The high school where I work has FINALLY adopted a cell-phone policy. It's pretty simple--kids just have to put their phones in pockets. It has been amazing to see 1) how readily kids are accepting this--they, too, want a break from the constant pressure from their phones, but the devices are simply too powerful to control on their own; 2) how quickly the classroom culture has changed. For the first time in years, I've had to deal with classes being too talkative! Kids are complaining less about having to work in groups; I see them doodling and writing in notebooks during class; they're even taking longer to do their work since they're not just rushing through it so they can go back to their phones.
I really do think that some day we'll look back at the first 15 years of smartphone usage as equivalent to when doctors condoned cigarettes. Obviously, smartphone technology can be an incredibly useful tool, but the idea that everything in life is enhanced by it, or that they *should* be on us at all times (or even that we *should* be reachable at all times) just hasn't borne out.
"I really do think that some day we'll look back at the first 15 years of smartphone usage as equivalent to when doctors condoned cigarettes." Yes! I think so, too. (And I hope so.)
My partner and I talk about this in the context of smartphone use while driving, too... I feel strongly that we'll have a MADD-esque pushback against it, and 10, 15, 20 years from now, it will seem ABSURD that people used their phones while driving — the way we think about drinking and driving now. My partner is not so optimistic.
It's great to hear how the cell phone policy is playing out at your school! I do think kids and teens crave more in-person, real-world interaction but aren't really sure how to get it. Plus the FOMO from thinking that everyone *else* is living it up online means they want to be on their phones all the time too.
Also, I recently had to be the ugly mother-in-law to be and tell my kid's partner to put away his phone. He was driving at a high speed in the rain on a freeway and decided it was time to check his text messages. WTF? I once broke up with a guy because he sent me photos from his long-distance commute, taken from his car at, again, high speed. I just don't get it. (Thank you for this opportunity to vent.)
The Swedish elementary school attended by my grandchildren has a phone locker where smart watches and phones are kept during school hours if the kids bring them to school. Which is a relief.
Oh gosh I hope that happens with driving. It is TERRIFYING. I am strict with myself because my friend lost her parents to a distracted driver in 2004, and he was just talking on the phone, not making a TikTok or texting. Whenever I am in traffic I see most drivers texting or swiping or talking on the phone. Because we can’t handle being bored with our thoughts for one minute. And we think everyone wants a video of us opining on a topic while driving - the urge to be entertained or to share ALL our thoughts at every moment. And it’s so dangerous.
Yup, yup, yup. I hate driving as it is — I feel like I'm piloting a giant weapon — and the thought of doing so while fucking around on Instagram is just... gahhhhhh.
Yes. It’s dangerous. Years ago, I recall seeing someone writing on a legal pad while driving in a tunnel in Boston. Just had it propped up on the steering wheel. I thought that was dangerous at the time.
Many years ago, at least 20 or 25, I remember flying down I-94 at about 80mph; I looked over to the car next to me and the driver was --I shit you not -- folding up his newspaper. I've still never figured out the right words for that scene. Horrifying, hilarious, surreal, absurdist all somehow fall short.
Yeah, good point about the FOMO and them feeling the need to stay on top of what's happening online. A couple of kids have told me they're already experiencing less drama since there isn't this real-time broadcasting (and escalation) of online beef throughout the day. Putting their phones in the wall pocket provides a 51-minute cool-down period for everyone in the building--at least when it comes to online interactions.
I wish my daughter's high school would do this! I instituted a no devices policy in my college composition classroom this semester and was surprised to get no (overt) pushback. Yesterday was the second day of class, and the level of engagement was striking, especially compared to last spring, when blatant device usage during class reached an intolerable peak. I'm so glad to know that your students are accepting and benefiting from the new policy. I hope many more schools will put such policies in place.
It was intolerable for us last year too! Our admin was *extremely* hesitant to create a school-wide policy, but the teachers at my school organized and demanded it. Even at the beginning of the year, the assistant principal who reviewed the policy introduced it as "the policy YOU all wanted." I think they just didn't want to deal with enforcing it or dealing with kids who refused to follow it? But for all of their talk of "what's best for kids," they were being willfully blind to the fact that at least a quarter of our students were totally checked out. I, too, anticipated more pushback especially since I teach HS seniors, but, just like in writing assignments, artificial constraints are actually more freeing than a total lack of rules.
Ronny Chieng has a great bit on this about how we will look back in fifty years and be shocked at how we let babies be exposed to “the internet”. Second hand stupidity.
About a year ago, after a 10-year hiatus, I re-subscribed to the print version of The Atlantic Monthly. I had read it religiously, cover to cover, every month for much of my 20s and early 30s and it gave me a really nuanced view of the world and of politics, but it also exposed me to so much that I never would have chosen for myself - art, literature, music reviews, extremely niche dives into topics that were never part of my orbit.
I canceled my subscription when I started reading *exactly the thing I wanted to read* on Twitter (RIP) or other news sites and was able to perfectly cultivate my experience with being informed about the world. In a way that exactly aligned with my worldview, from people who reinforced my own biases and beliefs. And I lost SO much during that time. I lost my patience, I lost my ability to think critically, I lost my tolerance for anything that wasn't *the thing I wanted*.
With the death of Twitter (among many other things), resubscribing to a physical magazine and reading it cover to cover every month has changed my brain for the better in ways I didn't really think I had missed. Just being exposed to articles about ideas I had forgotten were important (or not) and immersing myself in them briefly has made me feel a lot calmer about my consumption of the news and media, and it makes me wonder what other areas of my life I can extend this simplicity and peace to.
I've been re-disciplining myself to actually READ the print magazines that still come to my home. And I'm loving Plough magazine -- a faith and arts publication based in a small (3K members) network of anabaptist communities. Thought provoking and profound.
