English 1A Essay 3: What Kind of Human Being Should We Aspire to Be?
Addressing Stephen Marche’s “The College Essay Is Dead,” Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?” Andrew Sullivan’s essay “I Used to be a Human Being,” Jaron Lanier’s book 10 Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Sherry Turkle’s YouTube Ted Talk “Connected But Alone,” and the Netflix documentary Stutz, develop an argumentative essay that answers the question: What kind of human being should we aspire to be?
Suggested Outline
In paragraph 1, explain the chasm between technologists and humanists in Stephen Marche’s essay “The College Essay Is Dead.”
In paragraph 2, combining the works cited for this essay assignment, write a description of The Dysfunctional Online Human Being and be sure to give 4 defining characteristics. These 4 traits will be expounded upon the next 4 paragraphs.
Paragraphs 3-6 will be an elaboration of The Dysfunctional Online Human Being.
Paragraph 7 will be explain the Functional Human Being in the context of the Netflix documentary Stutz and his use of The Tools. You will give 3 characteristics of the Functional Human Being.
Paragraphs 8-10 will elaborate on the Functional Human Being.
Your last page will be your Works Cited in MLA format.
ChatGPT Response:
In today's society, we are constantly surrounded by technological advancements that have drastically changed the way we interact with each other and with the world. Stephen Marche's essay "The College Essay Is Dead," Jean Twenge's "Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?" Andrew Sullivan's essay "I Used to be a Human Being," the Netflix Black Mirror episode "Nosedive," and Sherry Turkle's YouTube Ted Talk "Connected But Alone" all explore the impact of technology on our lives and our humanity. Despite the various viewpoints presented in these works, they collectively suggest that the kind of human being we should aspire to be is one who can balance technology with genuine human connection and self-awareness.
Marche argues that the traditional college essay has become outdated and irrelevant in a world where social media and technology dominate communication. While he acknowledges the value of technology in expanding our access to information and communication, he warns against its potential to isolate us from genuine human connection. Twenge echoes this sentiment in her essay, arguing that smartphones have contributed to a rise in mental health issues and a decline in social skills among young people. She emphasizes the importance of face-to-face interaction and human connection for healthy development and well-being.
Sullivan takes a more personal approach, sharing his own struggles with technology addiction and its impact on his sense of self. He argues that we need to reclaim our humanity by disconnecting from technology and reconnecting with our inner selves and with nature. Similarly, the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror depicts a dystopian society where people are consumed with social status and obsessed with maintaining a perfect image online. The episode serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of prioritizing social media over genuine human connection.
Turkle's Ted Talk further explores the theme of human connection in the digital age, arguing that we have become so reliant on technology for communication that we have forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts and emotions. She emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and introspection for personal growth and fulfillment.
Collectively, these works suggest that the kind of human being we should aspire to be is one who can navigate the digital world while maintaining a strong sense of self and genuine human connection. This requires a balance between technology and human interaction, as well as an awareness of our own emotions and thoughts. To be a truly fulfilled and connected human being, we must be willing to disconnect from technology and cultivate genuine relationships with others, as well as with our own inner selves. In essence, we should strive to be individuals who are both connected and self-aware, able to find balance between the digital and physical worlds and to maintain genuine human connections in a rapidly changing technological landscape.
Based on the Netflix documentary Stutz, write an essay that explains a philosophy of life that will make us the kind of human being we want to be based on Phil Stutz’s philosophy and therapeutic approach.
ChatGPT Response:
The Netflix documentary "Stutz" offers an insightful look into the life and work of psychotherapist Phil Stutz, who has developed a unique therapeutic approach that emphasizes the importance of taking action and embracing discomfort in order to achieve personal growth and fulfillment. Stutz's philosophy of life offers a valuable perspective on how we can become the kind of human beings we aspire to be, by focusing on self-awareness, personal responsibility, and a willingness to confront our fears and limitations.
One of the core principles of Stutz's philosophy is the importance of self-awareness. Stutz believes that we must take an honest and objective look at ourselves in order to identify our limitations and areas for growth. This requires a willingness to confront our fears and vulnerabilities, and to embrace discomfort as a necessary part of the personal growth process. By gaining a deeper understanding of our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, we can begin to make conscious choices that align with our values and goals.
Another key aspect of Stutz's philosophy is personal responsibility. He argues that we must take ownership of our lives and our choices, recognizing that we have the power to create our own reality. This involves letting go of blame and victimhood, and instead focusing on what we can control and influence. By taking responsibility for our thoughts, emotions, and actions, we can become more empowered and proactive in shaping our lives and achieving our goals.
