1C Week 10 Spring 2020
Updated Eight Choices for Essay 3: Due May 5
I put the bonus options and original options on one page for your ease of use. Here they are:
Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Option 1
Read New Yorker writer Joshua Yaffa’s essay “The Kremlin’s Creative Director: How the television producer Konstantin Ernst went from discerning auteur to Putin’s unofficial minister of propaganda
” and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the role of media in producing a new type of “postmodern propaganda” that shatters critical thinking.
Option 2
Read the online essay "It's been hot before
" and write an argumentative essay about the role of logical fallacies in the dangerous denial of global warming and global drought. For another source, you can use Netflix Explained, "The World's Water Crisis."
Option 3
In the context of Jasmin Barmore’s essay “The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online
,” develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the alleged benefits of mukbang
, the glorification of binge-eating on a webcam. In your essay, address the lonely factor by reading Read Judith Shulevitz’s essay “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore
,” and use the essay to support or refute the contention that mukbang addresses the depression and anxiety of loneliness.
Option 4
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind
” and “Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?
” and develop an argument about the authors’ claim that a “coddling culture” is creating a generation of dysfunctional people.
Option 5
World War Z and Covid-19 Comparison Essay
Read “You Can’t Scare a Virus
” in Vox, “Zombies in the Age of Covid-19
” in The National Review, and listen to Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview
with Max Brooks. Use this material to help you write an argumentative thesis about the relationship between Covid-19 and the allegorical 2013 horror film World War Z.
Because you are writing an extended comparison between zombies and people infected with the pandemic Covid-19, you are writing what is called an analogy.
Comparison Points of Zombies and Covid-19
Both create panic.
Both bring out the survival “doomsday prep” impulse resulting in hoarding supplies, guns, food, TP, etc.
Both create paranoia, resulting in fear of strangers, racism (see all of the hostility against Asians and Asian-Americans).
Both create a retreat from crowded spaces and encourage what is called the quarantine.
Both came by surprise. We got “sucker punched” and didn’t have the appropriate preparation.
Both caused disruption of society, the economy, national security, the supply chain, etc.
Option 6
See the 1998 movie A Simple Plan, and refute or support the argument that the movie makes a persuasive presentation of 5 points: the love of money is the root of all evil, acquiring a huge sum of money makes resisting this evil impossible, happiness may be found through working for one’s money but not stealing it, greed will devour even the best-laid plans and consume the souls of those who submit to it, and finally critical thinking skills of the individual get crushed when people join forces and become like a pack of crazed, ravenous wolves in their desire to gain control of their fortunes.
Option 7
Should Fox News be Sued for Covid-19 Misinformation?
Support or refute the contention that Fox News has endangered lives with their Covid-19 misinformation, and therefore they should be sued into bankruptcy.
Consult Caleb Ecerma’s “Fox News Is Preparing to be Sued Over Coronavirus Misinformation
,” Erin Carroll’s “Lawsuit Against Fox News Over Coronavirus Coverage,” and other relevant sources. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section.
Option 8
Support, refute, or complicate Will Oremus’ contention in his essay “What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage” that toilet paper hoarding does not reflect a breakdown of critical thinking, a spike in irrational primitive behavior (herd mentality) or some kind of shameful immorality. Rather, stocking up on toilet paper during the Covid-19 pandemic is entirely rational and justified. You can consult “What Misinformation Has to Do with Toilet Paper,” “How Panic-Buying Revealed the Problem with the Modern World,” and other relevant sources.
Choice C: Epidemic of Loneliness and Mukbang
Critical Thinking Objective: Explore the causes and effects of loneliness in a digital society and how this loneliness develops symbiotic relationships with those who are clever enough to exploit the digital landscape.
The Assignment: Read Jasmin Barmore’s essay “The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online” and Judith Shulevitz’s essay “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore,” and see The New Yorker’s “History of Loneliness” use the essays to support or refute the contention that mukbang addresses the depression and anxiety of loneliness. This essay requires a counterargument-rebuttal.
Sample Thesis:
In spite her mixed motives of profit, self-aggrandizement, and a delusional Messianic complex, Bethany Gaskin serves a deep need in our digital society: a pit of loneliness, fear, and fragmentation that needs to be healed through sacred ritual, authenticity, familial connection, and relief from food shaming.
Sample Thesis That Disagrees with the Above:
While I concede that Bethany Gaskin “serves a deep need in our digital society,” her ritualistic bingeing does more harm than good in that it glorifies unhealthy eating, it conceals the dark side of Gaskin’s undisclosed health problems, it reinforces people’s isolation, and it creates a diseased symbiotic relationship between viewers and the exhibitionist in which the viewers are being exploited.
Sample Outline:
Paragraph 1, Define Mukbang and its rise in popularity in the context of loneliness and the wealth amassed by Bethany Gaskin.
