4-17 Homework #11 due: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write a 3-paragraph essay about the alleged delayed development Millennials face from smartphones and helicopter parents. Show CNN Special Report: Being 13.
4-22 Homework #12 due: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why mass incarceration is America’s greatest scandal. I recommend you see documentary 13th on Netflix. See various essays and videos about for-profit prisons by Shane Bauer.
4-24 Homework #13 due: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.” See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. We will also address the anti-vaxxers so we can develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem"
4-29 Homework #14 due: Read “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and in 3 paragraphs explain the dangers of legalized pot. See Netflix Explained episode about history of marijuana.
5-1 Peer Edit
5-6 Essay # 4 due
Essay #4 Due Date: 5-6-18
You need a minimum of 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Option One: Read Tristan Harris’ “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” and his Ted Talk video. Then develop a thesis that evaluates the validity of his claim that technology, especially smartphones, are not empowering us but “hijacking” our freedom and autonomy and working against our best interests. You may refer to Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone?”
Option Two: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write an essay that argues for or against Twenge’s claim that smartphones combined with helicopter parenting are resulting in delayed development of Millennials and Generation Z (born after mid 90s). You may refer to CNN Special Report: Being Thirteen.
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the spiritual evisceration and mental dissolution in Andrew Sullivan’s essay “I Used to be a Human Being” with Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” You may consult Sherry Turkle’s YouTube Ted Talk “Connected But Alone.”
Option Four: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” Refer to the Netflix documentary 13th.
Option Five: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write an argumentative essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.”
Option Six: Develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem."
Option Seven: See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and read Annie Lowry’s essay “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. See Netflix documentary and Netflix Explained.
Option Eight:
Watch Hasan Minhaj video (on both Netflix under Patriot Act and YouTube) and support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the presidential administration is undermining civil rights to the detriment of American democracy and freedom. Be sure to have a counterargument section. For example, defenders of the administration would argue that their policies strengthen America against terrorism.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,200-word essay
9 Paragraphs, 135 words per paragraph, approx. 1,200 words (1,215 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-6: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 7 & 8: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” by Jean Twenge
Summary
One. The phone is the new “chaperone” or evil babysitter for teens. Teens have retreated into the igloo of their smartphones where they hibernate from life and suffer delayed development.
Not just teens, but parents turn to their smartphones as their default setting for the way to spend their day and night. The smartphone is an opium box plugged into the brain 24/7.
Two. The radical shift of smartphone overuse started in 2012 when smartphones became a “necessity.” We call this the iGen generation. Recent studies show that up to 84% of teens have a smartphone.
Not having a smartphone is a form of ostracism, feeling like one is a misfit who is “off the grid.” To feel invisible is one of modern culture’s greatest horrors.
Three. Rates of teen depression and suicide have “skyrocketed” since 2011 and we have the “worst mental-health crisis is decades.”
For many reasons, but mostly it’s the opium machine teens carry with them all the time. Three or more hours a day results in 35% more risk for suicide. Antidepressants are up 300%.
Boys’ depression up 21%; girls’ up 50%.
Medical News Today reports on the link between smartphones and depression.
Four. iGen doesn’t go out, date, or drink. These numbers are down from 85% to 56%.
Five. Working part-time is down from 77% to 55%. One might infer that smartphone use sucks energy and motivation required to work. The smartphone may be a precursor to an era of mass unemployment.
Six. iGen does less homework. We see Boston Globe report about teens on smartphones losing motivation to accomplish anything, including homework.
Seven. In sum, iGen isn’t developing. At 18, they’re more like 15. Why?
Eight. iGen sleeps with their phones and they suffer from sleep deprivation.
Jean Twenge elaborates on these findings on PBS.
“Your Phone Is Trying to Control Your Life”
“Why We Should Rethink Our Relationship with the Smartphone”
Counterarguments
One. We do not exist in a monolithic economic class. Why doesn't Twenge address poverty and depression? Is her causal analysis an over simplification? I'd say yes it its.
Two. Why one generation? Everyone is depressed and anxious from smartphones and related social media platforms, according to all studies. Why pick on one group of people?
Three. Screen time is correlated with poverty: The more poor we are, the more we're on our screens, the more we're debased and depressed by a compromised existence, as Nellie Bowles writes about digital use in her essay.
Four. Young people are overworked and face a declining American dream. They also suffer from burnout. Why aren't these factors addressed in teen depression? Anne Helen Petersen, writing for Buzzfeed, writes about this burnout.
Five. The problem isn't that Twenge doesn't address reality. The problem is that Twenge just addresses a sliver of reality and she lacks a comprehensive grasp of the problem of teen depression and arrested development.
