This article belongs to the ‘Books that count’ section, where experts from different fields dissect the informative books that are causing the most talk.
Enough time has passed since the emergence of the first smartphones or smart phones so that we can scientifically evaluate the consequences of their use (or abuse). The latest work of the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, The anxious generationcompiles and provides a conglomerate of research that leaves no one indifferent due to its relevance, due to the serious problem it denounces and, of course, due to some of the criticism received, since the digital environment that it subjects to scrutiny is full of polarization. and radicalization.
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt.
Even with science in hand and academia as support, the problem is so big, it has so many edges, it grows so much every day, so much new research appears every week, that it is almost impossible to address. And yet, the data show that we have a tsunami upon us that cannot be alien to us.
Child and youth mental health
What is Haidt talking to us about? With the eloquence of the popularizer who handles data from verified scientific research (the bibliography is suggestive and very extensive), he makes it clear to us that there is a mental health problem in our young people. We have already addressed the reasons on other occasions: we have not known how to prepare them for a digital world in which they have lost the ability to pay attention to what is relevant, and they prefer to interact in that virtual environment rather than maintain personal ties that force them to behave in a different way. accordance with social norms.
Although the book focuses on data from the United States (corroborated by others from the Anglo-Saxon environment), they can easily be extrapolated to other places in the world. And it shows, with a profusion of graphics, the unprecedented escalation of mental health problems in the generation that grew up with a cell phone in their hand.
From there, he tries to look for an explanation and finds it in two phenomena: the end of free play in children and the deterioration of interpersonal relationships in adolescents.
Read more: Digital orphans: Ten risks of growing up on the internet
Mobile and personal interactions
The criticism of Haidt They are mainly due to the fact that it correlates the use of technologies with the end of personal interactions in children and adolescents. But we have not found any section in his work in which he is categorical about this.
Quite the contrary, in his text, which with an informative style is based at all times on scientific contributions, he makes it especially clear that he does not want to be blunt. It simply analyzes two parallel social behaviors (mobile phone use and the end of free play in the street) with scientific and statistical data. But it constantly abounds that both realities are the result of many elements.
Today’s fears
For example, he explains that stopping playing in the street has not occurred only because children have become hooked on cell phones, but for a series of multifactorial reasons, such as parents being more afraid than before of what could happen to them in the street. abroad.
It leaves out some ideas that are worth investigating, such as the tendency to demand that parents overprotect their children: the pediatrician who scolds for letting the children climb trees or the neighbor who protests because they go to school alone. For Haidt, society is not seeing that excessively protecting minors from any physical risk can lead them to many other psychological risks.
Read more: Reasons to delay the use of mobile phones: loss of attention
Reasons for criticism
If we put the work in context, many of its approaches are better understood (and also why they have been criticized). The first element is that emotional elements of the author are perceived, as if he had felt driven to write this text as a duty to the rest of society. He has discovered this problem by sifting through the much scientific material he handles and has believed that his necessary contribution to the world was to tell it.
The second aspect is that it is not common in a book of these characteristics to propose solutions. Normally, scientific research focuses on the description of the problem and some brief conclusions after the analysis, but on rare occasions it dares to point out what we should do to change things. And Haidt enters the kitchen with especially controversial topics, such as the age at which you have to have a cell phone.
Individualism under examination
The third element – which, although shocking, is very appreciated – is that Haidt dares to touch on topics that seem to belong to the private sphere. For example, it addresses as a possible solution to the evils that new technologies generate in our daily ethical behavior a return to the life of faith (or contemplative life, or meditation, each one approaches it as they believe) because it considers that many of the problems would be solved if we were a society less focused on the individual and more focused on otherness, with time to reflect and less impulsive.
Read more: Reasons for delaying the use of mobile phones: the breakdown of the socialization process
Haidt begins by writing a well-documented work on the problem of mental health in children and adolescents, a complex reality in which, without a doubt, cell phones and social networks play a fundamental role. But the truth is that it achieves much more than that.
It achieves a text that is easy to read for any audience in which it invites everyone (of any age, with children or without children) to reflect on why we have lost our cool, why we behave so aggressively, why we sometimes fall. in apathy, why it is so difficult for us to dialogue with the opposite, since, one day, they assured us that all problems would be solved thanks to those cell phones that kept us connected with the world.
