| One of the things I blame is the decline of youth culture. When I was in high school and college (late 90s - early 2000s) we had all these youth "scenes" like goths, ravers, gen-X style hippies, garage band scenes, hip hop, underground punk, and so on. The standard formula was music plus style plus some kind of group bonding activity like dancing, playing music, going outside, etc. Drugs were pretty often involved too, but not always and even in drug-heavy scenes like raves there was a sizable "straight edge" faction. This was basically how all the young people who were not "jocks" or into other official activities (of which there is a limited selection) would meet one another and socialize. Maybe I just don't know, but this stuff really seems dead. I've spent some time digging out of curiosity and I've never found a hint of anything similar today. It seems like it all moved online into social media and now instead of dancing all night in warehouses or going camping to hear a band people just stare at phones and have their brains sucked out by "engagement" (addiction) maximizing algorithms. So social media seems like one thing that killed it, but I also think police crackdowns motivated by standard issue drug war freakouts were a factor too. (Irony: the replacement, algorithmically curated social media, is much more addictive than a lot of the drugs I remember people doing back then.) So now there's the people who are into the mainstream standard stuff and... what? Social media? 4chan? I shudder to think of who I would be without rave culture in late high school and college. I'd probably be dead of suicide or one of these hate-ridden incels or pajama Nazi CHUD types. I'd put my money on suicide. Edit: my philosophy with my kids is that screen time is okay as long as their lives are full of a lot of other things. I don't think screens are the problem per se. I was also into hacker stuff when I was a kid and spent a lot of time in front of screens. The problem is the absence of enriching social activities, not the presence of a screen. I do selectively ban certain things though, like YouTube, that are particularly toxic. |
People still go to concerts, raves, clubs, etc. Over the summer NYC streets were packed with young people going out as restrictions were lifting, so this isn't it.
Unless there's a select group of people who truly are addicted to technology and some who aren't (and the former is a silent majority), it's not accurate to say all young people are 24/7 on their phones and never go outside to talk to people.