Six. I have a lot of young students who are not addicted to their smartphones, but they suffer huge financial pressure, they suffer from food and home insecurity, they suffer from huge sleep deficits, and they suffer from lack of private space to do their homework. In totality, these challenges contribute to depression and anxiety in ways that are not discussed in Twenge's essay.
Summary of Critique:
Twenge’s statistics need to address economic class:
“Take a more granular look at the full range of usage, and it looks like the biggest risk of unhappiness is among those poor twelfth graders who don’t use social media at all. Quick! Someone get those kids a smartphone!”
We should consider that as parents work more to struggle to pay for higher cost of living with stagnant wages, they are tuning out their children more.
Now that parents have smartphones, they are tempted to disappear on their phones and withdraw from their children.
We read:
Zussman summarizes his findings with words that could just as easily apply to today’s smartphone-wielding parents:
Parents are, indeed, influenced by competing activity. They resort to a level of behavior that might be called “minimal parenting.” At this level of parenting, positive behaviors are regarded as expendable and are curtailed when parental load limits are reached. Although parents remain available to the children, they are slower to respond and interact with them for shorter periods, and their attention shifts rapidly among the two children and the task. They must continue to exert some control over the children, however, and negative behaviors may be increased in minimal parenting because they are seen as methods of obtaining rapid compliance.
Continuing in Psychology Today:
1) the data the author chooses to present are cherry-picked, by which I mean she reviews only those studies that support her idea and ignores studies that suggest that screen use is NOT associated with outcomes like depression and loneliness or that suggest that active social media use is actually associated with positive outcomes like resilience.
2) the studies she reviews are all correlational, meaning that the researchers merely observed associations between certain variables (e.g., smartphone use and depression). These studies leave open the possibilities that such associations are due to smartphones causing depression, depression symptoms causing greater use of smartphones, or a third variable, such as number extracurricular activities, causing both to rise and fall together. To actually know whether smartphone use causes depression, we'd have to assign large groups of adolescents perfectly matched on all number of variables to a long period where one group uses smartphones extensively and the other does not, and then watch to see whether depression levels rises more in one group versus the other. But even then we'd have to be careful to have the non-smartphone users have something else to do with their time that was carefully matched to smartphone use on time and engagement and social connectedness. Twenge is careful to note at several points this weakness of the research, explicitly calling out the correlational nature of the data. However, other places she says things like, "Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent."
3) the studies she reviews largely ignore social contexts and how people differ, instead reporting only average effects and correlations. Emerging evidence indicates that like every other question psychologists can think to ask about human behavior, screen use and its association with psychological well-being varies based on a multitude of contextual and personal variables - for instance, how you use media, when you use it, and what else is going on in your life. For instance, this article by Andrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein uses a careful design that takes into account these sorts of factors and concludes that "moderate use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and may be advantageous in a connected world."
Nowhere is Twenge's bias more obvious to me than in some research that she actually does review but then casts aside as seemingly irrelevant to her thesis - namely, the vast counter-evidence to the "destroyed generation" thesis contained in her headline. In the introduction to the piece she notes that this generation has sharply lower rates of alcohol use, teen pregnancies, unprotected sex, smoking, and car accidents than previous generations. This is what a destroyed generation looks like?
Moreover, there is good reason to think that smartphones and social media may have positive effects as well as negative effects. Routinely feeling connected to your social peers could have beneficial effects. Clive Thompson has written an entire book reviewing the evidence that technology may be amplifying our intelligence, our productivity, and our "ambient awareness" of each other's worlds. Kristelle Lavallee, Content Strategist at the Center on Media and Child Health out of Boston Children's Hospital, told me in an interview about many of the beneficial effects of social media on adolescent development. For instance, teens can find other teens interested in the same social movements, connect with teens across the globe on interests like music and fashion, and feel embedded in a social network filled with meaning.
Analysis or Rebuttal of Counterargument
The Psychology Today author says if we let kids use phones in moderation, they’ll be okay, but my counterargument is this: smartphones are created to NOT BE MODERATE. ADDICTION IS THEIR SOLE PURPOSE.
Refer to Irresistible lesson on addiction.
CNN video about Secret World of Teens
5 Critics
Sarah Rose Cavanagh observes that Twenge "cherry picks" her evidence.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown argues that Twenge is engaging in "fear mongering."
