The mute generation

An Italian city, interior day, thirteen o'clock. The suburban bus is full of high school students returning home after class. All the seats are occupied, some by the voluminous backpacks loaded with books. Several young people are standing, only two or three passengers, including the scribe, are not of school age. Three things are striking: the full, heavy backpacks, first of all. Many books many, little study: first incongruity. Second element, the unnatural silence of the boys. None of the natural confusion of age, the cheerful “mess” that characterized other generations. Third, corollary and reason for the silence: everyone, but really everyone, boys and girls, sitting or standing, are bent over - almost religiously - over their smartphones.

The object is no longer a tool, but a reason for living, a cornucopia, a medium for every relationship with the world, a substitute for the outside world, a magic box that the elderly insist on considering to be a telephone, while for the youngest it is a sort of universal key, a reassuring Linus blanket, constantly wielded, that connects but leaves one in a state of perpetual minority, a mass addiction from which few remain immune. The medium is the message, said Marshall Mc Luhan, the greatest scholar of communication and its effects on behaviour. And the message, it seems to the observer, is the emergence of a silent generation. Jonathan Haidt, a developmental psychologist, was right, asserting that since 2010, the year the smartphone burst onto the market, the brains of those who have been formed with and on that small multifunctional artefact have become different from those who were adults at the time of the launch of the prodigious little box.

Impressed, the scribe, upon returning home (smartphone research fails him, he is an aging boomer, not a Millennial) sets out to study, to research, to understand whether the reflection on youthful dumbness makes sense or is just a frowning age-related summary judgement. Too simple: the writer has discovered hot water, there really is a mute generation. Even nomophobia is rampant among the very young, an acronym of American origin, a neologism deriving from the contraction of ‘no mobile phobia’, the fear (sometimes terror) of separating oneself or not having the device available. What for many elderly people is a liberation, for their grandchildren is an illness. Alongside nomophobia, there creeps phonophobia, i.e. the discomfort of communicating by phone (the smartphone, the old-fashioned scribe thinks, is ‘also’ a phone) and the habit of not answering calls. Better to chat on Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram.

The statistics are stark: ninety-five per cent of young people use messaging to communicate and share what we have to call “content”, messages, texts, images, videos. A similar percentage participates in one or more chat rooms, the groups to which a message or content is addressed. Verbal communication seems to be on the rout, a widespread aphasia that also partly explains the poverty of language, the emaciation, the lack of depth of what is said and written. As always, massification makes everything superficial. Not only tenses and verbal modes disappear in favour of the present indicative, but also the nuances, the tones of the lexicon, of direct dialogue. Non-verbal language, expressions, postures, movements of body parts also declines or vanishes.

Young people appear eternally curved, bent over an object that in a moment connects and - apparently - shows, teaches, explains, solves every problem in a moment. An enormous power, which shapes, deforms, transforms and above all manipulates. Very few young people use a smartphone as a phone. The mute generation, according to all analysts, increasingly tries to avoid answering calls. Many fear that the ringing means bad news. If this is true, it is a frightened generation, ostriches who bury their heads in the sand, terrified of reality.

Typing rather than talking: an anthropological revolution. For three quarters of young people, research explains, talking on a mobile phone consumes too much time. Almost two-thirds say they dodge calls so as not to have to listen to their interlocutor complain. Others consider conversations inefficient, annoying, stressful or unnecessary, so they avoid them. They answer work calls more than friends and family. Delights of precarization. Chats and voice messages have replaced phone calls. Although on average members of Generation Z and Millennials spend five hours a day glued to their mobile screens, they prefer to arrange a time for a call rather than receive it unannounced.

Eighty per cent of Millennials confess to feeling anxiety before making a call; often to avoid conflict they don't even dial the number. When these negative feelings turn into fear, a peculiar telephobia is born. This phenomenon is an intense fear related to making or receiving calls, but goes beyond a preference for other modes of communication. More and more young people suffer from it, those who use smartphones the most. Not because of the device, but because of the communication it implies, two-way, direct though mediated by an apparatus. A further phenomenon is so-called “phubbing” (union of phone and snubbing, ignoring): the smartphone inhibits or interrupts familiar communication. It consists of ignoring friends and family during a conversation or at the dinner table in order to concentrate on the mobile phone.

