In the early 80s up until the late 90s to 2000. They were back in those years of web 2. 0 the first decade of the third millennium. It was giving people more bactivity online. It wouldnt just be passive consumers that could kind of altalk back. Social media, youtube, whose original modelsca broadcast yourself. You could write customer reviews. There is a more Interactive Media and the millennials were said to lead the way. These 15yearolds in their bedrooms and in 2005, they were the early adopters. Theyve grown up with the tools and they were ready to innovate andeb improvise with these new forms that have come along. Myspace was a few years before. The texting would come along soon, the handheld devices as they were called, twitter. So i think 2007, 2008. And they were exploiting the tools. So that those like me we get one of these handhelds, teach me how to use it and know there was so much hype in those years about the millennials. Here comes the millennials as it was often broadcast. They are going to change the workplace. They are going to change shopping and how we communicate and socialize with one another. And the cheerleading was amplified throughout the teaching profession. Many journalists, many intellectuals. Politicians were pushing getting wired to classrooms i should say. And i stepped in and a few others and looked at this and said no, no, this is awful. It is terrible for a 15yearold to have all these tools of selfexpression in hand that one that can walk around with 250 photos of himself right here in the pocket, very bad. To lie in bed at night so that it awakens you to in the morning with a picture that has come through sending out 3,000 Text Messages a month which is what happened by 2010 with teens with a cell phone. What about all of the other leisure activities like reading books, like reading newspapers, watching tv that has intelligent conversation. Overhearing your parents talking about current events, politics, grownup matters. Going to Historic Sites and museums, browsing through bookstores, not just reading books but going to the library. The Public Library is free. Parents, take your kids to the library. And a lot of libraries were really transforming themselves into Information Centers as they were called. When in 2007 i go into my library, Emory University where i was teaching. Had a great job, great school. You go to the library and every computer terminal is occupied by a cheerful sophomore. You go up and i could take a two hour nap. Me no one would bother me. Come on youve got to read and find the books. We read sports books and biographies. Get a book in hand, but this phone thing is a problem so i wrote the book the dumbest generation how the digital age jeopardizes the future or dont trust anyone under 30. I think the timing was right. It kind of took off and i got lucky with people sort of thinking this digital age, these screens in hand maybe not such a good thing. One of the things i predicted in the book is with the 15yearold, always at the screen online logged on is now enveloped in Youth Culture 24 7 andd a way that never happened n Human History before. They are not getting the tools of great novel, great stories, great characters, great music, great events from the past. The wisdom of tradition, they are not getting that and that is going to make their adult hood more difficult for them. They are not getting the equipment for grownup circumstances of life. Eand when they get older, we ae going to see the fallout. Thats particularly interesting given there is a glow and we are told you can see these tools do put us face to face with the wisdom of the past at a moment we can pull up Winston Churchills speeches on the youtube apps and phones within seconds. If you haveic spot if i or apple music you can listen to beethoven and you can come in front of the sort of wisdom of the past you are charging the trajectory of the technology and the generation that it shapes. So why have the tools been used differently . You are exactly right. You have the knowledge of the guniverse at your fingertips. You can go into the museum and i would bring material into my classes like if im teaching the generation of riders ive got jack on the steve allen show in 1959 while steve is atat the piano, carol is reading from one of the books and its a powerful point is what happens because it is theha performance of it thats very important and so its all there. And we heard the hype in the 1990s. There was something called the Digital Divide that people were quite worried about because here weve got this miraculous instrument of learning online. The connectivity would put you in touch with the masters, with the genius, knowledge, science and poor kids are not going to have it. They are not going to be able to afford the hook ups and their schools will not have the wiring. So there were things put in from the act of congress that would put more money m into wiring the schools for low income areas. And now we have another Digital Divide. And i talk about this in the current book. Its the low income kids who are having more screen time. Its flipped. Its exploded in the last ten years. The amount of online time. They are spending more and more time curbing their kids being online, getting them away from the screen. They see the problem in the Silicon Valley who designed a lot of these tools. The New York Times reported some very good stories and i quote them extensively in the book