People Have Been Panicking About New Media Since Before the Printing Press: POLITICIANS AND ACTIVISTS CLAIM SOCIAL MEDIA IS TURNING US INTO ZOMBIES. BUT NEW TECHNOLOGIES HAVE BEEN GREETED WITH SKEPTICISM SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.

• Author: Soave, Robby

ARE TEENAGERS ADDICTED to social media--and more depressed than ever because of it? Many politicians, consumer advocates, and even former employees of tech companies seem to think so. The anti-tech consensus that's emerging includes a diverse array of characters: populist conservative political figures such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.); generational psychologist Jean Twenge; and Tristan Harris, a former ethicist and designer at Google, to name just a few.

They share a belief that modern technologies--smartphones in particular--are extremely addictive and therefore dangerous. Smartphones learn about you, which means they get better at keeping you hooked. The smartphone provides access to all sorts of apps using all sorts of sophisticated strategies to lure users back to the home menu and start swiping, sharing, and snapping. The result, according to the technophobes, is an epidemic of dependency and depression, particularly among young people.

"Big Tech works relentlessly to force individuals into its ecosystems of addiction, exhibitionism, and fear of missing out," writes Hawley in his recent book, The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery Publishing). "It seeks to create its own social universe and draw all life into its orbit." To defeat the menace, Hawley and his allies have proposed various schemes to bring Facebook, Google, and Twitter to heel--by limiting their features, taking away certain protections from legal liability, and even breaking them apart entirely.

Though the technology may be new, the irrational fear is not. Every invention that has expanded the communicative space--from the written word to the radio--has been accompanied by histrionic concerns about the potential for misuse and abuse. The fact that so many of these earlier tech panics failed the test of time should make us even more wary of the current paranoia. In 2020, for instance, Pope Francis published an encyclical warning about the dangers of screen addiction. "Digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships," he wrote. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: In 1956, Pope Pius XII had warned that certain books emphasizing vice have an effect on readers that "totally paralyzes higher faculties and produces a permanent disorder, an artificial need of passionate character that at times reaches a real aberration."

In 1936, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a "determined movement" had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused car accidents. The car radio was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the product's dangers. The Charlotte News fretted in 1926 that radio was "keeping children and their parents up late nights, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep and making laggards out of them at school." In his 1963 book, Passion and Social Constraint, the Dutch-American sociologist Ernest van den Haag lamented that the portable radio "is taken everywhere--from seashore to mountaintop--and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings" and that mass media alienate us "from each other, from reality, and from ourselves."

In 1898, The New York Times panned Thomas Edison's newly invented phonograph. "Our very small boys will fear to express themselves with childish freedom," wrote the Times. "Who will be willing even in the bosom of his family to express any but the most innocuous and colorless views?" As Jason Feifer of the Twitter account Pessimists Archive put it, the Times was essentially articulating the most modern concern of all: Edison's invention would lead to cancel culture.

"Something ought to be done to Mr. Edison," wrote the Times in another article. "And there is a growing conviction that it ought to be done with a hemp rope." Newspapers were so freaked out about Edison's revolutions in communications that they wanted him dead.

Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English administrator known for his famous diary, wrote that he felt addicted to his watch and had stopped wearing it because he couldn't help but frequently check the time. Plato, the Athenian philosopher who died in 423 B.C., disapproved of the major innovation of ancient times: the written word. Writing things down, Plato complained, will "implant forgetfulness in men's souls." For as long as people have crafted new tools to make life slightly better, other people have predicted that those tools would spell the end of civilization.

In recent decades, televisions, computers, and video games have prompted considerable tech panic. In 1982, CBS' Dan Rather reported on an epidemic of arcade machines. Children in Boston had "made a nuisance of themselves" with their overuse of the machines, and the situation had grown so dire that "senior citizens could not go into a laundromat" without encountering a group of kids playing PAC-MAN (the horror!). The report noted that no study had shown a connection between arcade games and violence but said the city would make an effort to reduce the number of such machines anyway.

Attempts to ban or restrict video games have only grown more numerous over the years as the games become more realistic and vivid; indeed, it is the video game panic that the current collective freakout over smartphone addiction most closely resembles. The iPhone is a fancier gadget than the Nintendo 64, but except in extreme cases, its brain-rotting power is not really more pronounced. A hundred years from now, complaints about both machines will probably sound as silly as complaints about the phonograph.

ARE SMARTPHONES RESPONSIBLE FOR TEENS' DEPRESSION?

IT'S TRUE THAT rates of depression among young people have increased since 2011, and the suicide rate for 15- to 19-year-olds has steadily risen since 2008. Twenge, the psychologist, thinks the ubiquity of smartphones is the most likely culprit. "It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades," she writes in 2017's iGen (Atria Books). "Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones."

Her book's title comes from the term Twenge uses to describe people born after 1995. According to Twenge, iGen came of age during a time of...