Ted Gioia: What's Happening to Students?

I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Parents, for example, have no doubts about the danger—because they see it happening right before their eyes.

The story of Narcissus is about a man who sees his own gorgeous reflection in a pool of water and can't look away. His own reflection becomes an obsession and he wastes away the rest of his days staring into the pool.

It's not exactly what's happening with smartphones, but I think about this story pretty frequently these days when the topic of phone addiction comes up. I think smartphones are too good a product to the point that they've maybe circled around to being bad overall (although I'm, not prepared to say that emphatically, it's just a thought). Maybe having an object in our pocket that makes the world's knowledge and entertainment accessible to us in seconds is too compelling a product for us mere humans. The dire state of kids in schools today resonates with me as the husband of a high school teacher who has independently told me very similar things about her students as is discussed in the linked article.

Some will prescribe malice to everyone involved with bringing smartphones into the world. They'll tell you Steve Jobs knew everything that was going to happen when he unveiled the iPhone in 2007, but I simply don't think that's true. I truly think the current state of social media and attention span problems most of us are experiencing were unforeseen results of the smartphone innovation.

I don't know where we go from here. I'm not calling on governments to mandate screen time limits or for Apple and Google to enforce strict limits on how we use their operating systems, but I do think we as a society should be talking about how we can better manage our relationship with smartphones. Unlike tobacco, there are a multitude of benefits to smartphones I think we must recognize, but I do think that we've created a product more addictive than tobacco and we need to reckon with the effects of that.

I grew up in the 90s when you would go to a family restaurant and they'd ask you if you wanted to sit in the smoking or non-smoking section (the non-smoking section was just a bit less smokey). Commercials for cigarettes seemed as common as ads for gambling apps are today. Smoking was a fundamental part of the culture in my lifetime, and through a combination of government action and societal shifts, today smoking is way more niche to the point that I go "whoa" whenever I see someone smoking anywhere. I've seen we can make big societal changes, we just need to figure out how to do it again.

Update: an earlier version of this post suggested that TV ads for cigarettes were common in the 90s, but this apparently was a false memory as TV advertising was banned in the 70s. I guess I was thinking of print and billboard advertising. Shout out to reader Paul Kafasis for the correction!