interviewing a lot of the leaders like Chris Anderson of wired magazine saying these screens for our kids are as bad as a drug. They are addictive and the Silicon Valley designers hire consultants are experts to get people onto these sites and hold them there. Youve asked wait a minute. Fifteenyearolds dont want to go to the National Gallery of art. Connect with other 15yearolds. That is the social nature of adolescents. They are more interested in what happened. The social impulses into the insecurity of the adolescent ego, the confusion, im not quite sure who i am. My identity is just beginning to form, im coming into contact with the big wide world out there and it can be an uncertain anxiety and existence. You can surround yourself with a world of pleasing affirmations. If you can go in, shut the door and youve got the phone, the laptop, the videogame console which you can play with others your age, the social aspect of video games is very important for boys in particular. Youve got the tv on playing adolescent tv shows, you have music that you could be listening to. You are creating what in 2010 was called the daily me which is aou world that is highly reflective of who you are or aspire to be, what you desire yourself to be and youve got the power now to manufacture this reality. If you dont like something coming through these media inputs, you block it and you are able to screen out the disagreeable, the contrary, the disruptive, the thing that heightens your anxiety on. The things that provide comfort and warmth and fun. That is what they were able to create at age 15 in their room. It was a utopian space. And if only i could have done that. In 2008 i was exactly 15yearsold. This is all very vivid. And i do think that an interesting point particularly about the sort of addictive nature of the technology and humans are not going to chooseg to especially children are going to choose to rid themselves and it is less addicting of course to watch lets say churchill speeches or something of that point, but you write in this book that there is an absence of transcendence in the sort of millennialal universe, the millennial moral universe. And theres always a human longing for transcendence thats not being sold or provided so this cuts deeper than the technology. It gets g into a worldview and u write about this, the foundation that was laid out by the baby boomers. The technologies in some ways capitalize. What is fundamentally is that it thetechnology that millennias like Mark Zuckerberg created or what are the roots that go beyond this . About that first point that you made, im no better at age 15 then the millennials, then you were. If i had of these tools i would be doing the same thing. I knew it all when i was 16. I didnt need to learn anything. I didnt want to listen to my parents were some guy with a round face and mustache talking about t watergate. That wasnt the only screen in the house. There wasnt another for me to check into. There was only one phone in the house. We didnt a have the term land e lion. It wasnt private. It was in the kitchen if i wanted to call a girl and try to mumble my way through, stumble my way into a date. Im comfortable being around my older sister, my parents but i couldnt go to my room. This is not about the moral superiority of the generations. We didnt haveth the tools to go with adolescents to maintain our youthfulness, peer pressure, Youth Culture. Adult stuff filtered into my life whether i wanted to were not. Now youre a big question about the transcendent orientation. Sincee the mid20th century we know the phenomenon of the risingr nonreligious observant. More and more people in recent years refer to themselves. People who do not belong to any specific church they may have some spiritual ideas of some kind but its not organized in any way. Its not ritualized. They dont work a practical way into their life. They dont pray on a regular basis. And this is carried over to the young. The progressive secular American Society has been going on for 60 some years reinforced by the Supreme Court decisions that no prayer in school, things like that. What the Digital Media did is enforce that nontranscendent visionon in a very powerful way because as i said, the selfrealization orientation of the social media, again broadcast yourself. You can now express yourself in ways again never before offered to people. And one of the things it does is carry you out of yourself for something bigger out there than me and my life. Im pondering eternity like the vastness of time and space. The metaphysical side, the spiritual sideu of things. And when you are so distracted, when youre so connected to other people, its easy for the transcendent to rise to the eclipse and just think about how often spiritual leaders, jesus included, must be alone. I must go off to be by myself because that is the place of contemplation. Thats where the prayer can happen in powerful ways. There is a great scene when they said you cant pray a lie. Hes got to figure out what to do with jim and the society that hes in. A powerful moment of contemplating alone. If you are never alone, that search doesnt have to happen. What social media did, i cant remember if it was mark or reid hoffman, the founder of linkedin who said this, but we are trying to make it sone you never have o be alone. You never have to be lonely. Yet loneliness has increased. You are exactly right. All this facebook stuff actually