The theory that smartphone use is making people more alienated and uncultured seems so obviously true that it is hard to believe that anybody can deny it. We have little boxes filled with half the people in the world and most of the pop culture that has ever existed. How would they not turn into narcissism and distraction machines?
The problem is that there is nothing very political about blaming smartphones. Leftists want to talk about inequality. Conservatives want to talk about moral decline. Talking about little boxes full of bits of metal seems dismayingly reductive — but they clearly do have an influence on social life, just as contraceptives have an influence on birth rates and alcohol has an influence on liver disease. Sure, that doesn’t mean that economics and culture have no influence on our use of smartphones, contraceptives and alcohol. But it’s still the case — however reductive it might sound — that Twitter is fun, sex is exciting and beer tastes good.
Yet problems can be ignored and exaggerated simultaneously. There are people who are denying the obvious disadvantages of the internet (which is what the concern with smartphones really relates to, because no one cares about the alarm clock or GPS features). But there are also people who are using it as some sort of theory of everything — the source of all pathologies in the modern world. Civil disorder? Blame the internet. Violent crime? Blame the internet. The finite nature of existence? Blame the internet.
Some of these commentators lean to the left. There are social democrats who have convinced themselves that all political discontent can be reduced to social media disinformation and online abuse. It is inconceivable that modern Britain, with its booming economic growth, its safe streets, and its reliable and competent institutions, could be leaving people naturally dissatisfied. Populism must be reducible to Russian bots and social media trolls.
Yet there is also an increasing trend of smartphonophobia on the right. Again, don’t get me wrong — I’m sure that there is something to Jonathan Haidt’s argument that smartphone usage has made young people more anxious and depressed. It makes intuitive and evidential sense. Certainly, it would take a lot of rhetorical contortions to make the case that smartphones are generally good for kids.
In addressing genuine harms, we should not promote distinctly left-coded catastrophism about mental health
Still, claims that smartphones are “dooming a generation”, and are “destroying teenagers”, drown a sensible argument in alarmism. From the headlines, you would think that young people were melting down smartphones and injecting them into their brains. There is at least some extent to which rising levels of mental illness, among adults as well as teenagers, are the result of diagnostic inflation. On some metrics, like teen suicides, it is not clear that there has been a consistent international rise at all.
This is not to argue that the issue should be ignored — because, as should be obvious, something does not have to “doom a generation” to be a problem — but in addressing genuine harms, we should not promote distinctly left-coded catastrophism about mental health. If nothing else, that could encourage careless somethingmustbedoneism. Legislation, if it is to be introduced, should be evidence-based, as existing policies, like banning smartphones in schools, have produced minimal effects.
When it comes to other problems, I’m not sure that phones are the issue at all. Miriam Cates, GB News presenter and former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, has been arguing that there is a “strong correlation between recorded rapes, mobile data usage and broadband usage”. Mobile data usage and broadband usage, she argues, is “a proxy for mass porn consumption”.
Now, I think that porn is bad for its creators and its users — but the rise in rape that Cates is pointing to is, as Noah Carl has argued for the website UnHerd last year, down to “changes in police recording practices and increased reporting by victims”. It is not clear that there have actually been more rapes. There have just been different ways of gathering statistics.
Besides, the evidence linking porn to rape is weak. You can blame porn for a lot of things, but blaming porn in this case feels like an inoffensive outlet for the indignation that could be channelled towards facts like the disproportionate amount of foreigners among sex criminals or the miserable sentences handed out even to prolific rapists.
No doubt we should all use our phones less, and no doubt young people should use them a lot less, if only because their time tends to be freer and more formative than ours. But honesty — if not sheer contrarianism — compels me to say that there are good things about them too. Today, I could listen to a favourite podcast in the gym instead of techno music. I could talk to my family on the other side of Europe. I could access a world of information that the BBC and the broadsheet press might not have exposed me to in earlier decades. Does this make up for the harms? I don’t know. But it would be disingenuous to write as if smartphones have no blessings and then open up my Twitter app again.
