by Joe Miller
The last couple of weeks we’ve been discussing literacy rates, which climbed steadily until around 2015, and then began to decline for children and adults alike. Last week, I argued that while educators have adopted some suspect methodologies for teaching reading, the timing of those moves doesn’t fit the trendline.
Today we’ll look at a better culprit: the smartphone.
Pocket-sized computers are ubiquitous.
A 2024 survey from Pew Research Center found that 91% of American adults have a smartphone. That’s up from just 35% in 2011.
Increasingly, kids have their own phones, too. Over half of all eight year olds – roughly third graders – have a smartphone. Only 11% of third graders had one in 2011
We don’t just carry these things around. We use them a lot. One study found that adults spend an average of five hours per day looking at their phones. That’s about 25 more minutes than we spent just last year!
It’s hardly a surprise that we’re spending more time on our phones. They are designed to be addictive.
In Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Schull shows that slot machines actually lull users into a sort of trance-like state, where worries, fears and even literal physical pain disappear.
Mobile phones – and the apps contained within them – deliberately mimic the features of slot machines. A repetitive motion (swiping) causes content to flow up or across the screen, in much the same way that pulling the lever of a slot machine causes the drum to roll.
App designers – like interior designers at casinos – carefully choose colors and sounds, deliver feedback at crucial moments and hide clocks, all with the goal of maximizing the amount of time you spend there.
Both casinos and mobile phones lack what Schull calls “stopping cues,” little signals that it’s time to pause and move on to another activity. Older forms of media have – chapter breaks in books, commercial breaks in broadcast television or flipping an album to side B – have natural stopping cues.
Social media content keeps coming just as long as you keep scrolling. Netflix starts the next episode before the credits finish rolling. Spotify plays related songs when it reaches the end of your playlist.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, argues that mobile phones – especially social media – have broken an entire generation.
In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewir-ing of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt argues that smartphones have replaced things like playing outdoors, having in-person conversations with friends and even sleep. The result? A “surge of suffering” among young people.
Haidt points out that heavy social media use in teens is strongly correlated with mental disorders like anxiety and depression. Tellingly, teens who cut back their social media use report improved mental health. Conversely, communities that gain access to high-speed internet consistently see declines in the mental health of their teenagers.
Critics argue that Haidt is overstating the degree to which there even is a mental health crisis among teens and that he misinterprets some of the survey data on which his argument rests.
But regardless of its effects on mental health, there is no doubt that mobile phones occupy an increasingly large share of our time. And time is a fixed quantity: each hour we spend on a mobile device is an hour we don’t spend doing something else.
So where is that time coming from?
At least some of it has come from reading books. In 1999, Americans read an average of 18.5 books in a year. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 12.6. The percentage of readers declined as well. Just over 45% of adults regularly read novels or short stories in 2012. In 2023, it had dropped to a record-low 37.6%.
Perhaps that’s because smartphones reduce our attention span.
A 2023 study published in the journal Nature found that simply having a smartphone sitting within reach led to “lower cognitive performance” on a series of tests. Study participants whose phones were tucked away in another room consistently outperformed those whose phones were nearby on a series of concentration and attention-related tasks.
These types of results have led many educators to ban smartphones in classrooms. Earlier this year, the West Virginia legislature made those bans mandatory. House Bill 2003 prohibits the use of smartphones in the classroom and directs county boards of education to specify when and where students are permitted to access their devices.
It’s perhaps a good first step toward improving reading scores for children.
Meanwhile, we adults would probably do well to spend less time with TikTok and Bluesky and more time with Twain and the Brontës.
