Cote Briggs
ENG-110 (English Composition)
Professor Miller
April 6th, 2024

All Show and No Action— Technology’s Socially Impoverished Adolescents

In life, we all require necessities to survive. Whether it is food, water, or shelter, these are the things that we have enacted on our primal instincts to acquire. However, what if I were to pose the thought that technology has made its way into our words as such? Exactly in the way that we require food, water, or shelter to survive, many of our world’s adolescents require the blanket of technology to sleep at night: enacting in rebellion when forbidden. I’ve literally seen this—as children refuse to sleep or even function, for that matter—without the presence of their favorite show at hand. My colleagues Liv Arvidson and Finley Morrison at the University of New England write about their concerns in [Insert Title 1] and [Insert Title 2], respectively. They highlight such behaviors of the newer generation of technological natives which have become increasingly concerning. On the contrary, Sam Anderson, a Writer for the New York Times, argues against such claims in his article “In Defense of Distraction,” affirmatively agreeing that such cognitive plasticity is crucial for the survival of the generations to come. Simply put, he claims it is a benefit to our society to prioritize our technologies as a necessity. While I understand the point of Anderson, I disagree with his demonstrations. While our generation may be shifting towards a technological outlook on life, along with its many benefits for productivity, we are struggling to balance our primal necessities.
To put this show of words into action, we are struggling to the point in which some form of LED screen—whether it be that of an iPad or a Television—is required for our newest group of adolescents to fall asleep, or for that matter, to simply function. Morrison deftly touches on this idea, where they put into play “My niece, who just turned four back in January of 2024, is what’s known as an “iPad kid.” She gets cranky when she doesn’t have her tablet to watch mindless videos or play non-educational games no matter what the time of day is. It takes her minutes to return to reality once she’s done playing with her technology. It’s incredibly disheartening for her to finally recognize me after disconnecting from her tablet; this child genuinely appears to be waking up from a coma after watching nothing but brain-rot inducing videos on her iPad” (Morrison). Here, they discuss the effects that their niece’s brain-rotting media introduced through technology has had on their relationship—which presents as a detriment. However, Anderson contemplates whether this is truly a detriment. “Theres been lots of handwringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t… maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike stat of focused distraction” (Anderson 11-12). With the techno-cognitive shift towards a world in which technology had become our convention, he advocates a positive attitude toward such changes in hopes of a positive impact. When we reflect on Anderson’s statement, the key word for this previous statement is *maybe*. Yes, *maybe* along the line generations will be able to harness this techno-human essence— but do we really want to gamble our human element on a maybe? With such a large unknown with the techno-human condition of our generation, I find this assumption to be very risky, especially when there is a physically observable negative effect with our modern-day adolescents— a point Morrison clearly recalls. In a world where technology is becoming the glue to our cognitive function, we are crowding our necessities with nonsense.
Moreso, depending on the amount of exposure one experiences, there seems to be a fluctuation in adolescents’ competencies when introduced to technological devices. Arvidson shares in her personal statement on how she feels about technology: “I feel that enough is enough. I grew up in the perfect time when it came to electronics. Kids my age did not grow up with screens shoved in our faces, because they had not come out yet. We did not get phones as 7-year-olds, but often in middle- or high school. However, we also had enough exposure growing up that we know how to work the technology that we need to live in this world today. We are in the neutral zone; we have not had too much exposure like the younger kids, but we had enough that we are not clueless now” (Arvidson). Like Morrison, Arvidson doesn’t fail to include the observation of the younger generation. However, she also makes a distinct remark on the variations of technological exposure, noting that there may be different effects depending on the age and frequency of such introductions. Expectedly, Anderson attempts to counteract this argument with another notion from his article. “As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls flitting, the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools” (Anderson 12)…