This weeks RCL post is in response to Jean M Twenge’s article titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation”. In case anyone not from English 137 is reading this post here is the link to the article:
Now I’m sure that I’m not alone in the fact that I feel like I have read several articles very similar to the one that we were assigned this week. People love to write articles that condemn the workings of the newest generation and then go into lengthy detail about how everything is ruined now. The title of this article actually implies that our generation has already been destroyed, as though there in no hope of salvaging any of it to make a competent generation or whatever. I’m tired of all of these people that don’t even belong to the iGen predicting the impending demise of the human population.
Putting aside these personal frustrations, I did think that this particular article by Twenge was well presented and thoroughly researched. Jean Twenge has obvious knowledge on the subject, and I am persuaded by ethos to trust the message that she is giving. She garners credibility by talking in detail about what exactly her job entails as a person who examines trends in generations The parts about Athena, the young girl, are especially significant in building credibility because it provides a real life iGen perspective in the article.
It is easy to connect the message of the article to individual, personal experiences everyone has because of the prevalence of smartphones and social media in our society. In technical terms, the article makes good use of Kairos to become a persuasive message that I am actually interested in. Despite my exasperation with the doomsday prophecies for our generation, the message that Twenge is sending is one that directly concerns me, and it is based on an idea that has already gathered steam for many years. For those reasons and some others it has made me a captive audience member.
Since the release of the first smartphone and the enormous surge of social media everybody has been wondering what the implications will be. Most people in older generations inherently distrust things that are new and complicate the way things have always been, so it seems like there has always been negative press about the technology wave of the 21st century. However, this article stands apart from all of that chatter because it provides data from the past ten years that decisively concludes that social media and smartphone technology is making iGens unhappy.
Now, I am never one to be completely swayed by any persuasive argument, and it the same case regarding this article. I do find myself in agreement with the author that ultimately social media has direct correlation to unhappiness in iGens, but I think that many other factors play a role. Comparing generations to each other is not the most accurate way to evaluate the successfulness of a generation because of these other factors. We live in an age where information can be shared quicker and to a larger audience than any generation before us, and this means that we can share how we feel with others. We can know what others are feeling in a more intimate sense and and a larger scale because there are platforms for exactly this purpose.
Ideas can trend among demographics in ways that they never could before, and this has lead to the issue of “hot-button topics” These are issues that are sensitive and usually garner response in some way. Concussions are a hot-button issue right now because of the level of attention being paid to them. In any other generation if a kid got a headache after playing a game there would be little attention paid to it, whereas now there are multiple protocols, warnings, and information about concussions everywhere. And because of this there has been an enormous spike in reported concussions, a majority of them mild ones that would never have been diagnosed in an older generation.
I believe that in a similar way to concussions, depression (and mental health in general) has become a hot-button issue. Twenge talks a lot about the significant increase in depression rates and suicide rates. Personally, I think that these number have jumped so high not just because of social media and smartphones, and not just because of the more anti-social behavior of iGen, but because more attention is being paid to mental health in our current society compared to other generations. If you tell someone that you feel unhappy nowadays it is an easier and less humiliating process to get professional help than it was 5o years ago. Also, as more information is circulated about mental health issues, more people are exposed to what exactly depression entails, and are more likely to understand that they might actually be dealing with it.
I got a little off topic, but in conclusion the article did a very good job establishing ethos to make the core message more persuasive. It was also written at a time when this issue is relevant, which also helps its persuasion.
Your blog does a very well job analyzing the effective strategies the author uses in her article to make her argument, despite the fact that you disagree with the argument she is making. Objectively removing yourself from the article gives a much different perspective on the rhetorical strategies of the article, but this makes me wonder whether or not it is possible to objectively look at the arguments presented as a member of our generation. Can we separate our personal attachments to our smartphones and objectively criticize all of the negative aspects instead of be blinded by the positive ones? You bring up a very good point regarding the author’s claim to the correlation between smartphones and mental illnesses. The idea of “hot-button topics” is definitely a factor overlooked by many individuals as although it may seem like there was simply a time when this topic was discussed less prominently, the sudden presence of the topic in our daily discussions can no be directly correlated to an increase in say mental illnesses. Your analogy of the increase in awareness of mental illnesses to the increase in awareness of concussions is a strong statement which better provides a more relatable scenario for the reader to understand. Overall, well done on critically analyzing this author’s article objectively, as opposed to simply agreeing or disagreeing with their statements.