Writing to respond

Dear Miss Taylor,

To start, I strongly disagree about how teenagers are portrayed in the article you wrote for The Times. The way you describe teens as unsociable creatures is just false. Not all teenagers are addicted to their phones; if you had a look at the test results of 20 random teenagers I guarantee that at least 6 will have good grades and the rest will have bad, most probably because they were computer gaming rather than, as you claim, being glued to their phone. However, back to the point, it’s not all teens who behave in this way, a huge majority of adults use social media these days as well as us teenagers. You are simply stereotyping.

There was one phrase I didn’t like and it was Jonathan Franzen’s description of us as “enslaved social inadequates”. The word ‘enslaved’ was used, which is saying that social media is taking control of teenagers’ lives and attaching them to their phones as though social media is some sort of a powerful worldwide drug – I think Franzen has not done in-depth research and does not have the correct information to refer to teenagers in this way. He makes it sound like all teenagers are addicted to their phones, however it’s not all teens, it’s only a certain amount that are; I think he gets that impression because he met one girl who texts 150 times a day, and I think he just takes his thoughts too far. After that, he brings up video games and how it will affect teenage social behaviour, his concerns and the rest of it; he then says the trend is turning kids into ‘emoticon-addled zombies’ unable to connect and not even capable of making eye contact.

In the next paragraph you bring back the girl who texts 150 times a day and you describe how all teenagers are the same, constantly texting and spending no time with their family or friends. I myself have been told numerous times to get off of my phone and interact with the people in the house – the last time I immediately thought of your little rant and it kind of helped me to understand your point of view about how some kids are always on their phones. However, the thing that grinds my gears with you is that you act like the games teens play and the amount of texts teens receive/send is going to permanently damage their lives and cause them misery, when in reality it’s not. In fact it’s something that they choose to do and that keeps them in a way happy.

In a recent survey, it says that 25% of teens are ‘almost’ addicted to their phones, and 71% have one or more social media accounts, so that means the remaining 75% are not addicted to their phones and the remaining 29% are not involved with social media at all. Therefore, not all teenagers are addicted to their phones: only 25% are addicted; out of 100% a quarter are constantly on their phones, leaving a massive percentage of 75% – again out of 100, three quarters are not addicted to their phones, so perhaps you should do a bit of research before you speak about all teenagers being enslaved by mobile phones. If 25% of teenagers are addicted to their mobile phones, presumably the other 75% of teens are doing revision and exams.

Teenagers in this day and age are now under more pressure than teenagers in previous generations when it comes to exams because the grade boundaries have been raised higher than ever before, meaning that teenagers have to work at a much higher standard. Not only do teenagers have to work hard, commentators like you are stereotyping them as inadequates when they are simply using an efficient new form of technology to communicate with one another. This technology is nothing to be feared: if anything, it has made communication much faster if you go back and compare it to where it first began, with pigeons and letters. Texting is instant; it empowers teenagers to communicate with each other in a way that they are not constantly being watched over and it allows them to cross the social boundaries which they would not have been able to access many years ago. Maybe the ‘socially enslaved inadequates’ are in fact embodied in you, yourself – an older generation who grew up in a era where they didn’t have the technology we have, where communication on telephones was considered a luxury and was so much more unavailable, making it harder to find friends and meaning a lot of people would be extremely lonely.

Yours sincerely,
Karver