Paragraph 2, your thesis, agree or disagree with the claim that Bethany Gaskin is performing a noble service to lonely people.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supports for your thesis.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal. (does it encourage binge-eating? obesity? Or is it a cure for anorexia? Or both?)
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sources:
Harvard essay on Mukbang and "extreme eating"
Guardian essay on Mukbang and loneliness
Time essay on why eating alone may be bad for you
Overview from Above:
Mukbang means "eating show."
The epidemic of eating alone, especially among single people, is so unbearable that the lonely gravitate toward mukbang.
Eating alone is associated, especially among men, with depression, heart disease, and diabetes.
People with eating disorders are also drawn to mukbang.
Some observe that the danger of mukbang is that it is promoting binge-eating as a normal, healthy lifestyle when it is neither.
Sentence Fragments for the Perplexed
The two most frequent grammar errors in college essays are sentence fragments and comma splices. Professors at Cal State and UC throw away or flunk essays with 3 or more such errors.
Sentence fragments are incomplete sentences presented as if they were complete sentences.
Moreover, they are incomplete thoughts presented as dependent clauses or phrases.
A dependent clause or a phrase is never a complete sentence unless the writer deliberately uses the fragment for emphasis. We call this a stylistic fragment. Professors never assume that students are writing stylistic fragments.
Example of Stylistic Fragment:
My coffee maker broke this morning, then the toilet got clogged, then the shower nozzle broke, then I received a letter saying I was six months overdue in my cable bill, and then my girlfriend emailed me to say she wanted “to take a breather.” Such is my crappy life.
Technically, the passage should read like this:
My coffee maker broke this morning, then the toilet got clogged, then the shower nozzle broke, then I received a letter saying I was six months overdue in my cable bill, and then my girlfriend emailed me to say she wanted “to take a breather,” such is my crappy life.
Fragments don’t one or more of three things:
One. Subject
Two. Verb
Three. Complete thought.
Here is a short complete sentence that has all three:
Fish swim.
Here is a long dependent clause that is a fragment:
Whenever I watch the movie Spiderman and eat popcorn with my girlfriend during warm summer evenings
Whenever I watch the movie Spiderman and eat popcorn with my girlfriend during warm summer evenings, we argue about whether or not we should add parmesan cheese to the popcorn.
Types of Fragments
Dependent clauses:
Whenever I drive up windy mountains,
Because I have craved pizza for 14 months,
Unless you add coffee to your chocolate cake recipe,
which is currently enjoying a resurgence.
Phrases
Enamored by the music of Tupac Shakur,
Craving pesto linguine with olive-oil based clam sauce,
Flexing his muscles with a braggadocio never seen in modern times,
Lying under the bridge and eating garlic pepper pretzels with a dollop of cream cheese and a jug of chilled apple cider,
To understand the notion of Universal Basic Income and all of its related factors for social change in this disruptive age,
Running into crowded restaurants with garlic and whiskey fuming out of his sweaty pores while brandishing a golden scepter,
The Most Common Type of Fragments from My Students:
Tag-Alongs at End of Sentences
Examples
I won't entertain your requests for more money and gifts. Until you show at least a modicum of responsibility at school and with your friends.
I won't consider buying the new BMW sports coupe. Unless of course my uncle gives me that inheritance he keeps talking about whenever he gets a bit tipsy.
I can't imagine ever going to Chuck E. Cheese. Which makes me feel like I'm emotionally arrested.
I am considering the purchase of a new wardrobe. That is, if I'm picked for that job interview at Nordstrom.
Human morals have vanished. To the point at which it was decided that market values would triumph.
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for a fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her, Jerry contemplated dropping his math class.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance, he bought her an engagement ring.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market, is in the shop.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto, Jerry decided to run ten laps around the track.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming is to go down a rabbithole of anxiety and despair.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar dumped me.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I observed my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
At the dance club where I observed my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel, I realized I needed to make some changes in my life.
Identify the Fragments Below
I drank the chalky Soylent meal-replacement drink. Expecting to feel full and satisfied. Only to find that I was still ravenously hungry afterwards. Trying to sate my hunger pangs. I went to HomeTown Buffet. Where I ate several platters of braised oxtail and barbecued short ribs smothered in a honey vinegar sauce. Which reminded me of a sauce where I used to buy groceries from. When I was a kid.
Feeling bloated after my HomeTown Buffet indulgence. I exited the restaurant. After which I hailed an Uber and asked the driver for a night club recommendation. So I could dance off all my calories. The driver recommended a place, Anxiety Wires. I had never heard of it. Though, it was crowded inside. I felt eager to dance and confident about “my swag.” Although, I was still feeling bloated. Wondering if my intestines were on the verge of exploding.
Sweating under the night club’s outdoor canopy. I smelled the cloying gasses of a nearby vape. A serpentine woman was holding the vape. A gold contraption emitting rose-water vapors into my direction. Contemplating my gluttony. I was suddenly feeling low confidence. Though I pushed myself to introduce myself to the vape-smoking stranger with the serpentine features. Her eyes locked on mine.
