--Dictionary.com
When did the world shift? When did the world turn on its
axis, never, ever to be the same again?
When did life, as we know it, change forever?
When you are standing in the middle of history in the
making, it's almost impossible to make such judgments. No one would have
predicted on October 31st, 1517, that the act of the German monk Martin Luther
would so disrupt his world. He nailed a
list of 95 complaints to the door of a local house of worship. Within a
generation, a 1,500 year old way of life collapsed. Kingdoms fell, revolutions
rose, wars raged and the cry for soul freedom was given voice.
All because of one event.
Who could have have predicted that the failed political coup
of an unemployed house painter named Adolf Hitler on November 8, 1923 would one
day lead to the most deadly conflagration of the twentieth century? That the
defiant act of a tired housekeeper named Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her
seat on a bus on December 1, 1955, would give birth to the civil rights
movement? Who could have predicted that June
29th, 2007 was another such disruptive day in human history?
That's the first day the very first Apple I-Phone was sold. Hard to fathom it was only a little more than
ten years ago, barely a blip from a history perspective, that the first true
consumer friendly smartphone was available for purchase. Just one decade later, in 2017, 1,000,000,000
I-Phones are in the hands of users from the Antarctic to Zimbabwe. More than 2,200,000,000 folks worldwide have
and use smartphones for just about anything and everything: buying and selling,
talking and texting, surfing the net and going to school, dating and mating, starting
revolutions and starting businesses, and all with a device small enough to fit
in your pocket or your purse.
Utopia, right? June
29, 2007 was a great day! Thank God for disruption!
At least that's what the four horsemen of the tech revolution want us
to believe, need us to believe: Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon. They make billions of dollars on such disruption:
changing so radically and so fast how we human beings relate to one another, everywhere,
all the time. In our families. In our communities. At work. In government. At church. As consumers. There is nowhere left on earth
that our handheld devices do not disrupt.
But as the comedian and blogger Baratunde Thurston recently
said, "Just because you are a good software engineer does not mean you are
a good social engineer." So even as
we revel in the disruption and benefits of technology, we also need to try and understand
just what this all means for life with one another. For the quality and the fabric and the depth
of all our social relationships: around the dining room table and at temple,
and in the voting booth and in the neighborhood, and perhaps most important for
our kids, our children, they, who, in the words of author and San Diego State
University Professor of Psychology Jean M. Twenge, are "IGen". As in "Generation IPhone", the young adults and teens and tweens and
children of today. They were born with
smartphones in hand.
In a sobering September 2017 Atlantic magazine article, "Have Smartphones Destroyed A
Generation?" Twenge's research on kids born between 1995 and 2012, is
heartbreaking. How have smartphones and
social media changed our kids' lives? Lenge's research shows that from 2007 on,
these young people report spending less time hanging out with friends, are less
likely to seek a driver's license, are dating less, are much more likely to
report feeling more lonely and more left out, and are less likely to get enough
sleep.
But here's the line from her story that just slayed me. IGen kids actually have more leisure time
than past generations, in part because they do not work jobs as much. "So
what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room,
alone and often distressed." That's
why reports of depression and anxiety are soaring among high school and college
students. And suicide attempts. And anxiety.
Imagine looking into a mirror/screen all alone for so many hours and
seeing all of these supposedly "great" lives going on and wondering
and worrying, "Why can't that be me?"
Imagine being so tethered to a machine that you sleep with it, look at
it first thing when you wake up, last thing before you go to bed.
When did the world change?
In years to come, folks in the future just may say June 29th, 2007. What disrupted everything? You are holding it in your hand or it is very
nearby: chirping, chiming, and always calling: to us and to our children
too.
How will we answer the call of history? May God grant us
wisdom and courage for the living of these disruptive days.
(Illustration by Jasu Hu)
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