Smartphones And Adolescence: A Lethal Pair

Every generation believes the next one is doomed. When hieroglyphs were all the rage in Egypt in 3000 BCE, the older generation must have thought it would be the end of civilisation. When the Gutenberg press started printing in the 1400s, mothers and fathers must have felt books would be the downfall of their children. In my parents’ generation, when they were in their teens in the 1950s, radio and cinema were the dark forces that would corrupt young minds.

When my mother would reminisce about her childhood, she would narrate how after much coaxing and cajoling her mother (the children never spoke to their father directly for anything, least of all to go to a movie), she and her sisters were allowed to watch Sivaji Ganesan라이브 바카라 Parasakthi (1952) in the cinema hall, in Palakkad in Kerala. This, after my mother라이브 바카라 aunts had already watched and vetted it, and deemed it suitable for the children. Sivaji was somewhat permissible, but M. G. Ramachandran라이브 바카라 movies were total taboo, as they were usually ‘aabasham’—full of ‘sex and violence’.

Films were never so kosher in my growing-up years either. If I remember right, the first film we went out to see as a family was Jai Santoshi Maa, when I was about seven and my sister and brother were younger than me. Then an untoward episode happened with Amitabh Bachchan라이브 바카라 superhit Don a few years later. My friends in school had all seen it, and had told its story complete with background music many times during the lunch period. I had been coaxing and cajoling my mother to take us to see it (we could talk to our father directly about other things, but not wanting to see a film) and they finally relented.

I vividly remember sitting and squirming between my parents, as right upfront the film has Helen with full-on oomph, with her green eyes and patchwork of a dress cavorting to Yeh Mera Dil, Yaar Ka Diwana. None of my friends at the lunch break narrations had warned me of this song, and our family outing for a film was banished for a couple of years.

In my working years, I have seen the whole life cycle of what was slated to be the biggest generation-wrecker of our times: television. It was to spell doomsday for the adolescents of the 90s in India. Reams were written about what the idiot box could do to youngsters, how TV news was dumbing down viewers, and how it was reducing attention spans and breeding a generation of maladjusted youth.

All that about TV was probably true. The millennials suffer from many of these disorders, but it라이브 바카라 not as if they were wiped out. They have survived TV to tell the tale. But nothing so far, hieroglyphs or books, radio or cinema or TV, has taken hold of our lives in this all-consuming, all-encompassing way as the internet. Again, I am certain every generation has said this about something or the other. But having come so far into the 2000s, when the internet was just about seeping into our lives, with anecdotal and available empirical evidence, nothing else like it seems to have happened to humankind—from babies hooked to Peppa Pig in their perambulators to priests reading the hymns for last rites on their iPads when bodies are gently drawn into the incinerator.

And in the last decade or so, the smartphone and the world within it—social media, apps, messaging, search engines, music, news—humankind has not had this kind of a passionate relationship with a device ever. We have all gone through our Walkman phase, VCR and DVD players, or loved vacuum cleaners and electric kettles, but never this kind of blind devotion. If it doesn’t squeak for half an hour, we get alarmed. It라이브 바카라 the first thing we look at when we get up in the morning and the last thing before ending the day. Our whole life—relationships, work, finances—are embedded in it.

Smartphones and adolescence are a lethal pair. The teen years are a tough phase in life in any era. There was bullying, misogyny and incel (involuntary celibate) during my school days too, only we didn’t know many of these terms then. I remember how boys who were quiet and sensitive were branded as ‘homos’—a catch-all term for a sissy, gay or a deviant. If you didn’t participate in teasing or troubling girls, or worse, if you stood up for a girl who was being harassed, the other boy gangs gave you hell. But issues were easier to handle as it remained in one class between a few students or if it became too big, it reached the principal. But it rarely went beyond the school boundary. Now, with social media, this boundary is the whole world.

Two, in pre-internet days, parents, by and large, knew what the kids were up to. There was only so much mischief they could conjure up. But now teenagers on their phone with earplugs on—which is how they mostly are at any given time—could be plotting to bomb the world. In the Netflix miniseries, Adolescence, the parents of 13-year-old Jamie—who has been charged with stabbing and killing his classmate Katie Leonard—keep asking themselves if they could have done better. Jamie라이브 바카라 father Eddie Miller has been busy with his growing business, away from home from 6 AM to 8 PM. His homemaker mother Manda always gave Jamie whatever he wanted. Like a high-end computer console even when they couldn’t afford it. They thought it would help him in his studies. But the world little Jamie traversed till late into the night was the ‘manosphere’, full of hate and aggression, contempt for the female sex and creeping insecurity for himself.

How much can the parents monitor? When does it become an intrusion into a teenager라이브 바카라 space? Can any limits be set at all when it is child라이브 바카라 play to break the child lock in any device? Adolescence writer Jack Thorne is demanding a law to ban social media use for children. If that is the answer, can it work? A few decades later, will we be surprised to see children using smartphones in photos, books and movies like we are now—when we see passengers smoking inside a plane in a 1950s film?

For now, the thrall of social media is too alluring, the dependence on smartphones too deep. A series like Adolescence comes up to give everyone a warning, flag a disease in society. But soon everyone will move on and start swiping again.

Satish Padmanabhan is the Managing Editor of 바카라 Magazine

This article is part of 바카라라이브 바카라 April 21, 2025 issue 'Adolescence' which looks at the forces shaping teenage boys today—online misogyny, incel forums, bullying, and the chaos of the manosphere. It appeared in print as 'Intergalactic Emergency'.