It's interesting that you mention the Atlantic. I subscribed (digitally) during the pandemic, mostly because they had a lot of really excellent COVID coverage, and I also enjoy Charlie Warzel's weekly writing on tech. But they've been running some big articles lately by David Brooks, a writer whose work I loathe, and I actually put my renewal date on my Google calendar in case I want to unsubscribe before it auto-charges me for another year. But I think this is another casualty of the Internet—now I can choose to send my dollars ONLY to people whose views I support (including AHP, Garrett Bucks, etc.). Similarly, I've seen a lot of people on Twitter over the years calling for people to unsubscribe to the NYT, mostly because they have a lot of terrible op-ed writers (David Brooks again!, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, etc.) or are too middle of the road, especially regarding trans issues or by using euphemisms like "racially charged." I wonder how this is going to shake out a few years from now—will opinion/analysis-focused magazines like the Atlantic eventually become obsolete because writers can make more money on forums like Substack, and consumers can choose to directly support the people who have the "right" opinions?
So I actually have David Brooks in mind as I wrote this. Last night I finished reading his piece in this month's magazine about why Americans are so mean to each other and what we can do about it. It was a lot of typical David-Brooks-ness and his shitty centrist views, but in the end, I was glad to have at least read the article. If I had seen his name on an Atlantic piece online, I absolutely would have skipped it. And I agree with you that I don't love that my subscription dollars go to him (or Bret Stephens, or other too-powerful white men with garbage opinions). But this goes back to my original delight at rediscovering The Atlantic - because I can read DB's stories and roll my eyes at them and recognize the things about him that are truly problematic, and still see value in the magazine as a whole.
That being said, I ALSO give my money to Substack writers whose values I support (so many...) and want to see them succeed. But that doesn't negate my original recognition that rediscovering print magazines with a wide variety of opinions, articles, and viewpoints (even ones I disagree with) has overall been beneficial to me.
Mmm, this makes me miss National Geographic magazines. I am not a fan of their corporate media daddy, but I agree with exactly what you said about the delight that comes from reading an article that you might have otherwise skimmed past. Plus, I'm not sure I will ever get over the textural experience of a printed publication, whether it's a newspaper, book, or magazine. I use my iPad for reading all the time, and it's nice to get access to e-books when the physical book is expensive and/or the library hold is 30 weeks long. But then again, maybe that's part of AHP's point, is a certain degree of patience and accepting that physical items take time and space to reach us.
My husband and I (68 and 65, respectively) often discuss this with our daughters (34 and 30): Has the Internet enhanced or degraded our lives? I grew up with serendipity and mystery, or so it seems now. What did it mean that “Bell Bottom Blues” was the first song I heard on the radio the morning after a date? Or running into that guy from film class at a screening of “400 Blows”--a guy I knew nothing about because there was no social media, and a film I had to wait for the film society to screen--an event. I went to the library to do research, to find out anything, really, and I waited for Elvis Costello’s new album, and put on my fat headphones for the ritual First Listen once I’d made my purchase at the record store--a wondrous place. Yeah...I sound like the old coot I am. The Internet made it possible for me to work from home decades before most people, so I was more available to our kids. The Internet made it possible for my husband to finish his PhD remotely. Etc., etc. But if it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t be devastated. I’m glad I grew up during that era.
I think about this often when I think of childhood/adolescence=that you could only experience a thing when it happened, not via a video of it happening later, and you often experienced it as a communal thing. I remember waiting in line with 50 other people for the Beastie Boys' 'Hello Nasty' and thinking about how all these people in a city in Ohio loved them as much as I did and that felt lovely.
I also remember lying on the family room carpet, post-bath, with wet hair and ice cream watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' because it was the ONLY time you could see those Disney movies, and it made Sunday nights *magical*. My daughter doesn't get to experience that because it's all right there for her, and a lot of that sparkle is lost. There is no longing or anticipation, and sometimes that is the best part.
I'm 62 and I remember those days well. I am very glad I grew up at the time & place that I did. That said, I do appreciate a lot of things about the Internet! And I have often said I would love to go back to school -- if only to be able to research and write a term paper (draft, edit, final copy!) entirely (or almost entirely) on my laptop! lol I spent a small fortune in rolls of nickels, photocopying periodical articles from the library (which you couldn't borrow) -- 5 cents per page -- and lugging home stacks of books. I'd make handwritten notes from those. Spread out all the different notes on my bed & on the floor and start handwriting a rough draft. After a couple of drafts, I would type up a final version, bottle of white-out at the ready -- usually at 2 a.m. the night before it was due, with the typewriter sitting on a towel to try to muffle the sound in deference to my dorm neighbours. Those were the days....
I think this is largely why people are such enthusiastic supporters of Trader Joe's, Aldi, or Costco-they eliminate the choice overwhelm. I often think about how nice it is to have three choices of mustard versus 33 choices, and even if it's not perfect, it's FINE.
Someone introduce the concept of "sufficer" (e.g. is it good enough) vs "maximizer" to me while I was wedding planning. So many things only need to be good enough!!
This really resonates with me and is something I've also considered. I have an intense amount of nostalgia for my undergrad years (2005 - 2009, so we had a little more tech but not too much), and this piece has helped bring that nostalgia into focus. My friend group and I spent so. many. nights. doing what we called "Lounging" (capital L) our freshman year. Each floor in our dorm had a lounge, and we would gather most nights to watch the Daily Show on the tiny wall-mounted TV and just fuck around. We were so very silly and uninhibited in some ways, and thinking about it now, I realize that we were just very, very *present.* A few of us had cell phones, but they were mostly for calling home, and we didn't really text one another. Time together was intentional but also wonderfully free-form.
Interestingly, that same friend group set up twice-weekly virtual video calls when the pandemic began and they are STILL GOING, three-plus years later. People filter in and out; sometimes we cancel; but generally, it's remarkably parallel to our Lounging of 15-plus years ago. We are silly and uninhibited and we shoot the shit and fuck around and have fun. We've reconnected in ways that I didn't really expect, which is kind of poignant and beautiful. The calls have even led to yearly reunion gatherings that are always a complete blast and so nourishing.
I went to boarding school and Lounging was our whole life.
