You’ve probably read the results of some studies according to which millennials drink less and have less sex than their Generation X or Boomer forebears. And if you have, you’ve probably heard the theory that at least a portion of the blame for this can be attributed to the rise of smartphones.
While I think must be part of the story, it also seems to me that commentators haven’t realized millennials’ habits are reflective of a broad trend in post-WW2 social behaviour, a trend that sees face-to-face activity replaced by staring at a screen. A very famous work of sociology, Robert Putnam’s 2000 *Bowling Alone, *showed that humans in the last third of the 20th century got less connected and more atomized. They stopped getting involved in neighborhood watch groups or PTAs or, indeed, bowling leagues. And this atomization correlates neatly, Putnam shows, with the rapid rise of television in American homes and day to day lives.
Considering this suggests a unified theory of the last fifty of so years: screens, of televisions or smartphones, by offering proxies for face-to-face socializing, replaced the latter.
It’s useful to see this for three reasons. For one, it helps to realize that there’s not something world-shatteringly new and weird about millennials. They are not some unique generation whose ways are determined by the fact that they happened to grow up as the iPhone came out, a cohort to be pitied or mocked by their hard drinking, sex-having elders.
Rather, they are simply following a path that those elders already started walking, one replacing people for screens. Secondly, the decline of sex and drinking correlates with an increase in mental health problems among millennials. If we think smartphones are the cause of the former, we might think that they are also the cause of the latter, and accordingly that stopping using smartphones would help with millennials’ mental health problems. But if instead we are seeing the playing out of a more general pattern linking technology with sociality, then we have to make sure we don’t replace smartphones with equally harmful technologies. It’s not enough to ditch the smartphone if we replace it with binge watching Netflix, a point we can only appreciate by looking back a few decades. Thirdly, if we understand millennials in terms of broad historical trends, we might be able better to foresee how things will play out, and be better placed to deal with the future. If there is indeed a pattern of better technology increasingly replacing face-to-face interaction, we should be very worried about AI, sex robots, and so on further etiolating our connectedness to each other.
I’m going to be relying on this very long and interesting article from The Atlantic — every piece of data in the following paragraph is got from that piece (it itself to a large extent reports on Jean M. Twenge’s book iGen).
Millennials are having less sex, both in the US and elsewhere. Research by Twenge points out that people in their early 20s are considerably more likely to be abstinent than their Gen X counterparts at that age; 15% hadn’t had sex since adulthood. Importantly, this isn’t restricted to the United States. The UK also records these things and young people have been having less sex there. Ditto Finland. Ditto the Netherlands. Ditto Sweden.
Abstinence and restraint also seem to apply to alcohol. From this article, I learn that as of 2015, 1/3 of British teens aged 16–24 don’t drink; in 2005, it was 1/5. Similar data exist for the US (here)). I couldn’t find interesting figures for continental Europe, but a sliver of evidence suggests that there is no particularly clear pattern — notably, there doesn’t appear to be any sharp difference, either concerning sex or alcohol, between the more affluent north and the more economically troubled south of Europe.
Proposed explanations of these facts aren’t lacking. The Atlantic article suggests several for the decline in sex, including porn, online dating, and hookup culture. And some have suggested that millennials are drinking less simply because they know that it’s bad for them.
One of the most popular explanations comes from Twenge, who correlates the decline of both drinking and sex with the advent of the smartphone in 2007. Around then, according to her work, two things happen: people come to spend much less time with each other, as opposed to with their devices, and mental health among young people starts to get worse.
Twenge’s work has received much attention, and it is intuitively compelling. If drinking and sex are primarily activities one can’t do alone, and using smartphones are paradigmatically solitary activities, then the rise of the latter, given the finite numbers of hours in the day, may well easily eat into the latter. This is especially pressing given the fact that the internet offers things like face-to-face connection: social media is a low-stress way of interacting with people, looking at porn a low-stress way of satisfying sexual desire.
Is it, then, the internet that is responsible for millennials’ habits? I think that zooming out a bit suggests that while it is part of the answer, there is more to be said. The internet and its effects are simply the latest chapter of a piece of our recent history, one of the main features of which has been a rise of screens and a decline of face-to-face activities.
In order to see this, it helps to go back a bit, and consider other technologies and the effects they had on face-to-face activities. If we see similar things, then we have reason to conclude that it’s not necessarily the case that millennials should put down their smartphones — at least, if they do put them down, they should make sure not to replace them with equally harmful technologies.
So let’s zoom out and consider Putnam’s book, mentioned above. It is about social connectedness and civic participation in the last third of the 20th century. Civic participation takes many different forms, for example voting, running for office, PTAs or neighborhood watch programs, workers’ unions and other professional organisations, playing or watching sports, volunteering or other charity work, or simply hanging out at a bar with friends. Civic participation is very important: such associations not only strengthen communities, but they lead to friendship. Moreover, they are very important for well-being. The more connected we are, the less likely we are to experience ‘colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death of all sorts’ (Bowling Alone, 327). These are well-established findings — ‘statistically speaking, the evidence for the health consequences of social connectedness is as strong today was was the evidence for the health consequences of smoking at the time of the first surgeon’s general report on smoking’ (same page).
So what’s been happening with civic participation, then? Alas, not good things. Putnam books meticulously details how, since around the 1960s, rates of participation have been plummeting. People vote less, form less community groups, play sports together less, even hang out in bars less.
And Putnam provides a possible reason for this: television. After the war, television very quickly came to be ubiquitous in people’s homes. I refer the reader to Putnam’s book for all the details, but one suggestive piece of information is that in 1950, around 10% of homes had TVs, while in 1959, 90% did (page 221).
In Putnam’s words:
in a correlational sense….more television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement…dependence on television for entertainment is not merely a significant predictor of civic disengagement. It is the single most consistent predictor that I have discovered (228…231).
This is striking. Way before the internet, we see the case made that a screen-based technology isolates us, diminishing social behaviour. Given this, we should be very careful analyzing millennials in case we miss out on larger trends that better explain their behaviour.
This is the explanation I think follows: civic participation and drinking and sex are stopping points along the same continuum, as two different forms of face-to-face activity, and we should seek to understand their declines in terms of the same underlying mechanism.
Civic participation, you might think, is a more optional or peripheral form of social activity. It is what you do with people who you otherwise have less reason to spend time with, and without which you can still lead a full and rich life.
By contrast, sex, with partners, and drinking, arguably a paradigm behaviour for groups of friends, are more central forms of social activity, since for most people, relationships with partners and friends are some of the most valuable things in life.
What we see, then, looking back, is a pattern stretching back to mid last century, as gradually we become less and less connected. At first we jettison the more peripheral aspects of socialization, but then technology gets better and we stop doing the more fundamental things.
I think this perspective should both hearten and worry us. It should hearten us: there is nothing completely novel and weird about millennials as compared with the previous generations. We are all following the same path of switching out people for technology; it’s just the technology that changes. Realizing this, especially when we note, with both Twenge and Putnam, the correlation between face-to-face interactions and good health, we have a path forward: get rid of screens of all sorts!
But it’s also worrying, because, well, will we get rid of technology? Things don’t seem to be going that way. If what we have witnessed since around 1960 is more and more social activity eaten into by better technology, we should be worried about the possibility of yet better technology — sex robots immediately spring to mind — and yet further etiolated social lives.