Forbid the smartphone? No, too that beast

The crowded train comes to a halt in a meadow, I don’t have a seat and look down on a sea of ​​screens. A woman is video calling with family in New Zealand; A boy learns Arabic; Someone laughs at a series, another reads the newspaper, someone is looking for the love of his life – really nobody stares like it in the past.

I also wipe open my escape sleeve. In the memorandum app I start to outline this essay: an unashamed ode to my smartphone, my crystal clear window in the world, my dreamed, all-knowing traveling companion, my everything.

Because there is already enough harm on this device. The smartphone is poison, the smartphone is a cigarette, the smartphone makes the youth unhappy – all this was recently in the newspaper. In the Netflix-series Adolescence A child of twelve years commits a murder under the influence of social media. Fiction, but the writer of the series arranged The Guardian unqualified: Smartphones must be banned for children.

If I read such things, then I think of Joost Klein, the autonomous small artist and song festival hero. He grew up in a rot village where he was bullied as an artistic outsider. His father and mother died when he was very young (father cancer, mother heart attack), he was raised by YouTube. There he makes videos and processed his misery with music (‘In primary school they sometimes beat me up/then I just went on the bike to’ t Vogdbaar ‘). He found digital, real friends, soul mates with whom he is now on stage. Where he talks about his soul races with a jealous openness, you also learn that on YouTube.

What would have become small if they had taken his smartphone?

Forbidding phones is to burn books: you do not destroy the object, but kill a universe.

Reading excessive books as a child will give you glasses later. The invention of electric light ensured that we went to sleep for an hour shorter. Were we going to prohibit those crushed light bulbs? Did we do books under the spell? Why then prohibit screens? All the good comes with something bad.

Of course your child can end up with extremists via his phone. Recently was the boss of the AIVD, Erik Akerboom, on television. The Spy of the Fatherland said that parents should also spy their children, see if they are not radicalizing online. My children are still going to primary school, but you can’t be there early enough. So I sent them away from their screens (hop outside! Climb into trees and be very loudly like before!) And took a look.

For a while I was worried that they rarely played with Lego. Children should stack two blocks together and then say: look daddy, a dog? But no, they had started to babble English glued to screens. Ender Pearl, Villagers, Pickaxe. Their brains had to be grounded by all those shorts and reels.

As it turned out, they were indeed a rabbit hole in hunted, a parallel, fact -free fantasy world Minecraft. There they built the most fantastic miracles with digital blocks. I gazed at their digital Sagrada Família and was ashamed of me. I myself played a different block game on the PC: Tetris. You only get brain rot from that.

And no I have no wonder children; Hundreds of millions of children play Minecraft. Not Snake or Candy Crush but Minecraft Is the most sold out game worldwide ever: an extremely complex world that revolves around fantasy, logic and collaboration. Great news! But then recently the Minecraft-Film in the cinema played -an infectious ode to fantasy -the news was mainly about a stupid craze to throw with popcorn during the film. That apparently better suited the image of the corrupt youth, whose attention span is so that they even interrupt a feature film for one foodfight.

Smartphonephobia

What plays here is broader than smartphone phobia: we are experiencing a new culture pessimistic wave. See for example the constant obsession with Fatbikes. The youth once moved on smelly puchs and crackling Zundapps, now teenagers are hazing environmentally friendly and whisper quiet – often with such an orange cube on the back, because they prefer to work than coma drowning – but apparently it is not yet good for the good -sight. When then, if they play with wooden toys?

After the First World War we were also in such a dip, then the German philosopher Oswald Spengler published the cult hit The downfall of the evening country. I understand his gloomy, at the time millions of teenagers and twenties were killed with ultramodern machine guns; But nowadays one fatbike in the streets is enough to jeremize Masse ‘sic transit’.

I fear that we have become more conservative. In any case, we have grown older: the population pyramid of the Netherlands and other Western countries is top heavy, many elderly people, few young people. There is even such a shortage of youth that universities nowadays have to import foreign youth (a doubling in ten years!), Otherwise they will not get their lecture halls full.

Such a senior population can lead to cultural arteriosclerosis. The vast majority of Dutch people grew up in a world in which antique skills were essential, such as writing business letters in French; Sitting still for hours behind a table. Along that antique yardstick, the youth soon seems to be broken.

Sure, technopanic is something of all times. The Radio was the devil last century: listening to jazz all day would hunt the heart rhythm. In the nineties, conservative Americans in rap music and video games saw the source of all evil. Thierry Baudet acted against modern sex toys, technology that would undermine real love. New is that now also hip progressives have started to blame modern miracles.