In the summer of 2020, when people started having socially distanced hangouts in parks, I realized that one of the things I liked about it was how much it reminded me of how we socialized in high school and college. Namely, you just pick a geographical location (someone's basement, someone's dorm room, in 2020 someone's neighborhood park), everyone just goes there and sits around. I loved it.
Oh man, this just brought back a memory of watching Northern Exposure every week in college (so, early ‘90’s). A bunch of us from my all-girls dorm would gather in someone’s room in front of a tiny TV - no talking, no reading anything, no distractions of any kind. Just watching together. I’m not often nostalgic, but I genuinely miss this sort of experience.
I remember sitting in the “lounge” in my dorm, doing laundry, and watching TV with people I didn’t know but who lived in the same dorm complex. We talked about the TV show too. Not going to say what the TV show was, that would date me. But I’m not young.
Oh, the joy of sitting by the radio with a cassette tape in the deck, waiting for a song you wanted to capture, and hitting record as soon as you recognized the first few bars!
I totally understand the point you are making and I grew up in a similar time. But I don’t have the same nostalgia for it. It was fine. But I was an undiagnosed autistic closeted queer kid doing my best to people please my way through the world. If I had an internet full of information autistic self-advocates and queer youth my life wouldn’t have the same trauma in it. I had anxiety as a teenager and I still have anxiety as an adult with a smartphone. Neither version is better. My choices, or more accurately lack of them, for clothing as a fat kid made me cry repeatedly. As a fat adult, I get to shop online (still a less than ideal experience) and feel that my clothes fit and express my personality, style and even sometimes my (nonbinary) gender!
At risk of oversimplifying, I think fewer choices only serves people when most of the choices they have or imagine remaining are accessible to them. There are so many ways in which I want more choices. But it feels like wanting more choices (or not) is distinct from the expectations of social engagement in a device moderated attention economy. My life was more siloed in many ways as a younger person and that had benefits. But it also had hugely stressful drawbacks. And I couldn’t control those things. Right now, we have the illusion of control because we can theoretically make certain decisions but we are not empowered to do so.
YES. I just commented above that my (white, straight) son says he'd love to go back to the 90s, while my queer neurodivergent daughter wants no part of it. Makes total sense to me.
thank you for this, amy. I truly believe I would have realized my own queerness at a much earlier age had I had more choice growing up. (omg tumblr alone.) and the stories now! sure streaming has exploded and there is too much everywhere but in some ways, because of this, smaller projects are greenlit than *never* would have been seen in the 90s. like heartstopper or t&s's high school.
I'm a tail-end Boomer with a young teenager and I want to weep when I see how social media/cell phones affect my kid. It's like someone took Seventeen magazine and Cosmopolitan and cranked them up to 11 -- times infinity. I have lots of conversations with my kid about how to deconstruct what she's seeing, I use car time to play stealthily subversive podcasts -- we listened to Jessica DeFino on skin care as the new diet culture, for example. But it's a constant struggle.
"Skin care as the new diet culture" -- yes. I'm blown away by how much skin care teens and young adults are doing! Their skin is already in lovely shape, and yet they're using firming creams and wrinkle reducers???
Yes to all you say here -- the ennui results from infinite choice; the joy that can arise from frequent encounters with the unexpected. My 15-year-old daughter has recently started listening to the radio, and it makes me so happy to see her experiencing the rush of having that song she really wants to hear come up after 30 minutes of songs she doesn't care about or even like. This is something that people her age rarely get these days -- the feeling of suddenly having something completely out of your control align with your desires, and not because you've been feeding data to an algorithm (which always seems to get it not quite right, except when it gets it creepily exact). To me, the particular charge of this that radio provides is one of the best there is. Finally, thank you for reminding me of the singular excitement of rushing to get my film to the 24-hour photo processing place before the deadline to get my photos the next day!
Were getting double prints a big deal for anyone else? Like, my good friend was the unofficial photographer of our college crew team, and getting "first dibs at her doubles" gave me such high status.
You've captured so perfectly the cold, lonely exhaustion of knowing what's happening everywhere, all the time yet feeling utterly disconnected. I'm 65, but pretty extremely online, and I'm an introvert who's lived alone a long time. It's never felt desolate in the way it does now.
Yeah, for me (also 65, also introverted) I'm less overwhelmed by FOMO than what I call DIDMO: "Discovering I Did Miss Out," often a party or outing that is being reposted by a friend decades later that I didn't even know happened.
I've talked about this with regards to my kid. I realized that with all the streamers she doesn't have a scarcity of choice for what she wants to watch or play so it can cause decision paralysis or just bouncing around from thing to thinf. Versus when most of us were kids you maybe had a couple VHS tapes and you wore them out and knew the lines by heart. Same for music. It wasn't until I recently bought a vinyl player and let her pick out a few of her own albums to have (Midnights, Spiderverse soundtrack) that she really developed a very strong bond to music. So now with a forced scarcity of choice from the physical media she has been wearing out the grooves and reading liner notes and learning the lyrics in a much more involved way.
There are words to very niche folk songs that my sister and I both know by heart because my dad would played the same CD every Sunday morning as we got ready for church for a whole year. I LOVED lying on my bed reading liner notes! Some of this is probably an age thing - music means so much more when you're younger and have few other ways to define yourself. But thinking about what a big part it played in my childhoods (Little Richard versions of children's songs!) is making me think about how I want to recreate it for my future children. Maybe a record player in the nursery is the answer? Spotify is just not the same.
There are tonies and yoto that have music components and are intentional in their physicality. It took a while to get to this point because they are exposed to so much through Kidz bop and TV and such, but I got tired of Kidz bop and made conscious choices to push her toward adult music. Records are interesting because there are so many novelty records that are goofy and fairly cheap to acquire, but to be honest it took her getting older to even care about having music on in the background.
Yeah, my sister just went to see The Fantasticks at her community theatre, and I told her I still know all the words from the record I had. And she said SHE still knows all the words from me playing the record so often!
