"Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price, having literally changed the world with their 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, are back with a new book for tweens: The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World. The book uses charts and sidebars, pull quotes from Gen Z about their negative experiences with phones, graphic novel-style fictional comic pages, and colorful design, repackaging for a middle-grade audience arguments and ideas that will be quite familiar to people who've read"
"Among these: Apps are dopamine-hijacking machines; tech companies are knowingly hacking our brains for profit; everyone's screen time is hours more per day than you'd like; twentysomethings wish that TikTok had never been invented (or at least they will tell inquiring pollsters so); kids should be outside, moving around, and hanging out with one another more-all the basic stuff."
"I was curious as to whether kids like mine-children of phone-queasy, anti-algorithm parents who have been subject to ad hoc lectures about Phone Bad at random times in their childhoods but have not yet seen the arguments presented in a way that's aimed at their age group-would be interested in or remotely convinced by The Amazing Generation. To find out, I convened a book club of four kids-two 11-year-olds in fifth grade and two 9-year-olds in third grade"
Charts, sidebars, pull quotes from Gen Z about negative phone experiences, graphic-novel-style fictional comic pages, and colorful design repackage arguments and ideas for middle-grade readers. Claims include that apps act as dopamine-hijacking machines and that tech companies knowingly hack human brains for profit. Daily screen time often exceeds preferred limits by hours. Many young adults express regret about TikTok. Recommendations stress outdoor play, physical activity, and in-person socializing. A small group of four children without smartphones (two 11-year-olds and two 9-year-olds) participated in a discussion; parents aim to delay phones and social accounts, and one nine-year-old expected social access around age 20.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]