Bluesky Yes!

Cell phones are to blame for the youth loneliness crisis—but not in the way you might think. We can’t fault cell phones alone; they are tied up with too many social phenomena for that. But they are emblematic of a way of life—one isolated yet always connected—that so many of us want to escape. Cell phones are portals to monetized digital worlds that depend and feed on loneliness. Teasing out their roles in these complex social dynamics can help us understand how to confront the youth loneliness crisis.

The prehistory of cell phones provides clues on where to begin. The solitary individual in mass industrial society has long been a research subject of academics and a theme in pop culture. David Riesman’s 1950 sociological study The Lonely Crowd, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, and Sherry Turkle’s 2011 book Alone Together all explore how extending our communicative capacity creates a double bind: We gain something—say, the ability to reach farther and faster—but also lose something, such as memory and in-person conversations. Cell phones accelerate this trend. Astonishing capabilities have been shoehorned into one hand-sized object, but the trade-offs are steep.

You probably know many of the arguments about how cell phones cause loneliness: the habit-forming, attention-extractive designs; the disembodied digital identities and parasocial relationships; the echo chambers and cultural homogeneity; the hyper-visibility of oneself without control of one’s audience; the data collection and surveillance; the algorithms that determine tastes and fates; the separation from the physical environment; the fleeting consumable pleasures that will never fulfill deeper human needs; and the tech oligopoly’s “enshittification” business model.

But even these critiques miss something, because we tend to use yesterday’s terms to talk about today’s tech. Our language is awash in the logic of old media: YouTube is like TV; Facebook is like a book. Cell phones are mostly not phones at all; they’re supercomputers that contain an app imitating a phone. We are building our technological world more quickly than we can understand it. To navigate what social media are doing to us, we need to update the language we use.

I study the forms of attention that we use with new media but that we don’t have words for yet. I do this at the Strother School of Radical Attention and at Duke University’s Dialogue Laboratory, where I help students research their phoneless encounters. Together, my students and I examine forms of attention—like those at the root of loneliness, miscommunication, and habit—and try to remake them into practices that yield better alternatives. Through this work, I’ve learned that the youth loneliness crisis, like so much else, flows through our phones, but that simply telling young people to use their phones less is not practical. Phones are the basic infrastructure of our work, leisure, and social lives. So we should ask a more manageable question: In what ways can young people engage with phones so as not to perpetuate the loneliness that phones help create?

Since loneliness is a subjective experience, self-reports make for good starting points. Many people say they want to be on their phones less but feel unable to disconnect individually and also that they relish being in well-designed phone-free spaces. In other words, we want group de-phonification.

When we do create these environments, people stop just consuming and start creating experiences together. The key here is attention and using it in the plural: attentions. The attentions used for swiping through TikTok videos are different from the ones you use to talk to a person, write a letter, or contemplate art. The way out of the youth loneliness crisis begins with young people enjoying the types of attention that occur off-screen and then experiencing that with others. This teaches people to see as others see, to listen as others listen.

These shared attentions create a shared experience, which is natural, fun, and intimate. Kids do it in spontaneous role-playing. We do it with our pets. Interacting with each other through our favorite types of attention is how we create shared worlds and reconnect in new ways—things that cell phones inhibit.

So how do we reclaim that kind of shared attention in practice? For starters, we can negotiate how we’re allowed to use our phones. In cell-phone stacking, for example, people place their phones in a pile and whoever grabs their phone first pays a consequence, such as picking up the tab for everyone.

If using a cell phone is like pointing a fire hose at our face, then we are not drowning alone. So many of us are struggling with worlds experienced chiefly through our phones. Let’s use that: Communalizing the struggle against the cell phone can reduce loneliness. If we blame cell phones constructively, we can reengineer the kinds of attention that create what we want and need. Removing or changing technology on its own won’t solve youth loneliness, but generating punkish DIY methods for coming together without screens can.

David Landes

No!

As public projects suffer from a lack of funding in the United States, we are seeing a decline of “third places”—locations, such as libraries and parks, that are neither work nor school yet provide opportunities to socialize. Gentrification, rising prices, and the overreliance on cars mean that a simple social outing can burn a hole through our pockets. Overpolicing, gun violence, and the criminalization of youth activities—in which hanging out becomes stigmatized as “loitering”—also work against young people’s efforts to socialize. So who can blame young people for staying home and turning to their devices for social connection? The loneliness epidemic was not caused by cell phones; it is a symptom of late-stage capitalism and a society that is unable to support or protect its youth.

I am a sociocultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer who specializes in digital culture, youth culture, and identity in Japan. And my research on young people’s use of social media and cell phones shows that in Japan there are clear conceptions as to what constitutes “proper” or “good” use of digital technologies. There, analog and face-to-face interactions remain privileged over digital ones. Japan has been a leader in mobile communications since the 1990s, and cell phones with Internet have been embedded in the social lives of Japanese youth for decades. This makes Japan a valuable case study in thinking about the perceived relationship between cell phones and the youth loneliness epidemic.

Japan has been facing its own loneliness epidemic for a while and so became a hot spot for the literature on loneliness. Indeed, news and books on solitary death (kodokushi), youth suicide, and Japan as a “relationless society” (muen shakai) emerged in the early 2000s and have proliferated over the years. But the main cause of this epidemic was the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1990s, which led to a recession and a decline in stable employment.

Those conditions linger, as young people on the cusp of entering the workforce and becoming shakaijin (literally “members of society”) realize that they don’t enjoy the same career paths as the previous generation—such as a lifetime job in a corporation—and instead must navigate a landscape of precarious employment. The demands of securing work create a profound sense of loneliness. The phrase deai ga nai, or the inability to meet people, frequently appeared during my conversations with college graduates. High school and college students, meanwhile, enjoy robust social lives, since their social connections are mediated by their schools.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, high schoolers, college students, and postgrads told me that cell phones should supplement in-person social interactions—not replace them. Their views shifted during the pandemic. Because in-person interaction was prohibited, they recalibrated their relationship with the digital. They understood many of the drawbacks of relying on screens for connection, but they also recognized that phones and social media were the key means of finding solidarity during the pandemic. Since then, young people have been using hashtags and platforms to build community. In my research, for example, I have documented how social media has allowed Black Japanese youths to connect with each other and participate in the global movement for racial justice. Social media is crucial in helping people with marginalized identities—for example, queer and trans youth—feel less alone.

Classroom visits in Japan challenged my views on digital sociality and what I—a millennial who grew up in the United States—have taken for granted as “normal” digital practices. Students asked me questions like “Why do Americans show their faces online? Isn’t that dangerous?” and “Why do Americans debate and argue with each other online if it won’t change anything?” One student even commented judgmentally about my screen time (which, admittedly, was excessive). My conversations with young people in Japan show that it is possible to grow up with cell phones and the Internet and still prioritize in-person interactions.

This is a result of factors such as parenting and Japan’s extensive public-health infrastructure. For example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has an online portal dedicated to “wise” and “safe” Internet interactions, with scenarios that demonstrate how the digital can negatively affect social connections. When seeing the portal, my students at Duke remarked that they wished they had a similar resource growing up. The US would benefit from developing more educational resources that teach young people media literacy and how to “get along” (tsukiau) with the digital in their lives.

I don’t want to frame Japan as unique or perfect in all this. Japan has its own issues regarding youth mental health. But I do think Americans can learn from Japanese youth. It is hard to be young, especially in the wake of a pandemic. Instead of blaming technology, we can—and should—work toward building the better society that young people deserve.

Kimberly Hassel