I think about this stuff all the time, particularity as a mom of a daughter starting her senior year and a son starting high school last week. That one detail — not recalling a single moment with headphones — contains worlds. I have always known and celebrated that my best adventures happened in the space of “lostness,” relying on encounters with people that led to absurd and memorable outcomes, or even just great conversations. Snippets of life that really, truly in the aggregate feel like they make up “my life.” These random, unplanned encounters with the world fully capture what it feels like to be me. The loss of that gives me immeasurable grief for others; I can only continue to hope that we somehow reach a saturation point and bounce back towards something even more fully human, perhaps as a result of the reckoning with ai. Thank you for this lovely piece.
This post reminded me of a sad story. In the late 90s a large group of my friends and I went the The Lemonwheel. It was a huge Phish music festival that hundreds of thousands of teens and young adults attended all the way at the tippy top of Maine. I didn’t particularly like Phish, but was happy to spend the time with my friends and go on an adventure, we bought the tickets last minute (at Tower Records no less!!). Several car loads of us departed from Boston in the evening to make the 8 hour drive up to Maine. As to be expected, we lost each other along the way, and there were no cell phones to help us reconnect at the festival. When we got to the Lemon Wheel there were huge boards all along shakedown street, (deadhead slang for the main thoroughfare in parking lots where full time followers of bands set up shop selling anything from grilled cheeses to hits of nitrous oxide) with fluttering notes that festival goers left for each other ranging from requests for golden tickets, rides, or detailed instructions for friends on where to meet and at what time. It was like Desperately Seeking Susan but in real life. We managed to find most of our friends but there was one carload of kids we couldn’t track down. We left notes on every board, made signs that we held up high while walking through the crowd, shouted out their names, we did everything we could with the technology of the time to find our friends. When we returned back to Boston after several days of festival delirium we found out that the missing carload of friends had been in a horrible accident on the way up there. The car flipped off the road killing the driver and severely injuring the rest of the passengers. Over the years I’ve often thought about how different that festival would have been for us if we had cell phones and got the news right away. I think about the signs we posted to friends who could never see them. I think about how sometimes not knowing horrible news immediately can be a dark kindness.
Maybe in a similar mode, but I may be thinking of the "slow glass" stories. They were about a type of glass that took 20 years for light to pass through. In the stories, it would be a used in a window but into the past, usually with some tragedy involved. Who says that 1950s "hard" science fiction stories couldn't be a tearjerkers?
I am going to have to ruminate on this - it's inspired a bunch of feels. (I think I'm a little older than you - I didn't get anything internet until a year or two after I graduated college, but I recognize a lot of what you describe, which I think is very characteristic of a certain small residential college experience.)
My immediate reaction, though, is to think of clothes. I shop pretty much exclusively online now, and I do miss the luxury of wandering through stores, finding items I didn't know I wanted, and the fun of college friends and I trying on fancy dresses we had nowhere to wear and couldn't afford even if we did. I was a suburban kid so this was in big department stores and mall standards rather than hip urban boutiques or the like, so not "cool," but a lot of fun.
But I couldn't do that now even if I wanted to, as I've sized out of what's available in physical stores, except for Old Navy's failed attempt at inclusivity and maybe a few sad "women's" sections in the aforementioned department stores. Plus-sized fashion obviously still has lots of issues, but the online world has definitely opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. I recognize this is more about consumption than communication, of course, although in the world of communication, it's enable non-mainstream communities in a way that was much harder before infinite choice (to a fault - at the same that the online infinite choice allows, for instance, marginalized people to form communities outside their physical locations, it enables living in bubbles and fostering hate.)
I definitely agree about the algorithm reflecting you back and yourself, too - my Etsy search results are a really blatant example of this. I've become hyperfixated on "curating" my ear piercings so I've been searching for various kinds of earrings, and my Etsy suggestions are clogged with items I've already looked at or already bought. My political/social online experiences are likewise created by various algorithms in ways that aren't quite as obvious but just as narrowing.
I was thinking about this too — and I think that the answer is that I don't want to go back to THAT time, specifically (with all of the shitty things that came with it) so much as a time were there were fewer things but those things actually matched and suited the market, instead of the absolutely unfathomable reality that the vast majority of clothes are made for, oh, half of the population, if that? Basically what if: fewer choices *and also* no fatphobia
One of the things about comment sections is that you never know where they'll take you. When did they go from half sizes to plus sizes? My mother was seriously overweight - diabetes killed her - so she always shopped the racks for half sizes. I vaguely remember that she took a 20 1/2. Would that be a 20+ nowadays? She said that they called them half sizes so there wouldn't be embarrassingly high numbers. I suppose I could Google this, but I figured that mentioning this might trigger someone else's nostalgia.
You've inspired me to not spend time browsing dahlia varieties in all their glory and instagram marketing and just take what I can find locally and enjoy them.
And this is why, when I ride around town, I find myself turning on FIP (specifically the Radio France app then fip). It’s eclectic, it’s curated, it’s commercial free, the lady announcers all speak French which is all Greek to me, and above all it always makes me feel GOOD. Yesterday I caught myself singing along with 50 Cent, that motherfuckin P.I.M.P. The tune was so catchy I had no choice!!!!
I really appreciate this thoughtful essay today.
The high school where I work has FINALLY adopted a cell-phone policy. It's pretty simple--kids just have to put their phones in pockets. It has been amazing to see 1) how readily kids are accepting this--they, too, want a break from the constant pressure from their phones, but the devices are simply too powerful to control on their own; 2) how quickly the classroom culture has changed. For the first time in years, I've had to deal with classes being too talkative! Kids are complaining less about having to work in groups; I see them doodling and writing in notebooks during class; they're even taking longer to do their work since they're not just rushing through it so they can go back to their phones.
I really do think that some day we'll look back at the first 15 years of smartphone usage as equivalent to when doctors condoned cigarettes. Obviously, smartphone technology can be an incredibly useful tool, but the idea that everything in life is enhanced by it, or that they *should* be on us at all times (or even that we *should* be reachable at all times) just hasn't borne out.