doesnt make people feel that much better at least in the long term. Being alone is one of the things that helps you to ponder the bigger things, to get out of current social events, to get away from the distractions, the diversions and away childish things and think about what is serious andd what is eternal and universal. The problem is loneliness can be absolutely debilitating. I was terribly lonely, awful to be lonely and being alone can put you in a desperate condition. Who wouldnt want to escape and contact. Its particularly difficult for an adolescent whose fragility is there, who doesnt have many foundations that grownups would have that they could rely upon. Things like having a child of your own, having to take care of an infant, the foundation for your life. You cant worry about yourself quite as much. You start thinking about the time and a different way when youve got to take care of a 1yearold because youre thinkingay about that 1yearols futureut and when youre not evn thinking about your own future, quite different. That form of selfsacrifice, that can lead to pondering the bigger thing in life. So the web, although social media really just accentuated i think the process in america pulling people away from the transcendent orientation and the problem was i think prayer is healthy. And im not saying which religion, just whatever the metaphysical, the divine happens to be about working prayer, the ordinary exercise, and daily level youve got to be alone for some period of the day youve got to get out of the street and be by yourself to contemplate. Remember the root of the word contemplate. So that requires a little subrogation from your social network whichk, is what everythg in an adolescents life opposes. Youve got to get back in. One of the things that prompted this first book is seeing kids leave class. Theyve been disconnected for 45, 50 minutes out of the loop. And when you are a professor you notice this. They are all checking in on whats goinggh on. Our people meeting somewhere, any photos out there, and i didnt see you joy on their face. I felt a little consternation in whats t going on. And thats part of that youth insecurity for the social media plays upon. Speaking about your point, you referenced spiritual leaders and prayer. Something you organize a chapter around you use a fascinating description for malcolm x. You describe his intellectual confidence and i thought that was really, really interesting in this context. Can you expound upon what you mean when you write about the intellectualol confidence of somebody like malcolm x . Malcolm x goes into prison and malcolm little is a horrible human being. He is a thug and a thief and exploits people. Hes violent and he goes into prison. The nickname they have for him is satan. He likes that nickname. He enjoys it. Theres a whole chapter of him going to prison. But then follows over the next 30 or 40 pages is i believe one of the most remarkable conversion stories in all of american history. He changes so profoundly that he talks about himself as another person. I was changed, i was transformed. I b look back upon and another person entirely. A stranger to me. What happened to do this . He goes into prison and all of his street smarts really dont fly. For one thing he says i had a working vocabulary of about 200 t words. I couldnt say a sentence without some profanity and that worked well on the street. He was ahe good hustler, very smart you could tell very canny. Theres another man who speaks thoughtfully, deliberately. Malcolm little looks aroundse ad says these other prisoners listen to him and respect him. The white guards listen to him and respect him. He kind of takes him under his wing a little bit and advises him grow a little bit. He gets the dictionary and starts copying it word for word. Aardvark, copy the whole thing. Months and months of ftranscribing. We wouldm . See this. What a drudgery. The dictionary is kind of like an encyclopedia. All these wordsle contain so muh knowledge and he was hooked. He would stay up at night and by the light coming in through his window, he would copy. It opened his eyes. He has to have classes now because of what hes done to his eyes but he wouldnt trade that for thetu world then he starts reading literature, philosophy, history, politics. He comes out of the nation of islam and that gives him a meaning to his life. He says i understand myself and my life now because i have put my existence into a big historical model that includes transcendence. You have stories of what happened to white people and people of color that he then finds explanatory and that is what gives him confidence this is what i provide as a model for millennials what you must do. Christians are wrong and white people are evil. That does not make him say im canceling you. I am getting you out of my life. No it makes them want to learn. He sits acrossss the table from white men in these new shows in the last couple of years in his life and you can see the way that he converses with them. He wants to know what is going on in their head. He doesnt say racists, bigots im out of here. No. He wants the exchange because he has what he mentioned, the confidence. He speaks clearly, slowly, deliberately. He said in prison i will never use bad words again. No more profanity. Im not going to do that anymore. And you can see hes settled and has a foundation within. Its have been through this deep psychological emotional