Finally, Stutz emphasizes the importance of embracing discomfort and taking action. He believes that in order to achieve personal growth and fulfillment, we must be willing to step outside of our comfort zones and face our fears and limitations. This involves taking action towards our goals, even if it feels uncomfortable or scary at first. By challenging ourselves in this way, we can build resilience and develop a sense of mastery over our lives.
Overall, Stutz's philosophy offers a valuable perspective on how we can become the kind of human beings we want to be. By focusing on self-awareness, personal responsibility, and a willingness to embrace discomfort and take action, we can cultivate a sense of purpose and fulfillment in our lives. Whether we are facing challenges in our personal or professional lives, or simply seeking to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world, Stutz's approach offers a valuable guide for personal growth and self-discovery.
Based on the Netflix documentary Stutz, write an essay that explains a philosophy of life that will make us the kind of human being we want to be based on Phil Stutz’s philosophy and therapeutic approach.
ChatGPT Response:
Phil Stutz's book The Tools presents a unique philosophy for achieving self-actualization. Through a combination of psychological and spiritual techniques, Stutz offers a practical approach to overcoming negative patterns and achieving personal growth. The book's main thesis is that self-actualization is not something that comes naturally; rather, it is a process that requires active effort and the use of certain tools. This essay will explain how The Tools provides a cohesive philosophy for achieving self-actualization.
The book presents five specific tools that readers can use to achieve self-actualization. These tools include the Reversal of Desire, Active Love, Inner Authority, Grateful Flow, and Jeopardy. Each tool is designed to help readers overcome different obstacles that may be preventing them from achieving their full potential. For example, the Reversal of Desire is a tool that helps readers overcome procrastination and self-sabotage. Active Love, on the other hand, helps readers overcome fear and insecurity by teaching them to act from a place of love and compassion.
One of the key features of The Tools is its integration of psychology and spirituality. The book acknowledges the importance of both the conscious and subconscious mind in achieving self-actualization. By combining psychological techniques such as visualization and cognitive restructuring with spiritual concepts like surrender and gratitude, the book offers a holistic approach to personal growth. This approach is grounded in the belief that true self-actualization requires a deep understanding of oneself and a connection to something greater than oneself.
Another important aspect of The Tools is its emphasis on action. The book recognizes that personal growth cannot be achieved simply by reading about it or thinking about it; it requires active engagement and the use of specific tools. Each chapter of the book includes practical exercises and techniques that readers can use to apply the tools in their own lives. This emphasis on action makes The Tools a valuable resource for anyone who is serious about achieving self-actualization.
Finally, The Tools offers a cohesive philosophy for achieving self-actualization by emphasizing the interconnectedness of all the tools. The book acknowledges that personal growth is a complex and multifaceted process that requires the use of different tools at different times. However, it also emphasizes that the tools are not separate entities; rather, they are interconnected and can be used together to achieve greater results. For example, the tool of Grateful Flow can be used in combination with the tool of Inner Authority to overcome feelings of powerlessness and achieve a greater sense of self-worth.
In conclusion, The Tools offers a cohesive philosophy for achieving self-actualization by combining psychological and spiritual techniques, emphasizing the importance of action, and emphasizing the interconnectedness of all the tools. By providing practical exercises and techniques that readers can use in their own lives, the book offers a valuable resource for anyone who is serious about personal growth. The book's message is clear: true self-actualization requires active engagement, a deep understanding of oneself, and a connection to something greater than oneself. By using the tools presented in this book, readers can achieve these goals and unlock their full potential.
Lesson #1: “I Used to be a Human Being” by Andrew Sullivan
Study Questions
One. Why does Andrew Sullivan give up his smartphone and enter Internet Addiction Rehab?
His life as a curator of web news had taken over his life, had hijacked his brain, and had attacked his immune system. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually. More and more, he became immersed in Internet activity, and his body and mind could not keep up with it.
He was losing his life. He was dying.
A spark of metacognition (self-awareness) kicked him in the pants and told him to go to rehab before it was too late.
His blogging was killing him while making him rich and famous:
We read:
“If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”
But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”
Sullivan described a certain anxiety I’ve read about in other Internet addicts, and I’ve seen it in myself during my worst times:
I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.
Two. How does Sullivan suggest that the new technology is different from technologies of the past?
The new technology is infinite in its data, and it can penetrate our brains, hijack our brains, and manipulate our behavior through algorithms.