"I really do think that some day we'll look back at the first 15 years of smartphone usage as equivalent to when doctors condoned cigarettes." Yes! I think so, too. (And I hope so.)
My partner and I talk about this in the context of smartphone use while driving, too... I feel strongly that we'll have a MADD-esque pushback against it, and 10, 15, 20 years from now, it will seem ABSURD that people used their phones while driving — the way we think about drinking and driving now. My partner is not so optimistic.
It's great to hear how the cell phone policy is playing out at your school! I do think kids and teens crave more in-person, real-world interaction but aren't really sure how to get it. Plus the FOMO from thinking that everyone *else* is living it up online means they want to be on their phones all the time too.
Also, I recently had to be the ugly mother-in-law to be and tell my kid's partner to put away his phone. He was driving at a high speed in the rain on a freeway and decided it was time to check his text messages. WTF? I once broke up with a guy because he sent me photos from his long-distance commute, taken from his car at, again, high speed. I just don't get it. (Thank you for this opportunity to vent.)
Ohh, that boils my blood! Vent away!
The Swedish elementary school attended by my grandchildren has a phone locker where smart watches and phones are kept during school hours if the kids bring them to school. Which is a relief.
Oh gosh I hope that happens with driving. It is TERRIFYING. I am strict with myself because my friend lost her parents to a distracted driver in 2004, and he was just talking on the phone, not making a TikTok or texting. Whenever I am in traffic I see most drivers texting or swiping or talking on the phone. Because we can’t handle being bored with our thoughts for one minute. And we think everyone wants a video of us opining on a topic while driving - the urge to be entertained or to share ALL our thoughts at every moment. And it’s so dangerous.
Yup, yup, yup. I hate driving as it is — I feel like I'm piloting a giant weapon — and the thought of doing so while fucking around on Instagram is just... gahhhhhh.
Yes. It’s dangerous. Years ago, I recall seeing someone writing on a legal pad while driving in a tunnel in Boston. Just had it propped up on the steering wheel. I thought that was dangerous at the time.
Many years ago, at least 20 or 25, I remember flying down I-94 at about 80mph; I looked over to the car next to me and the driver was --I shit you not -- folding up his newspaper. I've still never figured out the right words for that scene. Horrifying, hilarious, surreal, absurdist all somehow fall short.
Yeah, good point about the FOMO and them feeling the need to stay on top of what's happening online. A couple of kids have told me they're already experiencing less drama since there isn't this real-time broadcasting (and escalation) of online beef throughout the day. Putting their phones in the wall pocket provides a 51-minute cool-down period for everyone in the building--at least when it comes to online interactions.
I wish my daughter's high school would do this! I instituted a no devices policy in my college composition classroom this semester and was surprised to get no (overt) pushback. Yesterday was the second day of class, and the level of engagement was striking, especially compared to last spring, when blatant device usage during class reached an intolerable peak. I'm so glad to know that your students are accepting and benefiting from the new policy. I hope many more schools will put such policies in place.
It was intolerable for us last year too! Our admin was *extremely* hesitant to create a school-wide policy, but the teachers at my school organized and demanded it. Even at the beginning of the year, the assistant principal who reviewed the policy introduced it as "the policy YOU all wanted." I think they just didn't want to deal with enforcing it or dealing with kids who refused to follow it? But for all of their talk of "what's best for kids," they were being willfully blind to the fact that at least a quarter of our students were totally checked out. I, too, anticipated more pushback especially since I teach HS seniors, but, just like in writing assignments, artificial constraints are actually more freeing than a total lack of rules.
“It's pretty simple--kids just have to put their phones in pockets.”
That just summed it all up for me (how to enjoy fewer things more deeply). Thanks!
It’s really heartening to know that the kids have accepted this!
Ronny Chieng has a great bit on this about how we will look back in fifty years and be shocked at how we let babies be exposed to “the internet”. Second hand stupidity.
About a year ago, after a 10-year hiatus, I re-subscribed to the print version of The Atlantic Monthly. I had read it religiously, cover to cover, every month for much of my 20s and early 30s and it gave me a really nuanced view of the world and of politics, but it also exposed me to so much that I never would have chosen for myself - art, literature, music reviews, extremely niche dives into topics that were never part of my orbit.
I canceled my subscription when I started reading *exactly the thing I wanted to read* on Twitter (RIP) or other news sites and was able to perfectly cultivate my experience with being informed about the world. In a way that exactly aligned with my worldview, from people who reinforced my own biases and beliefs. And I lost SO much during that time. I lost my patience, I lost my ability to think critically, I lost my tolerance for anything that wasn't *the thing I wanted*.
With the death of Twitter (among many other things), resubscribing to a physical magazine and reading it cover to cover every month has changed my brain for the better in ways I didn't really think I had missed. Just being exposed to articles about ideas I had forgotten were important (or not) and immersing myself in them briefly has made me feel a lot calmer about my consumption of the news and media, and it makes me wonder what other areas of my life I can extend this simplicity and peace to.
I've been re-disciplining myself to actually READ the print magazines that still come to my home. And I'm loving Plough magazine -- a faith and arts publication based in a small (3K members) network of anabaptist communities. Thought provoking and profound.
It's interesting that you mention the Atlantic. I subscribed (digitally) during the pandemic, mostly because they had a lot of really excellent COVID coverage, and I also enjoy Charlie Warzel's weekly writing on tech. But they've been running some big articles lately by David Brooks, a writer whose work I loathe, and I actually put my renewal date on my Google calendar in case I want to unsubscribe before it auto-charges me for another year. But I think this is another casualty of the Internet—now I can choose to send my dollars ONLY to people whose views I support (including AHP, Garrett Bucks, etc.). Similarly, I've seen a lot of people on Twitter over the years calling for people to unsubscribe to the NYT, mostly because they have a lot of terrible op-ed writers (David Brooks again!, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, etc.) or are too middle of the road, especially regarding trans issues or by using euphemisms like "racially charged." I wonder how this is going to shake out a few years from now—will opinion/analysis-focused magazines like the Atlantic eventually become obsolete because writers can make more money on forums like Substack, and consumers can choose to directly support the people who have the "right" opinions?
