Jean M. Twenge

Analyzes how the young people born in the mid-1990s and later significantly differ from those of previous generations, examining how social media and texting may be behind today's unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

IGen

Lindy

Just to get this out of the way first: I hate the title and early in the book Twenge misapplies life history theory in a way that made me grind my teeth.

The argument, as Twenge lays it out in the introduction, is provocative and one that interests me: the widespread adoption of smartphones has fundamentally altered American adolescence. The problem is that Twenge does not stick to demonstrating this point. She presents a compelling case in discussing the interaction between technology and teenage mental health in Chapter 4, and briefly mentions how the internet leads to polarization and bubble effects with regard to politics at the end of Chapter 10, but I don't think she mentions the internet or smartphones once in the chapter about religion and so it's unclear how this information relates back to the rest of her arguments. In my opinion the religion statistics would have best been integrated into Chapter 10's discussion of libertarianism. Speaking of that, it surprises me that Twenge didn't connect the increased importance of the internet in daily life to the longstanding libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. 

I was hoping for something that dives deeper than a typical Newsweek article, and the data Twenge presents offers opportunities for more complex analysis, but instead she opts for the simplistic and fails to look at the ways the internet has changed American life overall and then figure out how teenagers fit into it. Take, for example, the concluding sentence of Chapter 4: "In other words, there is a simple, free way to improve mental health: put down the phone, and do something else" (p. 118). Okay... what else? Twenge constantly invokes mall rat nostalgia so I guess that's one place she might advocate teens meet up with their friends, but that often isn't an option as malls continue to shut down thanks to the popularity of online shopping amongst all demographics. Public space on the whole is in decline, and there really isn't anything teenagers alone can do about it. The internet is, in some analyses, one of the few public spaces readily accessible. Likewise, I'm not sure Twenge understands that there are genuinely fewer opportunities for teen employment than in the past-- I was a lifeguard in high school so that job's still there, but my peers who worked at the mall would now be out of luck, and supermarkets and drug stores employ fewer individuals as they switch over to automated checkouts. I'm also guessing Twenge wouldn't count a teen who makes extra cash by selling her artwork on Redbubble or another informal internet based gig to be working. This is how labor goes for a lot of people at the moment, whether they were born after 1995 or not. 

I would recommend reading iGen in tandem with It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, which delves into the online social lives of late millennials and forecasts many of the trends outlined in the former.

IGen Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

Reviews