Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation Summary

New communicative technologies — for the purpose of this paper — refer to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and their rise particularly in partnership with smart mobile devices. Usually when these mediums are discussed they are paired with headlines like; “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” (Twenge 2017) which have theorist like danah boyd and Alice Marwick urging us to stop believing the hype. According to boyd, this panic over youth and what they’re doing is nothing new, contrary to what many would want you to believe, boyd believes that American youth are in fact more concerned with creating public spaces where they can exist without adult supervision. In this paper I will use two authors, danah boyd

By viewing new communicative technologies from primarily dystopian technologically deterministic angles, you ultimately ignore the ways that they are actually being used by youth today. danah boyd suggests through her research that teens today are using social media to form their own publics, using sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, they are creating private spaces within public platforms to express themselves and continue their friendships beyond physical attachments as well as without the intrusive presence of adults. Alice Marwick offers another understanding of youth’s online activities that differ from boyd’s. Instead of social media being used exclusively as a private space for teens and their friends, Marwick discusses how social media allow average people to reach the broad audiences once available only to those with access to broadcast media (157). Kids these days, have found ways to manipulate and adapt the intentions behind these social networking sites to bend to their own wills. Not everyone uses these technologies in the same way. Some teens are like those interviewed by boyd; using social media exclusively for communication and sharing with their friends across multiple platforms. And some use these technologies in the ways Marwick suggests, to broadcast themselves to a mass audience by emulating the tactics and practices of celebrities to become ‘Instafamous’. However different the analyses of teenagers and youth by these authors, it emphasizes the importance of not believing the hype. Youth are not one dimensional followers simply being led by company created subcultures and media applications, the ways in which they use their various medias depends solely on the individual and, the changes between this generation and the last is not substantial enough to incite feelings of moral