So I actually have David Brooks in mind as I wrote this. Last night I finished reading his piece in this month's magazine about why Americans are so mean to each other and what we can do about it. It was a lot of typical David-Brooks-ness and his shitty centrist views, but in the end, I was glad to have at least read the article. If I had seen his name on an Atlantic piece online, I absolutely would have skipped it. And I agree with you that I don't love that my subscription dollars go to him (or Bret Stephens, or other too-powerful white men with garbage opinions). But this goes back to my original delight at rediscovering The Atlantic - because I can read DB's stories and roll my eyes at them and recognize the things about him that are truly problematic, and still see value in the magazine as a whole.
That being said, I ALSO give my money to Substack writers whose values I support (so many...) and want to see them succeed. But that doesn't negate my original recognition that rediscovering print magazines with a wide variety of opinions, articles, and viewpoints (even ones I disagree with) has overall been beneficial to me.
This resonates hardcore! Forever & always a print magazine enthusiast.
Mmm, this makes me miss National Geographic magazines. I am not a fan of their corporate media daddy, but I agree with exactly what you said about the delight that comes from reading an article that you might have otherwise skimmed past. Plus, I'm not sure I will ever get over the textural experience of a printed publication, whether it's a newspaper, book, or magazine. I use my iPad for reading all the time, and it's nice to get access to e-books when the physical book is expensive and/or the library hold is 30 weeks long. But then again, maybe that's part of AHP's point, is a certain degree of patience and accepting that physical items take time and space to reach us.
We subscribe to print National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Bust. I enjoy print magazines--especially reading in the bathtub.
My husband and I (68 and 65, respectively) often discuss this with our daughters (34 and 30): Has the Internet enhanced or degraded our lives? I grew up with serendipity and mystery, or so it seems now. What did it mean that “Bell Bottom Blues” was the first song I heard on the radio the morning after a date? Or running into that guy from film class at a screening of “400 Blows”--a guy I knew nothing about because there was no social media, and a film I had to wait for the film society to screen--an event. I went to the library to do research, to find out anything, really, and I waited for Elvis Costello’s new album, and put on my fat headphones for the ritual First Listen once I’d made my purchase at the record store--a wondrous place. Yeah...I sound like the old coot I am. The Internet made it possible for me to work from home decades before most people, so I was more available to our kids. The Internet made it possible for my husband to finish his PhD remotely. Etc., etc. But if it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t be devastated. I’m glad I grew up during that era.
I think about this often when I think of childhood/adolescence=that you could only experience a thing when it happened, not via a video of it happening later, and you often experienced it as a communal thing. I remember waiting in line with 50 other people for the Beastie Boys' 'Hello Nasty' and thinking about how all these people in a city in Ohio loved them as much as I did and that felt lovely.
I also remember lying on the family room carpet, post-bath, with wet hair and ice cream watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' because it was the ONLY time you could see those Disney movies, and it made Sunday nights *magical*. My daughter doesn't get to experience that because it's all right there for her, and a lot of that sparkle is lost. There is no longing or anticipation, and sometimes that is the best part.
Yes! Or waiting for the annual broadcast of “The Wizard of Oz” (on a Sunday in the spring)!
This was a BIG DEAL when I was a small child!
I'm 62 and I remember those days well. I am very glad I grew up at the time & place that I did. That said, I do appreciate a lot of things about the Internet! And I have often said I would love to go back to school -- if only to be able to research and write a term paper (draft, edit, final copy!) entirely (or almost entirely) on my laptop! lol I spent a small fortune in rolls of nickels, photocopying periodical articles from the library (which you couldn't borrow) -- 5 cents per page -- and lugging home stacks of books. I'd make handwritten notes from those. Spread out all the different notes on my bed & on the floor and start handwriting a rough draft. After a couple of drafts, I would type up a final version, bottle of white-out at the ready -- usually at 2 a.m. the night before it was due, with the typewriter sitting on a towel to try to muffle the sound in deference to my dorm neighbours. Those were the days....
OMG, open the lid, flip the page, clank the nickel into the slot. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Those WERE the days.
I think this is largely why people are such enthusiastic supporters of Trader Joe's, Aldi, or Costco-they eliminate the choice overwhelm. I often think about how nice it is to have three choices of mustard versus 33 choices, and even if it's not perfect, it's FINE.
Someone introduce the concept of "sufficer" (e.g. is it good enough) vs "maximizer" to me while I was wedding planning. So many things only need to be good enough!!
As my mentor used to say, the perfect is the enemy of the good
Everytime I grocery shop I say, why are there so many kinds of BREAD?
It’s cereal for me.
THIS.
This really resonates with me and is something I've also considered. I have an intense amount of nostalgia for my undergrad years (2005 - 2009, so we had a little more tech but not too much), and this piece has helped bring that nostalgia into focus. My friend group and I spent so. many. nights. doing what we called "Lounging" (capital L) our freshman year. Each floor in our dorm had a lounge, and we would gather most nights to watch the Daily Show on the tiny wall-mounted TV and just fuck around. We were so very silly and uninhibited in some ways, and thinking about it now, I realize that we were just very, very *present.* A few of us had cell phones, but they were mostly for calling home, and we didn't really text one another. Time together was intentional but also wonderfully free-form.
Interestingly, that same friend group set up twice-weekly virtual video calls when the pandemic began and they are STILL GOING, three-plus years later. People filter in and out; sometimes we cancel; but generally, it's remarkably parallel to our Lounging of 15-plus years ago. We are silly and uninhibited and we shoot the shit and fuck around and have fun. We've reconnected in ways that I didn't really expect, which is kind of poignant and beautiful. The calls have even led to yearly reunion gatherings that are always a complete blast and so nourishing.
Whew, now I'm in my nostalgia headspace...!
I went to boarding school and Lounging was our whole life.
