Will the“Digital Age” be the Downfall to Our Future Generations?
There are many varying factors that contribute to the ever changing “digital age” and how these times may help or hinder us. The film “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World” by Werner Herzog and the article Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation by Jean Twenge provide us with differing looks into the new age we are living in, while still holding constant the idea that society may not be looking at the whole picture. The benefits to the birth of the internet and digitalizing our modern world are overwhelming that we can see throughout our every day life. When it comes to connectivity, accessibility, and availability, our world today is faster than ever before. I can ask Google any question I may have and I will know the answer in under a minute. That is something that is new to older generations, yet, unfathomable to Millennials/iGen (according to Jean Twenge).
In an examples from the film by Werner Herzog, he interviews many various technologically advanced companies or specialists who can give us an inside look to how the advancements in technology and the start of the internet and phones have proven to be a tool of success or downfall. The successes typically came from the ability to access and connect with people everywhere from various ages and parts of the country. When Herzog interviewed the CEO of the self driving car company, he began to divulge in the way the internet allowed him to teach online classes to hundreds of thousands of students who actually out preformed his previous Stanford students. This idea that you can use the internet to access a new scope of people with great ideas and knowledge could not have been done with out the invention of the online world.
On the opposing end, we also could see how this new world would yield negative effects on our society when it comes to anonymity, privacy, and the effective withdrawal of the real world. I of course knew these negative effects were present in our generation, yet, I was eye-opened when watching the various stories that I never thought about before. When it came to the Catsouras family and the death of their daughter and sister plastered all over the internet, this reality began to set in. This lack of privacy or accountability that the internet has can be a starting point for much pain in peoples lives.

This brought me to think about my own experience in the online world, specifically, anonymous sites such as Yik Yak. If you are unaware of what this application is, it was available for smartphones and directly marketed to college students because it allowed people to post anonymous discussions that you could respond to and vote “up” or “down” but could only view within a 5 mile radius. This is why colleges were using it so much because there were so many people with these 5 mile radii that could talk and respond to you. This application, however, began to get discovered by high school students and turned into personalized, anonymous attacks. I fell victim to many anonymous cyber bullies who could post anything they wanted about me and I would never know which one of my classmates sent it in. The only way for these “Yaks” to disappear was to have it reach 10 “down” votes by other peers, but that rarely happened. In a type of application like this, people don’t have to take responsibility for their words or actions because you are hiding behind a screen, or, in this case, your cell phone. This type of online discussion board really disconnects individuals from the real world they are living in and allow young kids to be subjected to hateful and nasty comments in their fingertips at all times.
This relates back to the article written by Jean Twenge about smartphones and the effect it has created in this newly named generation; iGen. This is defined as anyone born between 1995 and 2012 who grew up with smartphones becoming the new norm. I remember, personally, everyone had an iPhone by the start of high school and other kids beginning to use iPads in school by my senior year. I would like to note, however, my childhood was never bombarded with technology as kids today are. We had a desktop computer, a landline, and a VCR for the majority of my life. Nowadays, when I babysit children for extra cash in college, a 4 year old picks up her personal iPad, unlocks it, opens up YouTube, and picks her favorite TV show and props it up onto the couch. By children watching their parents on their own devices, they quickly learn how to access and use their own a such a young age.
Twenge mentions as well that due to the boom of technology, there are drastic changes that we can statically see that differs from the preceding generations. iGen is much safer and secluded from the world because many of them choose to stay in and talk to each other on their phones rather than meeting up to see people in the real world. This could be seen as a positive, yet, iGen are more vulnerable which means their depression and suicide rates are higher than any generation before them. This kind of reality is very problematic and on the verge of the biggest mental health break thus far in history.
We can see through the article and film that there is much more to be worried about than our society may realize when it comes to the overuse of the internet and how the ever changing online world can yield great effects that many become irreversible.