Malcolm Harris critiques Jean Twenge's "sloppy research." Here is Harris' excerpt:
Twenge is not very interested in possible financial reasons for general change. In her scholarly work, she has suggested that market cycles fluctuate rather than follow a consistent trend, and that makes economics a poor explanatory variable. In iGen, she writes off the importance of the 2007–09 recession because “[u]nemployment, one of the best indicators of how the economy is affecting real people, peaked in 2010 and then declined.” Aside from the unemployment rate being a notoriously unreliable indicator of how the economy is affecting real people, that is a profoundly incurious sentence. There have been major changes to the nature of work and employment over the past few decades, and for Twenge to more or less ignore all of it because unemployment is back under 5 percent seems like more than an error. It hints at something deeper about why the book exists.
The 313-page book is broken into (by my count) 99 bite-size sections, and features 123 half-page charts, the “vast majority” (author’s words) of which come from four national surveys on youth attitudes and behaviors. That structure makes for a breezy read, but there’s only so much substance anyone can fit in so few pages. Evidence and ideas are presented without interrogation or critique. Twenge conducted 23 interviews (of up to two hours) with young people, and their quotes — along with some internet-sourced anecdotes — provide minor qualitative support. Mixed together and squirted into three-page section molds, it all feels pat and formulaic, more like a detailed corporate research dossier than an earnest work of inquiry.
Sometimes, though, the research is just sloppy. “The Internet — and society in general — promotes a relentless positivity these days,” Twenge writes in one section. “Social media posts highlight the happy moments but rarely the sad ones.” Only five pages later, Twenge introduces the reader to a teen named Laura and her Tumblr page, “a depressed person life [sic].” “Her pain is starkly evident in her posts,” Twenge writes, “which include ‘That’s how depression hits. You wake up one morning afraid that you’re going to live.’” Twenge likes the post so much, she uses it as a section title, and it is a good line — which is probably why Laura reblogged it from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s iconic Gen-X memoir Prozac Nation.
If the deleterious impact of smartphones is the premise of iGen, then Twenge has two main conclusions: “Overall, iGen is good news for managers” and “iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified.” Instead of investigating the possible links between these two findings, Twenge offers the managers suggestions for luring iGeners, like referring to the office’s “safe environment.” But at the end of the day, corporations have no interest in making their workers feel safer when fear makes them “less likely to expect more pay for less work.” (Twenge could have phrased it in the opposite direction, as “more likely to expect less pay for more work,” which would have clarified the stakes for employers.) This connection between an increase in the rate of exploitation and an increase in fear within the cohort would be by far the strongest argument in iGen, if Twenge had bothered to make it. Why didn’t she?
The term “millennial” was invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who’d been stars of the generational-consultant industry since their 1991 book Generations. Coining “millennials” made Strauss and Howe name brands — even though critics found their book Millennials Rising decidedly lightweight — and in a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Eric Hoover put Howe’s speaking rate between $5,000 and $14,000 a pop plus expenses, with too many offers to take them all. The two authors also formed a consultancy called LifeCourse Associates, which lists clients “from Disney to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Compared to all that, book money is chump change.
Twenge is featured in the 2009 Chronicle article, too, as a second-tier speaker ($1,000 to $5,000), but with a more skeptical and data-based view than the optimistic Strauss and Howe. With iGen — her own coinage — Twenge looks to be the next marquee name as the millennial boys fade from prominence. That helps explain why there’s more in the book about how textbook manufacturers can engage students (“interactive activities” and “lower their reading level”) than why most iGeners oppose the capitalist system that has gone largely uncontested by Americans for 50 years. It helps explain why she poses questions like “How can managers get the most out of the newest generation in the workforce?” or says things like “Car manufacturers should take heart” and “this is good news for advertisers and marketers.”
When David Brooks (of all people) reviewed Millennials Rising, he wrote that, “This is not a good book, if by good you mean the kind of book in which the authors have rigorously sifted the evidence and carefully supported their assertions with data. But it is a very good bad book. It’s stuffed with interesting nuggets.” Twenge seems to have followed that description like a map; iGen is a nugget cluster with the rigor of a sales brochure. I have little doubt it will take her all the way to the bank.
Alexandra Samuel writes that Jean Twenge "is on to something" but misses the correct emphasis: parents.
Lisa Guernsey argues that Twenge is overstating her case about a "ruined generation" and that a more nuanced analysis of teen depression is in order.
Sample Thesis
While Twenge makes some convincing points about smartphones hurting young people, her diagnosis fails to persuade when we consider that her analysis of teen depression and teen arrested development is so specific that it leaves us with an over simplification, it gives us faulty causation, and it obfuscates more compelling causes of teen depression such as financial and family deficits, and even parents who are smartphone addicts.
For your counterargument, you might address her claim that low unemployment proves that poverty is not the cause of teen poverty.
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