Past generations were “screen free”? You’ve got to be kidding.

The vastly greater freedom, expression, and choice today’s technologies afford is why reactionary older generations raised on stultifying media seek to suppress them.

Socrates and Plato were cerebral fundamentalists. They hated books. The written word, Plato warned in Phaedrus, “will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks… [Reading books] will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. As with men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

If they witnessed today’s criticism of the isolating features of social media, Socratics would have had a further point: the solitary “me time” spent reading books detracts from time socializing with real human beings. At least, social media can involve human interactions like texting, emailing, videochatting. But social mediaphobes grew up with books, magazines, and newspapers, so those are their ideal media.

The larger commonality is that mediaphobes, ancient to modern, view humans as hopelessly weak, unable to adapt, with fragile psyches easily corrupted by technological innovation. They see humans as helpless automatons ruled by cheap allures sensational to subliminal to algorithmic, ever-compelled to misuse each new medium in the most destructive way possible to wreck relationships, mental health, and lives.

How can it be, then…

… that teens, most of whom are online for hours a day, tell us their worst problems by far stem not from screens, smartphones, messages, and algorithms, but from good old face-to-face, personal interactions? (Socrates’ fate exemplifies that last peril.)

Two rigid rules dictate how authorities treat teens’ self-reports: (a) teens who report negative things about themselves are believed and sensationalized, while (b) the same teens who report good things about themselves or bad things about adults and families are ignored and dismissed.

Thus, authorities and commentators incessantly cite the 30% of teens who reported on the CDC’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance that they suffer frequently poor mental health. Yet, when 83% of those same depressed teens reported on the same exact survey that they also suffer emotional and violent abuses inflicted by parents and other household adults, and 75% also reported histories of living with adults’ poor mental health, suicidal behaviors, and/or drug alcohol abuse, authorities dismiss their concerns.

The “idiot box(es)”

Back in social-media-alarmists’ Jonathan Haidt’s and Jean Twenge’s adolescences in the 1970s and 1980s, Neilsen surveys show, 12-17-year-olds averaged 25 to 30 hours per week (one-third of their waking non-school time) staring at television screens, passively absorbing one-way entertainment and ad messages hawking sugar, Twiggy fashion, impossible beauty, wealth, and mindless consumption. Media and corporate critic Vance Packard’s estate should sue Haidt, Twenge, and social-mediaphobes for appropriating his complaints, right down to fearing that 1970s and ‘80s children no longer played outdoors.

The other idiot box consuming hours of teenage time back then was the radio. At least, in its pre-1950 golden age, radio listeners had to imagine their own visuals for The Shadow, War of the Worlds, Flash Gordon, etc. Then, as television ascended, post-1950, radio devolved into passive, repetitive top-40 ad-stuffed formats dictated by Billboard popularity.

No wonder that by the 1970s, TV and radio would be run by Artificial Intelligence computers spinning looped tapes and sequencing formulaic programming. Put passively-consumed TV and radio of the 1950s-90s era alongside the obnoxious voice telephone, whose bleatings demanded immediate attention to some disembodied voice who knew exactly where the call recipient lived, and you have the trifecta of mind-melting media. Occasionally, a provocative movie (another screen), show, or song would break the tedium.

Today’s elder nostalgia does not yearn for frolicky screen-free teens socializing in public. Hell, no. Elders’ fear of solitary teens pales in comparison to their panic over teens in public groups. Rather, it seeks to return to passively-entertained adolescence, one in which tribal elders safely control what media, information, and censored expressions teenagers are allowed.

Online/social media’s threat is that it offers not the stifling, force-fed content to which today’s mediaphobes would confine teens, but a virtually unlimited world of opportunities, information, contacts, and creativity. That is, the mediaphobe of the ages fears young people having options. Notice how quickly they assume that teens’ online freedom boils down to porn and bullying.

The voice-phone nostalgics can’t be serious

A 2024 survey of 2,000 U.K. adults found “nearly 70 percent of those aged 18-34 preferred texting over talking, with 23 percent admitting they never answer calls at all. The reluctance to pick up the phone is often linked to avoiding scam calls, but social factors also play a role.” Said the founder of a center that counsels avoiders to answer the phone: “Social media contributes to the environment of curated interactions and, in turn, causes phone calls to feel overwhelming from their spontaneity."

Baloney. Voice-telephone-avoidance is a fantastic trend. The voice telephone is the all-time most disembodied, destructive, intrusive, danger-exposing, demanding instrument of communication, second only to the rock-wrapped note hurled through a window. Except for a few numbers I recognize, I never answer my voice phone.

Crusades to tar Gen Z’s voice-phone disdain as pathological are packed with hypocrisy. Social-mediaphobes at once berate Gen Z’s supposed online recklessness and overexposure, then their supposedly over-thought, overly “curated” communications. Older generations’ contempt for the careful, non-reckless teen is nothing compared to their fear of teenage spontaneity.

Imagine the elder panics that would erupt in community after community if teens gave up their screens to group-flood public spaces to express mass-spontaneities. Old folks would demand armed policing.

Thoughtful critiques of today’s wide-open interactive social-media milieu – and its differences are worth confronting – contribute to positive adaptation. However, Gen Zers should not bestow a shred of credibility on elder boasts that pre-internet generations flourished in a screen-free paradise of spontaneous group hugs and soul-searching empathy. Boomer, Xer, and Millennial parents and grandparents spent far more hours staring passively at low-content, commercialized screens than Gen Z teens do, and frankly, it shows.