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I must confess I have a huge bias with respect to the questions posed in the title and subtitle of this essay. I have been teaching college-level courses for more than 40 years. Most of those courses are three-hour classes with two breaks.
Almost every student takes out a cellphone and starts texting during the few minutes before class begins. The cellphones come out again during short breaks and as soon as the class is over. The students who leave immediately often congregate on the steps outside the building, where cellphone reception is better. They are already texting as I walk past them. As I return to my office in another building, I sometimes feel like I am in a cellphone/texting class, interrupted occasionally by a few lessons in literature or writing.
As a writer and author, not to mention a much older American, I treasure those moments when I am alone with my uninterrupted thoughts. My best ideas usually come when I am alone doing something other than writing, often just walking and contemplating the world around me. I would never give up those opportunities, but does that make me a deeper thinker than my students?
If I am a deeper thinker, it is probably because I have a deeper well of experience, earned through the aging process, on which to base my ruminations. Or maybe I am just a grumpy, old curmudgeon who refuses to get with the modern world and all the electronic gadgetry that defines it.
My own phone of preference is an ancient flip-top cellphone I carry on my belt and seldom use. My wife insists I have it in case I get lost, or my 20-year-old Honda Accord breaks down. Otherwise, I would probably dispense with the cellphone altogether as I seldom turn it on.
When I pull it out and place it on my desk before class, my students look at it like it must be the one they believe Alexander Graham Bell invented. (Today’s students couldn’t possibly know that the first telephone I used was the box wall phone in the kitchen of my uncle’s farmhouse.) Other students chuckle and shake their heads in unison at the ancient relic lying on my desk. My flip-top cellphone gets no respect in a college classroom.
I have also stubbornly refused to learn how to text. For one thing, my fingers are too fat to hit the right keys on a cellphone. That matters very little as I would refuse to text anyway.
My rants against modern electronic technology have earned my classroom, or so I am told, a reputation as “the place where electronics go to die.” In retaliation, I have a series of insults I hurl at my students whenever the opportunity arises. I refer to their cellphones as “electronic pacifiers” and their texting as “intellectual vaping.”
My favorite response was created by another professor I read about on an ecard who has a similar cellphone/texting problem in his classroom. He warns his students he will know if they are texting during class time, because “no one can spend that much time staring at their crotch.” (I wish I had thought of that one!)
My heroes are authors like Henry David Thoreau, not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, although I have read that neither Gates nor Jobs allowed their young children to use much of the modern gadgetry they invented. In Walden, Thoreau has an entire chapter on “Solitude.” Judging from this chapter alone, it is hard to believe that he would ever be a multitasker; or that he would peer for hours into Walden Pond, hoping to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe—while occasionally pausing to text friends about what he was doing.
He saw everything in nature as a window through which the universe revealed its many mysteries. However, in Thoreau’s world, the only way to think deeply was to first separate oneself from the superficial and mundane distractions of life—or at least that is what I tell my students as they text away during our breaks to reengage with friends they have been separated from for all of 45 minutes.
But I still haven’t really addressed the question raised in the title of this piece: "Do Cellphones and Social Media Create Superficial Thinking?" I am sure scientists have looked into this issue and will continue to do so as more and more people devote their time to staring at their crotches. But that is beyond my area of expertise.
Here’s what I do know. For several years, I, like many of my colleagues, allowed laptop computer use in our classes during lectures and discussions. What we learned, however, is that students would look up any question we posed to them and virtually read the response off their computer screens. They did not look deep inside themselves to whatever original response they might create in the depths of their own unique intellects. The answers to them were to be found in their computers or cellphones, not in their own ability to think.
When many of my colleagues banned computer and cellphone use from their classrooms during these discussion sessions, they encountered another teaching challenge: complete silence. No one was willing to offer a response. Deafening silence filled the room.
I know from private conversations that these were intelligent students. Yet, it seemed they had been so conditioned to look for the definitive answers in their computers that they couldn’t deal with the uncertainty of a world in which there are no easy answers. So they preferred to remain silent.
What can I conclude from this lament? Probably not much. However, I do know that throughout world history, despots and tyrants have always sought to control the masses through thought-control. The only way to do this is to take away the ability of people to think, either through programming, indoctrination, and/or by simply forbidding free, independent thought and discourse. Perhaps today, modern computer technology is doing their work for them.
Texting and other electronic technologies often deny young people the solitude the great thinkers like Michelangelo, DaVinci, Einstein, Thoreau, and numerous others sought as they tried to understand this thing called human life. What Thoreau wrote at the very end of the chapter in Walden titled “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” applies to all of these deep-thinking individuals who graced the human race with their presence and insights: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it: but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper, fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
A few sentences later in the same paragraph, Thoreau wrote, “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” He had considerable faith in young people to see the world more clearly because they were unencumbered by the complexities and obstacles that come later in life. However, he would probably be concerned that the electronic gadgetry that consumes young people’s many waking hours in the modern world may have closed off those channels of deeper thinking, even though they were fully capable of it.
Frankly, I was planning to end my rant against modern electronic gadgetry, especially cellphones and social media, with this final gesture to Thoreau’s concept of living and thinking deeply. However, I set this essay aside on numerous occasions. During that time, two articles in the nation’s media addressed the same issue I was pondering.
I opened my New York Times (October 4, 2019) and saw a photograph of a group of people holding their cellphones high in the air with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The accompanying article, titled “Our Fear of Being a Nobody,” written by Bianca Vivion Brooks, addressed many of the same issues during her nearly decade-long involvement with social media.
She explained that her decision to devote so many waking hours to social media was based on her fear that without these external props and constant interactions with her peers, she would fade into obscurity. Nine years later, she realized that her “fear of obscurity is eclipsed by much deeper ones—the fear of foregoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone....” She also worried that the superficial connections she established with other people through the electronic media had replaced the deeper, more meaningful relationships that were possible in life.
Another article, titled “Human Interaction Improves While on ‘Digital Detox,’” in the San Diego Union-Tribune (October 29, 2019), described a growing trend of people who take “a vacation from social media and digital technology [while] they travel.” The article summarized the results of a British study of 24 people who traveled to “17 countries and regions, most unplugged from technologies such as mobile phones, laptops, social media, and navigation tools for more than 24 hours.”
They were participating in what has become known as “digital-free tourism” or “digital detox holidays.” Many of them experienced considerable anxiety when they were first unplugged from their electronic connections to the rest of the world. However, that anxiety gradually subsided as they established deeper connections with their traveling companions and the sights, sounds, and surroundings of the places they were visiting. The downside was when they plugged themselves back into their electronic portals and realized during their absences, they were inundated with “incoming messages and notifications received while they were away.” The article ends on that note.
However, an old curmudgeon like me can only hope that perhaps the accumulation of all of this trivia served as a reminder of the clutter they had avoided while they explored the deeper wellsprings of life on their digital-free holidays.
Maybe Thoreau was right after all!
