Children of the Algorithm

What smartphones and therapists are doing to young minds

In 1952, the Radio Corporation of America revealed it was developing a portable receiver small enough to fit in a vest pocket. Glass vacuum tubes, the analogue precursor of the computer processor, would be replaced by a semiconductor smaller than a pea. 

By the end of the decade, the portable transistor radio was fast becoming ubiquitous among teenagers, fuelling a rising moral panic about the character of contemporary youth.

“He has music wherever he goes,” reported the Australian Women's Weekly. “It comes from the pocket-sized radio tuned to rock-’n-roll of the new and wildest sort.” 

The impact of the transistor on my generation came to mind as I tried to pick holes in Jonathan Haidt's disturbing argument that the smartphone is the ruination of Generation Z, which embraces children and young adults born between 1997 and 2022.

His thesis is that two recent trends - parental overprotection in the real world and under-protection online - have produced an anxious, demoralised, fragile and disconnected generation lacking the resilience required of an adult.

The conclusion, if rightly drawn, is more than a little alarming for those of us troubled by the future of humankind, which, sooner or later, will be under the care of a damaged generation.

I sought comfort from this disturbing reflection in the beat generation whose sullenness, impertinence, and disinterest in the finer pleasures of music proved to be a passing phase. There were many social changes in the 1960s and 1970s that we now have cause to regret, but it would be wrong to pin the blame on technology nor yet proclaim that they were precursors of the end of civilisation.

Haidt's arguments are not so quickly shrugged off, however. It is hard to dismiss this distinguished thinker as just another moral panic merchant