Ties are also fraying because it is increasingly common for parents and children under the same roof to stop paying attention to each other when they are in front of their mobile phones, computers and television. Concentrated on the mobile device, one loses interest in one's surroundings, people, things, the environment. This phenomenon is not only the prerogative of young people, unfortunately, and generates a powerful imitative effect. Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to tell parents: “don't worry if your children don't listen to you, they are watching you all day long”. Example is the most powerful educational tool. If children see the adults they refer to spending hours in front of their mobile phone, television or computer, or answering a call or texting while eating lunch or having company, they will not hesitate to do the same. One of the consequences of screen overexposure mutism is the distorted perception of what is real and what is virtual. One boy kills another over a twenty-euro telephone headset: this is terrible Italian news.

Nomophobia, the irrational fear of being without a mobile phone, affects eighty per cent of boys. What would they do if they were left without a smartphone for a week? Perhaps instead of eating lunch while watching Tik Tok they would read a book, regain their speech and think more. Who knows. A long-term study sought to understand youth use of mobile devices. The experiment consisted of placing a control device on the mobile phones of a large sample of teenagers and young adults. In the first phase, the hours spent connected to the smartphone were measured and analyzed. Of the average of five hours, four were devoted to social networks, Whatsapp, Instagram and Tik Tok in order of use. The Chinese platform is increasingly the only information channel for young people.

The researchers' discovery was that young people do not seek information (!!); they come to them accidentally and involuntarily, through social networks. The concern rises: the power of those who provide information in this way is immense, devious, devoid of filters, mediations and even more so of alternative channels. Dumbness can easily turn into absence of thought. Above all of critical spirit, confrontation, acceptance - perhaps harsh but serene - of different points of view. As said many times, the mechanism generates a single thought, a subtly totalitarian non-thought due to lack of debate, fear and therefore hatred of alternative views. Today, it would perhaps be impossible to write The Barney Version, Mordecai Richler's 1997 novel, the autobiography of a man who interprets the events of his life defensively in order to free himself from the accusation of having killed a friend.

In the second phase of the experiment, the participants were obliged not to use mobile phones and to write down their impressions in a diary. Discomfort, insecurity, anxiety and addiction were the most recurrent feelings. Many reported looking into nothingness for a long time. In the third phase, they were allowed to resume using the devices. Use levels immediately returned to the average of five hours. The first change observed by the young people was the admission that they were addicted to mobile phones and that their whole life was tied up with the smartphone. Smart phone, foolish user? Quite a few improved their relationship with family members and regained lost habits. Another observation - which needs no specific study - is that young people read very little, and almost never the daily newspaper or weeklies.

For them, it is pointless to buy something that informs them of what has already happened, which is updated via smartphone. Another proof of the reduction of life to the present and of information to momentary breaking news, fragments that flow away replaced by the next news item. No reflection, no in-depth analysis, as blog writers know. The imperative demand is to be brief, very brief, on pain of boredom and abandonment of readers. Yet reality is complex and cannot be reduced to the Bignami [compendiums for students in small book format published by the publishing house of the same name] or, as they say now, the tutorial.

In the experiment, among those who agreed to remain without a mobile phone, some, after the initial nothingness and bewilderment, set out in search of content on their own, on alternative (i.e. traditional!) media, reusing printed paper or recovering the informative (and educational) value of the Net. Being without a mobile phone and having to go to sites or go to the library, forced me to search, to read and I felt more informed, reported one participant. A minority personality, but one who opens his heart to hope: he did not accept becoming the human extension of the artificial device and became proactive again. We are not dumb, we are not incapable of reasoning, we are not dependent on an object and the world view it conveys. As long as we recognise the dependence, the absence of communication, the detachment from community, to restore value to the Other and otherness. We fear that this is not the case for this generation, ruined - irretrievably ?- by its fathers, the creators of the predominance of having over being, of matter over spirit, of the individual over the community, of conformism over debate, of naked technique, of the “how” over the “why”, of the “instant” over the past and the future.

Original column by Roberto Pecchioli:

https://www.ereticamente.net/la-generazione-muta-roberto-pecchioli/

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo