. And you cannot expect students, parents, or even teachers to navigate the incessant temptations of modern technology—to be anything but distracted pawns—without clearly defined limits and an educational campaign to teach them the boundaries required for healthy use. Every school district in America has some Band-Aid initiative to shrink learning gaps and respond to the surge in mental health disorders, yet few, if any, will address this most obvious saboteur.
And when an institution as conservative as the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office is issuing a warning about the impact of the digital age on the health of our children, then you know the jury is in on what needs to be done to reign in our technological lives. The question is: will we have the will to carry out the necessary sentencing?
[1]And have done so at a cost to learning I have explored elsewhere and extensively documented in many of my previous postings.
References
Maylett, T. & Vandehey, T. (2023) Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don’t Finish What We Start. Herdon, VA: Amplify Publishing Group.
Rock, D. & Sarro, E. (April 16, 2023) Forget Information. Focus on This Instead. The Baltimore Sun. https://baltimoresun.newspapers.com/search/?query=%22forget%20information%22.
Trotter, S. (April 22, 2022) Hidden in Plain Sight: Putting Tech Before Teaching. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2022/04/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-why-we-should-stop-putting-tech-before-teaching/.
U.S. Surgeon General Advisory (2023) Social Media and Youth Mental Health. The Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf.
Light a Candle 