« I realize that I belonged to the last generation of teenagers who were always outside, I was recently back on the playground where I always hung around and there was no one there, » Thus the American-Vietnamese poet and writer Ocean Vuong (1988), recently in NRC. « The young people sit inside their iPhones. Then there can no longer be a correction, because you meet real people who are different from you, who surprise you, who can contradict you. That is how ideologies get free play. »

All contemporary culture pessimism is contained in Vuong’s words: the dédain for screens, the alleged superiority of real life outside, the threat of radicalization, the anecdotal evidence (I was recently at the playground); The apocalyptic conclusions (‘last generation’), the nostalgia. You could easily sing his words in the way of ‘the village’ of Wim Sonneveld, about that garden path of his paad: (« They played outside, never online; not susceptible to ideologies »).

Pastor

I don’t know his square, the children just play outside in Rotterdam. If they were on an iPhone, they make real friends there. And ideologies? We mainly suffered from this in the terrible 20th century, which was completely smartphone -free.

Sometimes I think that we ourselves suffer from the brain rot that we attribute to screens addicts: the superficial thinking, the fearful worldview, the yielding for the first the best influencer.

Take a more influencer like Jonathan Haidt, the American bestseller author who tells millions of people worldwide that the youth is broken and depressed because of smartphones. His book The Anxious Generation came to number 1 of the bestseller list of The New York Times. I recently listened to an interview with this Haidt and I was shocked. Not because of his ominous statements – that we may only have a few years to save the world, that the youth on their phone is only busy with « junk, superficials and nonsense » – but because of the lack of evidence.

While I listened to the doom preacher, my smartphone led me to deep -digging replks (as in The New Republic « Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids » Mental Health?  » van Siva Vaidhyanathan; Or « Are smartphones Driving our teens to depression? » from David Wallace-Wells in the The New York Times; Also the Trimbos Institute written That Haidts statements are ‘unfounded and problematic’.) In summary: there is no hard evidence for a connection between smartphone use and Depri Youth. Perhaps the youth is not even more depressed. See the countries with high smartphone density and a happier youth.

How is it possible that such a preacher is taken so seriously? And since when have we started to think about that modern technique such as the Amish about electronics?

Apart from that demography, there is of course also Trump. Only recently ‘We’ smartphones and social media associated with hip, left, progressive, Steve Jobs, Alexander Klöpping, Obama. Nowadays we think of Elon Musk, Trump and the rest of the broligarchy. The smartphone is now the ideal scapegoat for everything that is wrong: fake news, polarization, populism, depressive teenagers.

Pointing one culprit without evidence is more than sloppy, it is dangerous. Then you leave other causes of depression or populism untouched. And vice versa: you overlook the beneficial effect of technology.

What if the youth, for example, has become better at expressing feelings than their parents, that they say more easily when they are not doing well? There is no thermometer for depression, only questionnaires. It seems logical to me that the youngest generations at the question ‘are you depri’; Nowadays much earlier ‘yes’, not necessarily because they feel so much worse, but because it is taboo gone. Super positive, the children don’t kick things up anymore! The Joost Klein effect, so to speak.

The phone activates

Or maybe they are really depri, for example because because of those smartphones they have a better view of misery. The abuses now pop directly into your face. In addition to depression, this also leads to action. The Greta Thunberg effect. Or think of Gaza: seeing the genocide happen live is horrible enough, but thank goodness it does not take decades, such as with the Vietnam War or the apartheid regime in South Africa, before mass protests arise against it. (And no photo rolls have been lost.)

Screes activate people. That is why young people are now less indifferent than twenty years ago and there are larger street demonstrations. And yes, what you see sometimes makes you gloomy. Forbid that thing? Then you punish the messenger, the problems remain. Better is: learn how to tame the beast.

Once I also found my phone a devil, but I thin the monster. So that I enjoy the benefits with as few disadvantages as possible. It has to go out in the bedroom. And there are some locks on it, such as the apps freedom and appblock. Notifications disabled. No time to wipe with X or LinkedIn.

I now scissor my smartphone in that rare category of things that are pleasant and not necessarily bad, such as coffee and sex.

Hundreds of times a day I grab that thing, every time I grab. I speak all the languages ​​of the world, see galaxies, know the names of the animals and plants, read like a silly, photograph as a pro and smile me broken.

I absolutely notice how that Toverboerje has changed my brain: I no longer have patience with the reality that I receive. I look up to it in the cinema for two hours to staring at such a screen. Or to read other people’s Magnum Opus of a thousand pages. Broken my attention span? No, my brain does not want to be passive, but make things myself, the direction, away from the tyranny of the here and now, from this one train with a view of that one pasture.

Very occasionally I have the challenge to throw away that thing furiously. Then I force myself to read a few pages The eveningsthe classic novel about a young man who still lives with his parents, but does not have a smartphone, and is forced to listen to the tap, to conclude in the evening that another day has passed by meaningless.

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