Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ - Family dinners and chatty hand-written letters gave way to fast food and e-mail, and e-mail gave way to texting.
As someone who remembers the Sixties, I’ve seen texting become more and more of a time-suck, diverting its practitioners from work and play and quality relationships while those swept up in the texting craze sneer down on me as a Luddite.
But sometimes being a Luddite isn’t all that bad.
There are now a growing number of policies to ban use in schools.
Not to mention programs and camps dedicated to separating youth from their tech for much longer periods of time so they can focus on work, play, and developing human relationships. Before A.I. takes away choice completely.
Even adults are starting to question their reliance on apps – from GPS directions that lead to dead ends to the shaming of unfulfillment on dating apps or worse, after hours crafting the perfect profile and swiping right and right and right again, having the app spit out the least desirable matches possible.
Technology provides the illusion of infinite choice, of being everywhere and doing anything. But in a city of millions, it serves to isolate one from another; too much is lost in translation through an inanimate conglomerate of micro-processors and sim-cards.
You can’t see people when you are texting, you can’t tell if they are rolling their eyes or gazing at you with adoration or with sympathy or compassion.
You can’t reach out and touch someone staring at a screen miles or blocks away, or next door.
A smile is more than an emoji. It comes from the heart in infinite varieties and is not computer-generated.
Do you want to live a cartoon or a real life? Hate to say it, but IRL has texting beat all to shit.
And it’s hard to separate texting from the proliferation of the apps on which people have become codependent.
Senator Lindsey Graham recently berated Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, calling out its products impact on kids, saying: “You have blood on your hands.” He could say the same about their impact on adults.
Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, has pointed out the correlation between the propagation of addictive social media algorithms and the collapse of young people’s mental health, including rising rates of depression, suicidal thought, and self-harm.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the shift in kids’ focus from the physical world to the virtual one catastrophic, especially for girls. Apps like Instagram and TikTok have pushed popularity contests and unrealistic beauty standards into overdrive. Boys develop antisocial behaviors from overuse of video games and unregulated access to porn.
It’s probably a factor in the continuing rampant absenteeism in our schools – who needs the downer of teachers and rules when our friends are all online?
What can be done about it? Not much.
Banning TikTok and its sibling platforms will get us nowhere.
National laws to rein in the most predatory social media apps may pass but will certainly run afoul of freedom of speech protections. And it’s doubtful the courts will uphold them.
Especially given the power that their personal wealth gives the perpetrators, not to mention the heavy hand of Wall Street profiteers.
States face the same challenges in enacting laws to specifically protect consumers from social media’s viral explosion of lies and A.I.-generated fakeries or, more insidiously, half-truths that once released can never be recalled. These spread unfettered and will live on forever somewhere in the internet, jeopardizing futures – for child and adult alike.
From the pain of deepfake porn, from lives destroyed, from a return to the time of Hitler and Stalin where a pissed-off neighbor could turn you in for crimes real or concocted leading to torture and death or, more frequently in America today, financial ruin and ostracism.
From the suffering incurred by the invasion of people’s privacy – from Princess Kate's cancer to in-your-face interviews of people whose loved ones were killed or kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th.
From the commodification of personal lives through TikTok and similar apps which make it too easy to post hateful comments and A.I.-manipulated images such as have recently surfaced at schools in Beverly Hills and Laguna Beach.
From the shaming of not being able to be all we can be, unable to meet unreasonable expectations without the support and guidance of friends and family.
From relying on outside sources to shape our own reality, giving up the initiative to shape our destinies.
Keeping in touch is one thing; losing touch with ourselves is more problematic. And having lives destroyed by a careless text takes the danger to an entirely different level.
Phone-free schools and programs are touted as a possible remedy, although – only in America – some parents object because they want to be able to reach their kids immediately if there’s a mass shooting… or to remind them about a tutoring appointment.
Perhaps the world is going about this the wrong way. Instead of trying to control the negative aspects of unchecked tech, how about encouraging what was best before?
Sixty years ago, children had a great deal more freedom and independence. We would roam the neighborhood with friends unsupervised and, only if we weren’t on time for supper, would our parents start calling around.
Without apps, there was little opportunity for sexual predators to access us.
We need to give everyone more places – parks, community events, sports for the enjoyment of participating, multi-generational parties, lectures with open and free-ranging discussions – where kids of all ages and backgrounds can interact in person with each other, allowing them to explore the wonderful diversity of ideas and people and cultures. Developing relationships, learning to value and look out for one another.
Sitting at home in front of screens may keep today’s youngsters safe from certain physical harms, but it leaves them more vulnerable to technology approaches, specifically crafted to seduce them to demand parents buy certain goods, to engage in potentially harmful activities on the web, and worse.
Peer pressure through texting only amps this up.
The truth is that our youth are over-protected IRL but under-protected on the internet and their smartphones.
If we want to seduce young Americans away from their texting addiction, we need to give them better opportunities, more interesting places to go, and see, and do. And the so-called adults among us must lead the way.
Life should be something to be enjoyed, not endured.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