In the summer of 2020, when people started having socially distanced hangouts in parks, I realized that one of the things I liked about it was how much it reminded me of how we socialized in high school and college. Namely, you just pick a geographical location (someone's basement, someone's dorm room, in 2020 someone's neighborhood park), everyone just goes there and sits around. I loved it.
Yes! I feel that.
The boarding school experience seems like such a unique one. :)
Oh man, this just brought back a memory of watching Northern Exposure every week in college (so, early ‘90’s). A bunch of us from my all-girls dorm would gather in someone’s room in front of a tiny TV - no talking, no reading anything, no distractions of any kind. Just watching together. I’m not often nostalgic, but I genuinely miss this sort of experience.
I remember sitting in the “lounge” in my dorm, doing laundry, and watching TV with people I didn’t know but who lived in the same dorm complex. We talked about the TV show too. Not going to say what the TV show was, that would date me. But I’m not young.
Oh, the joy of sitting by the radio with a cassette tape in the deck, waiting for a song you wanted to capture, and hitting record as soon as you recognized the first few bars!
And reading liner notes of CDs to find new bands because your favorite artist lists them in their acknowledgements!
I did this so much as a kid and I think about it a lot. It was fun.
I totally understand the point you are making and I grew up in a similar time. But I don’t have the same nostalgia for it. It was fine. But I was an undiagnosed autistic closeted queer kid doing my best to people please my way through the world. If I had an internet full of information autistic self-advocates and queer youth my life wouldn’t have the same trauma in it. I had anxiety as a teenager and I still have anxiety as an adult with a smartphone. Neither version is better. My choices, or more accurately lack of them, for clothing as a fat kid made me cry repeatedly. As a fat adult, I get to shop online (still a less than ideal experience) and feel that my clothes fit and express my personality, style and even sometimes my (nonbinary) gender!
At risk of oversimplifying, I think fewer choices only serves people when most of the choices they have or imagine remaining are accessible to them. There are so many ways in which I want more choices. But it feels like wanting more choices (or not) is distinct from the expectations of social engagement in a device moderated attention economy. My life was more siloed in many ways as a younger person and that had benefits. But it also had hugely stressful drawbacks. And I couldn’t control those things. Right now, we have the illusion of control because we can theoretically make certain decisions but we are not empowered to do so.
I think this is right on, Amy
YES. I just commented above that my (white, straight) son says he'd love to go back to the 90s, while my queer neurodivergent daughter wants no part of it. Makes total sense to me.
thank you for this, amy. I truly believe I would have realized my own queerness at a much earlier age had I had more choice growing up. (omg tumblr alone.) and the stories now! sure streaming has exploded and there is too much everywhere but in some ways, because of this, smaller projects are greenlit than *never* would have been seen in the 90s. like heartstopper or t&s's high school.
I'm a tail-end Boomer with a young teenager and I want to weep when I see how social media/cell phones affect my kid. It's like someone took Seventeen magazine and Cosmopolitan and cranked them up to 11 -- times infinity. I have lots of conversations with my kid about how to deconstruct what she's seeing, I use car time to play stealthily subversive podcasts -- we listened to Jessica DeFino on skin care as the new diet culture, for example. But it's a constant struggle.
Whoa. Skincare as the new diet culture? This is a rich text. Why are kids (including mine) so into skin care? I need to talk to my kids about thus
"Skin care as the new diet culture" -- yes. I'm blown away by how much skin care teens and young adults are doing! Their skin is already in lovely shape, and yet they're using firming creams and wrinkle reducers???
Yes to all you say here -- the ennui results from infinite choice; the joy that can arise from frequent encounters with the unexpected. My 15-year-old daughter has recently started listening to the radio, and it makes me so happy to see her experiencing the rush of having that song she really wants to hear come up after 30 minutes of songs she doesn't care about or even like. This is something that people her age rarely get these days -- the feeling of suddenly having something completely out of your control align with your desires, and not because you've been feeding data to an algorithm (which always seems to get it not quite right, except when it gets it creepily exact). To me, the particular charge of this that radio provides is one of the best there is. Finally, thank you for reminding me of the singular excitement of rushing to get my film to the 24-hour photo processing place before the deadline to get my photos the next day!
Were getting double prints a big deal for anyone else? Like, my good friend was the unofficial photographer of our college crew team, and getting "first dibs at her doubles" gave me such high status.
You've captured so perfectly the cold, lonely exhaustion of knowing what's happening everywhere, all the time yet feeling utterly disconnected. I'm 65, but pretty extremely online, and I'm an introvert who's lived alone a long time. It's never felt desolate in the way it does now.
Yeah, for me (also 65, also introverted) I'm less overwhelmed by FOMO than what I call DIDMO: "Discovering I Did Miss Out," often a party or outing that is being reposted by a friend decades later that I didn't even know happened.
That is a perfect description!
Small edit, I think desolate is the word I was looking for, not despairing (though sometimes that too)
I've talked about this with regards to my kid. I realized that with all the streamers she doesn't have a scarcity of choice for what she wants to watch or play so it can cause decision paralysis or just bouncing around from thing to thinf. Versus when most of us were kids you maybe had a couple VHS tapes and you wore them out and knew the lines by heart. Same for music. It wasn't until I recently bought a vinyl player and let her pick out a few of her own albums to have (Midnights, Spiderverse soundtrack) that she really developed a very strong bond to music. So now with a forced scarcity of choice from the physical media she has been wearing out the grooves and reading liner notes and learning the lyrics in a much more involved way.
There are words to very niche folk songs that my sister and I both know by heart because my dad would played the same CD every Sunday morning as we got ready for church for a whole year. I LOVED lying on my bed reading liner notes! Some of this is probably an age thing - music means so much more when you're younger and have few other ways to define yourself. But thinking about what a big part it played in my childhoods (Little Richard versions of children's songs!) is making me think about how I want to recreate it for my future children. Maybe a record player in the nursery is the answer? Spotify is just not the same.