As he writes:
“We absorb this “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) no longer primarily by buying a magazine or paper, by bookmarking our favorite website, or by actively choosing to read or watch. We are instead guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.
And the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.”
Three. What is so scary for an Internet Addict who enters rehab?
In a word, silence. In silence, our demons that we’ve been tamping down with distractions come out of the woodwork, and we have to face them.
Another fear is boredom, or the boredom of the abyss. We’re conditioned to be repelled by boredom, as if it were a bad thing when boredom can be very productive and helpful.
Only in silence does our deepest psychic and soulful pain emerge, and we are overtaken by it, a terrifying but necessary event.
In Sullivan’s words:
“And then, unexpectedly, on the third day, as I was walking through the forest, I became overwhelmed. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my best guess is that the shady, quiet woodlands, with brooks trickling their way down hillsides and birds flitting through the moist air, summoned memories of my childhood. I was a lonely boy who spent many hours outside in the copses and woodlands of my native Sussex, in England. I had explored this landscape with friends, but also alone — playing imaginary scenarios in my head, creating little nooks where I could hang and sometimes read, learning every little pathway through the woods and marking each flower or weed or fungus that I stumbled on. But I was also escaping a home where my mother had collapsed with bipolar disorder after the birth of my younger brother and had never really recovered. She was in and out of hospitals for much of my youth and adolescence, and her condition made it hard for her to hide her pain and suffering from her sensitive oldest son.
I absorbed a lot of her agony, I came to realize later, hearing her screams of frustration and misery in constant, terrifying fights with my father, and never knowing how to stop it or to help. I remember watching her dissolve in tears in the car picking me up from elementary school at the thought of returning to a home she clearly dreaded, or holding her as she poured her heart out to me, through sobs and whispers, about her dead-end life in a small town where she was utterly dependent on a spouse. She was taken away from me several times in my childhood, starting when I was 4, and even now I can recall the corridors and rooms of the institutions she was treated in when we went to visit.
I knew the scar tissue from this formative trauma was still in my soul. I had spent two decades in therapy, untangling and exploring it, learning how it had made intimacy with others so frightening, how it had made my own spasms of adolescent depression even more acute, how living with that kind of pain from the most powerful source of love in my life had made me the profoundly broken vessel I am. But I had never felt it so vividly since the very years it had first engulfed and defined me. It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.”
Four. What are some of the dehumanizing effects of always being online?
We suffer the aforementioned nervous energy.
We find that being online has become, without us being aware of it, a full-time job that becomes more important than real relationships.
We don’t share space with loved ones because our attention becomes fragmented. Likewise, our personalities become just as fragmented.
In Sullivan’s words:
“But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.”
Another type of dehumanization: losing satisfaction of doing focused work. As Sullivan writes:
“Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.”
We also suffer the breakdown of community. As Sullivan observes:
So are the bonds we used to form in our everyday interactions — the nods and pleasantries of neighbors, the daily facial recognition in the mall or the street. Here too the allure of virtual interaction has helped decimate the space for actual community. When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”
Another form of dehumanization is dopamine addiction. Sullivan writes:
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.
In addition to dopamine addiction, your brain enters a zombie limbo state, where you don’t feel full emotions:
“He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”
Yet another form of dehumanization in Sullivan’s view is the elevation of consumerism into a religion, which has replaced legitimate faith. Sullivan writes:
In his survey of how the modern West lost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.
Five. Why are we hostile toward silence and embrace the noise and chatter of the internet?
For one, as social creatures we are hardwired to love gossip. Gossip is part of the moral glue that keeps societies together.
For two, noise is confused with the sound of being busy, which makes us feel like we’re adhering to a work ethic. But in fact we’re not. We’re merely scatterbrained.
As Sullivan explains:
“Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives — are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.
And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.
Comparing Andrew Sullivan and Lacie
One. Both Andrew Sullivan and Lacie disconnect from real world and become embedded in digital world where sense of self is based on an artificial, arbitrary ranking system, one that is becoming real in China.
Two. Both Sullivan and Lacie become "all in" in making sure their sense of self is validated by the around-the-clock image responsibilities. The constant self-curating is exhausting and takes a toll that they cannot recognize in part because it is gradual.
Three. As Sullivan and Lacie become distracted by their social media ranking quest, they fail to address their real demons, which continue to fester inside them.
Four. Both Sullivan and Lacie unshackle from their social media bondage in the same manner: They both have a physical and mental breakdown. Hitting rock bottom becomes the prelude for self-liberation.
Five. No longer trapped in the social media matrix, they must confront raw feelings of animal rage, which is the beginning of a slow rebuilding process.
Sample Thesis Statements
Mediocre Comparison Thesis
Famous blogger and public intellectual Andrew Sullivan and Lacie Pound from "Nosedive" embark upon a similar self-destruction journey propelled by their deep dive into social media.
Improved Argumentative Thesis
When we compare the similar journey of self-destruction in famous blogger and public intellectual Andrew Sullivan and "Nosedive" protagonist Lacie Pound, we are presented with compelling evidence to delete our social media accounts and balance our digital lives with an analog existence that insulates us from the excesses and pathologies of self-curation.
Argumentative Thesis That Disagrees with Above
Examining the similar road to self-destruction of Andrew Sullivan and Lacie Pound proves nothing. Addicts, narcissists, and the weak-minded are going to glom onto any vehicle to their own ruin. But for every Lacie Pound, there are thousands of social media users who live a digital life absent the pathologies chronicled by Andrew Sullivan and fictional character Lacie Pound.
Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?”
“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.
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? Is she conveniently omitting social and economic factors that contribute to today's generation's psychological state of depression, helplessness, and general malaise? I'd say yes it is. For example, The New Yorker observes there is a new type of Millennial fiction that captures today's hopelessness.
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. So there is a connection between screen time and depression, but poverty seems to be more connected to more screen time than does wealth.
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 Ignores Economics
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 Statements
Thesis with Concession
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 depression.
Thesis with No Concession
Twenge sounding the alarm bells about smartphones causing a "ruined generation" is third-rate self-promotional propaganda larded with logical fallacies, hyperbole, and sloppy research. To be more specific, her alarm bells about smartphones ruining a generation fail to persuade when we consider her self-contradictions, her "cherry-picked studies," her faulty causation, her dismissal of smartphones' positive effects, her dismissal of economic strain, her failure to consider minimal parenting, and her failure to define in any convincing way her notion of a "ruined generation."
Thesis That Defends Twenge with a Concession
While Twenge's research methods are somewhat faulty, she does a persuasive job of showing how the smartphone is curtailing a generation's growth and contributing to depression by connecting pathological, addictive behaviors that are replacing a healthy normal growing-up process.
Thesis That Defends Twenge by Objecting to McMahon's Lecture
In an exhibition of quintessential virtue signalling, McMahon is eager to discuss the young generation's malaise in terms of economic hardship, lack of personal space, and lack of sleep; however, these factors, however true they may be, do not contradict Twenge's claim that smartphones are afflicting young people with very specific types of pathologies and addictive behaviors that are connected to smartphones and smartphones alone.
Thesis That Defends McMahon While Refuting Twenge
To discuss the connection of smartphones and young people's depressive pathologies is irresponsible without giving these pathologies context in terms of economic hardship, lack of private space, and lack of sleep because, as McMahon correctly observes, smartphone addiction does not exist in a vacuum; rather this insidious addiction is debilitating precisely because of the social factors that McMahon rightly says should be included in Twenge's overreaching, oversimplified analysis.
The College Essay Is Dead by Stephen Marche
ChatGPT and other AI word processors can write competent essays. They may lack soul and authorial presence, but they are better than most college freshman essays.
OpenAI platforms can even do homework in other subjects often superior to MBA-level.
There is a chasm between the humanists and the technologists.
An Absence of Humanistic Education Accompanied by Arrogance and Ignorance
Today, disruptive players, the kind of people we value as a society, tend to be from the world of technology. As we read:
In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.
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To be “ham-fisted” means to be arrogant, clueless, and boring--lacking in subtlety, grace, nuance, and irony. If Musk were more versed in parody and satire, he might proceed with more savvy and sophistication or may not proceed at all because his own sense of humility might stop him.
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We Pay a Price for the Tech Lords’ Ignorance
Marche observes that the Tech Lords are spectacular in their ignorance of society and history and that this ignorance has consequences. For example, using social media algorithms to encourage our extreme tribalistic lizard brain causes social distrust and fragmentation, components that threaten democracy. As we read:
The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.
These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.
The Humanists Are Also Guilty of Willful Ignorance
Humanists have been apathetic about defending their discipline. They lack concrete arguments to make the claim that an education in the Humanities is essential for surviving and flourishing. As we read:
As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.
Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said. “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.
Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.
And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.
And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example. It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.
The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.
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The End of the English Major by Nathan Heller
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