spiritual change within him and he did the work. It was a reading plan. It gave him a historical interpretation of the present. And i quote early in the book the 19th century critic social thinker who said in this age where we feel religion is already frayed, people find a lot of chaos going on. There was a lot of great change. Railroads coming on, industrialization happening. Populations on the fringes of existence. He said converse with the ancient. Thee great riders in greece and rome and through shakespeare. It gives you a frame frame of the big changes from day today. To day. You need that a steady influence. Thats whatou civilization can give you to fall in love and be rejected. If youve got the story or calypso and her lauren fullness, the stories of love and disappointment, the great gatsby it gives you an understanding or not that it makes you feel better, less rejected but a place to interpret what would happen. If youve got the sermon on the mound to come back to. If you see the story of cain and gaabel it gives you that steady influence so that you dont need to run tot the text. Sthese are better resources for adult disappointment. It is a technology in and of itself and we dont think of it as a technology. We dont think of the mass production of written bibles, printed bibles as a technology, but they very much are in the scope of Human History in the relatively new technology, printed books are relatively new technology you couldnt always just listen. You would have to go see the performance or have to catch it on vinyl. And even that again feels ancient and is a vintage technology but its pretty new. I guess i have this question about why these technologies that have cropped up over the course of the last couple decades in what ways are they fundamentally different than the ideas of novels which there was panic about at certain points in history what separates the technology of the western civilizations and earliest printed books that came out oft china about 1100 years ago what separates these things from the last 20 years of social media and smart phones . The first point, a cheap remarkables a technology. Absolutely. You slip it in your pocket, toss it on the ground its not goingl to break. He used one would cost 25 cents and it contains hours of entertainment. Hoursg. Of diversion. Thats an amazing technology. Its a great now, why this green technology. Lets just take the overstimulation factor. When you read the book, you have to imagine and think about whats going on that isnt provided by all the visualization taking place. We need to understand mimagination, memory. All of the mental work that the mind and the brain does. These are exercises that you have to operate in order to improve them. I would have students write a poem and recite them before the class. Terribly painful for them to do it. [laughter] but i will telly you this when they were to do it and sit down after having finished a great book of accomplishments and the look of i did it on their faces. They were highly gratified that they got through it. It is spoon feeding everything to you. Its taking everything when you read a text online, one of the great innovations is the hypertext with the link so if youre reading a book and there is an unusual word you can click on the word and it will tell you what the word means. You are not going to remember it. Why do you have to memorize . I quote them in the book in 2007, l 2008. Why do i need to know this stuff. And the old days you had to memorize the gettysburg address. That is a failure of learning. Nsyouve got to memorize them ad become part of the sensibility. Its like the water that he swam all the time and made his way in. That doesnt happen now if its just a matter of information retrieval. Its a sort of pet thing for me. Memorization is you getting into another character because you cant recite a poem if youre not imagining the character. Her experience, her feelings. You cant do it from the outside. This is all very healthy for the narcissistic 16yearold redundancy. They dont have to recognize friends,t romans. Because the web makes that all external and it stays external. What happened at shiloh and gettysburg, dont you want to know the stories and about the carnage that took place . This is going to make you a more serious and interesting person if youve got these things inside you. So, and better citizens. And parents. Absolutely. Look at how the millennials took november, 2016. The trauma. They went1 for hillary and they couldnt believe that this monster was actually going into the white house and wanted to say to them this is politics. Do you think that you never lose . Did you think they went for obama and await george w. Bush and al gore pretty much split the vote. Ronald reagan crushed of these votes. So it was only after the Digital Tools came along that the youth vote skewed democrats and itmu pretty much stayed that way. The rate went a little down in 2012 they were disappointed because he turned out to be a politician, not a savior. And he was in early promoter of the technology making the generation quite miserable. They were very skillful. They were not good citizens because surprises have happened before. When mckinley was shot and a Teddy Roosevelt 1901 this character is going to be in the white house, the same thing they said about donald trump. This happens. Its in american politics. It happens in an open society. Youre going to be appalled