There are tonies and yoto that have music components and are intentional in their physicality. It took a while to get to this point because they are exposed to so much through Kidz bop and TV and such, but I got tired of Kidz bop and made conscious choices to push her toward adult music. Records are interesting because there are so many novelty records that are goofy and fairly cheap to acquire, but to be honest it took her getting older to even care about having music on in the background.
Yeah, my sister just went to see The Fantasticks at her community theatre, and I told her I still know all the words from the record I had. And she said SHE still knows all the words from me playing the record so often!
I think about this stuff all the time, particularity as a mom of a daughter starting her senior year and a son starting high school last week. That one detail — not recalling a single moment with headphones — contains worlds. I have always known and celebrated that my best adventures happened in the space of “lostness,” relying on encounters with people that led to absurd and memorable outcomes, or even just great conversations. Snippets of life that really, truly in the aggregate feel like they make up “my life.” These random, unplanned encounters with the world fully capture what it feels like to be me. The loss of that gives me immeasurable grief for others; I can only continue to hope that we somehow reach a saturation point and bounce back towards something even more fully human, perhaps as a result of the reckoning with ai. Thank you for this lovely piece.
This post reminded me of a sad story. In the late 90s a large group of my friends and I went the The Lemonwheel. It was a huge Phish music festival that hundreds of thousands of teens and young adults attended all the way at the tippy top of Maine. I didn’t particularly like Phish, but was happy to spend the time with my friends and go on an adventure, we bought the tickets last minute (at Tower Records no less!!). Several car loads of us departed from Boston in the evening to make the 8 hour drive up to Maine. As to be expected, we lost each other along the way, and there were no cell phones to help us reconnect at the festival. When we got to the Lemon Wheel there were huge boards all along shakedown street, (deadhead slang for the main thoroughfare in parking lots where full time followers of bands set up shop selling anything from grilled cheeses to hits of nitrous oxide) with fluttering notes that festival goers left for each other ranging from requests for golden tickets, rides, or detailed instructions for friends on where to meet and at what time. It was like Desperately Seeking Susan but in real life. We managed to find most of our friends but there was one carload of kids we couldn’t track down. We left notes on every board, made signs that we held up high while walking through the crowd, shouted out their names, we did everything we could with the technology of the time to find our friends. When we returned back to Boston after several days of festival delirium we found out that the missing carload of friends had been in a horrible accident on the way up there. The car flipped off the road killing the driver and severely injuring the rest of the passengers. Over the years I’ve often thought about how different that festival would have been for us if we had cell phones and got the news right away. I think about the signs we posted to friends who could never see them. I think about how sometimes not knowing horrible news immediately can be a dark kindness.
Was there ever a short story where if they didn't answer the phone then someone they loved was still alive?
Not that I remember, but it’s a great idea for one!
Maybe in a similar mode, but I may be thinking of the "slow glass" stories. They were about a type of glass that took 20 years for light to pass through. In the stories, it would be a used in a window but into the past, usually with some tragedy involved. Who says that 1950s "hard" science fiction stories couldn't be a tearjerkers?
I am going to have to ruminate on this - it's inspired a bunch of feels. (I think I'm a little older than you - I didn't get anything internet until a year or two after I graduated college, but I recognize a lot of what you describe, which I think is very characteristic of a certain small residential college experience.)
My immediate reaction, though, is to think of clothes. I shop pretty much exclusively online now, and I do miss the luxury of wandering through stores, finding items I didn't know I wanted, and the fun of college friends and I trying on fancy dresses we had nowhere to wear and couldn't afford even if we did. I was a suburban kid so this was in big department stores and mall standards rather than hip urban boutiques or the like, so not "cool," but a lot of fun.
But I couldn't do that now even if I wanted to, as I've sized out of what's available in physical stores, except for Old Navy's failed attempt at inclusivity and maybe a few sad "women's" sections in the aforementioned department stores. Plus-sized fashion obviously still has lots of issues, but the online world has definitely opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. I recognize this is more about consumption than communication, of course, although in the world of communication, it's enable non-mainstream communities in a way that was much harder before infinite choice (to a fault - at the same that the online infinite choice allows, for instance, marginalized people to form communities outside their physical locations, it enables living in bubbles and fostering hate.)
I definitely agree about the algorithm reflecting you back and yourself, too - my Etsy search results are a really blatant example of this. I've become hyperfixated on "curating" my ear piercings so I've been searching for various kinds of earrings, and my Etsy suggestions are clogged with items I've already looked at or already bought. My political/social online experiences are likewise created by various algorithms in ways that aren't quite as obvious but just as narrowing.
I was thinking about this too — and I think that the answer is that I don't want to go back to THAT time, specifically (with all of the shitty things that came with it) so much as a time were there were fewer things but those things actually matched and suited the market, instead of the absolutely unfathomable reality that the vast majority of clothes are made for, oh, half of the population, if that? Basically what if: fewer choices *and also* no fatphobia
One of the things about comment sections is that you never know where they'll take you. When did they go from half sizes to plus sizes? My mother was seriously overweight - diabetes killed her - so she always shopped the racks for half sizes. I vaguely remember that she took a 20 1/2. Would that be a 20+ nowadays? She said that they called them half sizes so there wouldn't be embarrassingly high numbers. I suppose I could Google this, but I figured that mentioning this might trigger someone else's nostalgia.
You've inspired me to not spend time browsing dahlia varieties in all their glory and instagram marketing and just take what I can find locally and enjoy them.
Your garden is also more likely to enjoy the local varieties!
And this is why, when I ride around town, I find myself turning on FIP (specifically the Radio France app then fip). It’s eclectic, it’s curated, it’s commercial free, the lady announcers all speak French which is all Greek to me, and above all it always makes me feel GOOD. Yesterday I caught myself singing along with 50 Cent, that motherfuckin P.I.M.P. The tune was so catchy I had no choice!!!!
Hahaha I'm French and it's amazing to hear a foreigner knowing FIP! That's the beauty of publicly funded radio :)
People in Chicago are proud that WXRT hasn’t changed formats since 1976 and I have to point out that fip has been doing its thing since 1971
WXRT 🤝 (handshake emoji) FIP