I decided to play it cool. Instead of overwhelming her with a loud, brash manner. Which she might interpret as neediness on my part.
Keeping a portable fan in my cargo pocket for emergencies. When I feel like I’m overheating. I took the fan out of my pocket, turned it on, and directed it toward the serpentine stranger. Making it so the vapors were blowing back in her face.
“Doesn’t smell so good, does it?” I said. With a sarcastic grin.
She cackled, then said, “Thank you for blowing the vapors in my face. Now I can both enjoy inhaling them and breathing them in. For double the pleasure. You are quite a find. Come home with me and I’ll introduce you to my mother Gertrude and her pitbull Jackson. I’m sure they’ll welcome you into our home. Considering what a well-fed handsome man you are.”
Week 10 Part 2
Comma Splices
A comma splice is joining two sentences with a comma when you should separate them with a period or a semicolon.
Incorrect
People love Facebook, however, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
People love Facebook. However, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
Though people love Facebook, they fail to realize Facebook is sucking all their energy.
Incorrect
Patience is difficult to cultivate, it grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Patience is difficult to cultivate. It grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Because patience grows within us so slowly, patience is extremely difficult to cultivate.
You can use a comma between two complete sentences when you join them with a FANBOYS word or coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Correct
People love Facebook, but they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
To Avoid Comma Splices, Know the Difference Between Coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS) and Conjunctive Adverbs
Examples
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week. Nonetheless, he remained skinny.
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week, but he remained skinny.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW. Instead, she bought the Acura.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW, yet she did buy the Acura.
Steve wasn't interested in college. Moreover, he didn't want to work full-time.
Steve wasn't interested in college, and he didn't want to work full-time.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me. However, I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do, however, want you to help me do my taxes.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid. Consequently, I think we should break up.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid, so I think we should break up.
Students hate reading. Therefore, they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Students hate reading, so they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Review Comma Splice and Sentence Fragments
Identify the comma splices and fragments below:
I buy my pants on eBay. They are “gently used” from nonsmoking homes. I find this way of shopping superior to brick and mortar stores. Where the fitting room floors are filthy with dirt and rubbish. The fluorescent lighting in the mirrored room is so hideous my reflection looks more like an anemic nightmare. Nearby, babies scream. I feel like I’m not so much in a clothing store but more in an overcrowded county health clinic. In the fitting room, I feel cold and vulnerable, there may be hidden cameras. I become paranoid that I’m being filmed or that a nurse will enter the room and give me a vaccine shot in the rear.
This aversion to going to stores like Target, Costco, and other big chains is part of a larger personality problem. A revulsion toward crowds, as a result, I don’t like busy restaurants, amusement parks, loud birthday parties, and the like. Some people ascribe agoraphobia, a fear of crowds, as the culprit. But I take issue with this. I don’t have a fear of crowds, I have enough confidence in my physical presence. I am a former Olympic Weightlifting and bodybuilding champion during my teen years. Even as I navigated through my thirties, forties and fifties, I stayed in shape by avoiding sugar and flour and exercising regularly in my garage with kettlebells. At 58, I stand at six feet and weigh exactly 200 pounds, my high school “fighting weight.” I feel I can handle myself in a crowd, I fear no one. The problem isn’t fear, rather, I experience unpleasantness among large groups of people. The environment is too loud, too cacophonous, and too chaotic for me to process all the noise. I am anxious, unsettled, and unable to concentrate on anything so that I withdraw into my turtle shell and brood.
My disposition is highlighted because I am the father of twin nine-year-old girls, and they sometimes attend birthday parties, their school’s annual “Daddy-Daughter Dance,” carnivals, and other functions that I cannot tolerate. When there is a school dance or carnival my daughters want me to attend, I persuade them to go with their mother or to not go at all. As a consolation, I offer to take them to Yogurtland, afterwards, I will buy them whatever they want on Amazon. These bribes may sound ethically dubious, but they help preserve my sanity. Which is seriously threatened by large groups of people.
About ten years ago, I tried having social media accounts as a way of connecting with people, but I ended up deleting those accounts due to an anxiety and depression that was just as acute as being in a crowded amusement park. In some ways, social media was worse. I had a special problem with married couples curating their mutual affection, showing themselves kissing each other at the beach, at a restaurant, at some party or other. Their cloying praise of each other was so clearly a facade failing to conceal their misery underneath that I started getting turned off by love itself. I’d look at these curated lives on Facebook and want to shake a giant jar of Prozac over a bowl of mint chip ice cream.
Choice D
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?” and develop an argument about the authors’ claim that a “coddling culture” is creating a generation of dysfunctional people.
Simplified Version of Choice D
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.
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 oversimplification, 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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