sometimes. So what do you do, you organize. You v do what Stacey Abrams didn 2020. Very good, you get out there, go door to door, mobilize the democratic process. We are going to march in the streets and resist. A big banner hanging with those six letters in white, resist. Thats actually antidemocratic. And we saw how much antidemocratic activity there was in 1718 and 19. So theres bad leadership taking place. Sometimess you lose. We are the ones who carry and shouldld be in charge of everything. That is and how the Pluralistic Society works and this gets to the condition of the millennials now that they are in their 30s. They were confident, optimistic, ambitious, goingng to college in record numbers to the lead in the 21st century. Now they are the most tolerant generation in history. This is often said back in zero seven and zero eight. Now on the surveys the rates of depression andsm narcissism, anxiety youre up, suicide is a. Job dissatisfaction is very high. They ar not tied to institutions. Only one third of them consider themselves patriots but they dont have a lot of country devotion. Thats partt of that horizon. Global citizens of course which is a meaning term. It is against the wall. They are not getting married informing families. It is the rate of the boomers, one third of the urban institute study. One third by each 40 will never have married. They probably never will. And a population problem Maintenance Issue you want to tell the millennials whats going to happen to your Social Security. Mine is okay because of you. The Social Security payments when they start coming in in a few years. But also they are the most intolerantn group. They have a more vindictive sense of life so if they see some injustice going on. They want to d see justice done. They will sign a petition to get a stranger fired for telling some dumb joke. So things are not going well for the millennials. For some they are. Generalizing talking about the statistical, but weve got a downturn. Ou certainly one that wouldnt have been predicted in 2005. The people who in some ways came out in opposition in the initial book. The grandpa get off my lawn. The job of the elders were supposed to rebuke. The adolescents, and of that helps them grow. I think its a healthy thing to be tension between the agenerations and its a healthy thing for the young to talk back tot. Say things have changed a little bit. You need to open up a little bit and i still get some emails from people. I responded to every single one. We got past the four letter words. The exchange was pretty good and one of the favorite things for heme to happen was when i had to say to some un clever ahsophomore, youre right on th. Youve got me on that one. So i was happy to be proven wrong because to be proven wrong youve got to make arguments and be like malcolm x and then respond with evidence. This is what too many of them lack the equipment to do and i thinkt that its making them unhappy. The data are depressing. What you predicted has sort of tragically come to fruition just a little bit over decades before. I would be remiss if i didnt ask your writing the first book in this climate, the book comes out in that economic despair. To what extent did the recession either exacerbate or come into play in this formula of despair that seems unavoidable and undeniable at this point. There are lower levels so how does the economic climate right as they were comingofage during theirin adult lives, to what extent is that a factor . You got a raw deal. For some of you you were told go to college, youve got to go to college to be a success. The Second Bush Administration and the Obama Administration pushed universal college heavily. You listen. The universities jacked up tuition, you got the loan, you got out of college and the success didnt happen. Those fantastic jobs were not there for many of you. Another is the globalization agenda that has hollowed out the middle class and the manufacturing class where weve profited miraculously and extraordinarily theyve done well. The e lead to the top ten or 15 . Youve got a lot of middleclass treading water. And they are more likely to have children spending time onn these technologies and social media where people of greater wellbeing the privilege are taking their phones away from their kids. Knowing that youre going to do better in college if you build better Reading Habits and study habits. So the real deal, absolutely. At the same time that we flooded you with the pop culture of garbage, the stupid of music and movies, the dumb tv shows, although reality stuff that we see, whichto crowded out Better Stories and characters and role models we have peddled to you so much consumption that doesnt prove inspiring or offer you any wisdom, that gives you bad moral instruction. It lowers your taste. Thats why i beginin the book wh a lion what have we done to them giving you an awful world in so many ways with economic hardship, the tough job market, a lot of debt, expensive healthcare and education. Then a culture and education that didnt give good equipment to manage the difficulties. Everything youre saying about the circumstances of everyday life is true for a lot of millennials a. Housing isnt cheap in madison ewand where i live a few years s a kid. All the more reason one needs the instruction and wisdom, the transcendent consciousness to make these institutions more bearable. Think about 1930 depression. Polio, jim crow. