Picture this. I am at a dinner in a dimly lit restaurant with some academics. We are all satiated from both the content of our discussions and the good food. The wine is flowing, as is the conversation. Esoteric jokes on esoteric historical figures are made, the majority of which go over my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of someone on their smartphone. Okay, nothing necessarily fatal. Perhaps they are checking train times. Oh how wrong was I.
To draw on Donna Tartt’s opening of The Secret History: it was only after I took another look at their screen that I “came to understand the gravity of our situation”. There in front of me, an eminent academic, smartphone clutched in hand, was watching YouTube Shorts. If I recall correctly, they were trying to find a particular Short to explain something to a fellow guest. My reaction in the moment was to smirk and forget about it. It is what it is. Let them be. But I kept coming back to this episode. What prevented this memory from disappearing into the mental abyss?
The case of the academic’s foray into YouTube Shorts at the dinner table struck a chord with me as it fits into a wider pattern of behaviour that I have come to notice. Walking about town, in social situations, and at home, I see adults not infrequently consumed by their phone screens. Much of the anti-smartphone discourse has, quite reasonably, focused on the impact of smartphones on children and teenagers. As people who are, alas, unlikely to have experienced a childhood without a smartphone or some form of social media, it is not surprising that younger people are more vulnerable to the vice-like grip of the smartphone than those of an older generation. For me, I got Instagram, my first social media par excellence (if I discount the hours spent watching Vsauce on YouTube), at around ten or eleven years old. With my mind still developing, this was gravely detrimental. And yet, I find that the focus on children and teenagers’ usage of smartphones from adults has a whiff of the infamous “when one finger points, three point back at you”.
The problem of adult screenagers hits, quite literally, close to home. I know I am not alone when I speak of certain close, later middle-aged, and nearing retirement family members who I habitually find scrolling through Instagram Reels, X, or the news on their smartphones. Often I will find them, smartphone in one hand, coffee in the other, getting a cheeky scroll session in before heading off to work. Public transport is another place where such behaviour is noticeable. When I lived in London, during my journey on the number 53 bus from Lewisham to the archives at Lambeth Palace Library, I would more often than not be obliged to listen to four second clips of slop as an adult scrolled through TikTok sans headphones.
For me, the most devastating example of adults screenager-ing is when I see a parent pushing a pram whilst they scroll on their smartphone. Worse still if the child has been given some form of screen-based “entertainment”. As someone who does not have children, I feel bad for judging someone else’s parenting, but it seems that in this situation any parent-child bonding has been precluded at the discretion of a screenager parent. It is not as if I expect a parent to have a deep conversation with a six month old, but at least some effort towards screenless bonding would be nice.
There is, I will partially concede, some difference between an adult and teenager scrolling aimlessly on a screen. Whereas a smartphone-obsessed individual nearing retirement will have had a childhood without a smartphone and social media and is thus, perhaps, more in control over their screen use, the same cannot be said for a child or teenager. Adult screenagers have known a different world without smartphones, whereas most teenagers today have not. Indeed, if we use the example with which I opened, whilst the YouTube Shorts enjoyer almost certainly learned to entertain themselves and socialise with others in ways not mediated by a smartphone, a child today will probably not have done so and learned these things through a smartphone. Of course, more and more adults were also screenagers when they were themselves teenagers. Alas, this is the case for me, for whilst I am technically an adult now, I also grew up a screenager. This latter point instils me with dread as children are now being raised by adults who were screenagers themselves ten years ago, in the age of Musical.ly and Vine. The last vestiges of parenting done by people who were not screenagers are dying out.
Despite this concession, when it comes to adults who now have a screen time of several hours a day, so what if their childhood was screen-free? They may have grown up when there were but three television channels available, but now they spend hours scrolling their lives away. The lived experience of an adult and a teenager who are both consumed by their smartphone are comparable. The conversation against the abuses of technology needs to go beyond a concern for children, teenagers, and young people only. It is right to be concerned about how the lives of younger people are taken over by smartphones and social media. However, the infatuation of adults by screens deserves our attention and consideration too.
To finish with an anecdote, my friend and I recently found ourselves in a farm shop cafe somewhere in the English countryside on a bikepacking trip. The cafe was full of adults, including people who appeared to be in their seventies and eighties. There in front of us were two older ladies, one with a smartphone the other an iPad, scrolling on indiscernible apps. They chatted to each other, but also scrolled and scrolled for the half an hour or so that we were there. In contrast, my friend briefly checked her messages whilst I failed to get onto the rural Wi-Fi. We soon put our phones away and chatted about our physical exertions. In this situation, who, then, are the real screenagers?