Smartphones: A Net Loss

Isaac Rothstein ’28

When I was younger, I was the only kid who didn't watch TV, play video games, or have an iPad or phone. I was always jealous of people with screentime privileges, but whenever I begged my parents for them the answer was no. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I was in 4th grade. Suddenly, I was immersed in a world of screens, and my grades were plummeting. Instead of doing work, I would spend the entire day playing video games. When my parents found out, I started to realize that they were right to not give me access to screens. 

My parents and I tried to come up with strategies to stop me from getting distracted by games, but they were ineffective. Then, as quarantine restrictions were lifted, my family moved to Brooklyn. I enrolled in a new school, one of the only ones with entirely in-person learning. Though I was much more focused at the new school than I was during Covid, the fact that we still used chromebooks at all still distracted me. This was even worse when the school would go on Zoom, which we did whenever someone got Covid, as we were inside, on a screen, without surveillance. In fact, this was the case for everyone. Teachers spent most of the day trying to get students off of online games, which was difficult because we were still using computers for Zoom. There was always a constant battle of teachers blocking games and students finding new ones. Eventually I got caught watching Youtube so frequently that my teachers took away my chromebook privileges. While my classmates were using screens, I had to do all of my work on paper. If I wanted an article for a project, I had to ask my mom to find one for me, which she would then print out. Getting used to my lack of internet was difficult at first, but eventually I managed it. By the end of the year, which meant final projects, I was still behind in school. In an attempt to salvage my grade, I chose to make my final project on Krakatoa, the volcano. I had so much fun researching it, and I was proud of both what I submitted and the grade I received.  That is what happens when we take a step back from computers. 

As life went on and I started 6th grade, I got my screen privileges back and returned to playing video games. Having discovered proxies, an online method to bypassing administration blocks, my classmates and I resumed our addictions. No matter what I tried, I could not stop playing games. In the middle of seventh grade, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I sent the links to all of the games I was playing to my school’s admin, so that they could block them from communal computers. I tried my best to limit playing games during school, using the resources at my disposal, hoping to benefit both myself and my classmates. In 6th grade, I read Fahrenheit 451, which reinforced my attitude towards screens. In eighth grade, I finally lost interest in games, partly because of the lack of unblocked games, partly because I just got tired of them, along with one of my friends. Despite our realization, our other classmates kept playing them. 

Having presented my history with screens, I think it is important to argue why I think they have a negative impact. The worst offenders are smartphones, which have been proven to have significant effects on the brain’s problem solving capability. A study titled "Overstimulation of Newborn Mice Leads to Behavioral Differences and Deficits in Cognitive Performance” conducted by Christakis, D., Ramirez, J. & Ramirez, J. at University of Washington, demonstrates how flashing colored lights affect a brain still in the stage of development. Scientists studying mice to understand this used an experimental group and a control group. They exposed the experimental group to flashing RGB lights for five hours a day throughout their youth, but didn’t expose the control group to flashing  RGB light at all. Once the mice reached adulthood and their brains had fully developed, they were all made to solve a maze. The mice who hadn’t been exposed to flashing RGB lights solved the maze much faster than the mice who had been. Our computer and smartphone screens are RGB lights, making this study applicable to the human relationship with technology. Have you ever noticed yourself struggling to draw your eyes from your screen? It’s because of these RGB lights that you find it difficult to do so. Screens also negatively impact people because they decrease their attention span. YouTube and TikTok wreck one's attention span, because the videos are so short. Our brains get used to a constant input of information from apps that allow us to skip clips that we don’t like. The more people expose themselves to these videos, the less stamina they maintain to focus on one thing for long periods of time. 

People might say the internet is beneficial because it allows easy access to so much information. But, what’s the point of having access to information if we are incapable of processing it? Phones make it easier for people to find information, but when we don’t have to exercise our learning ‘muscle’ to gain information, we lose our critical thinking skills. People become unable to tolerate the exertion of effort or above par workloads. When a machine spits everything out for us, we become incapable of coming up with our own creative ideas.  Phones are like a drug: they make you happy, but only because you are ignoring what is making you sad. They are addictive, and they lull you into a state of blissful ignorance. 

Based on this evidence, I have chosen to refrain from getting a smartphone to this day. Assuming that it never becomes absolutely necessary, I will never get one.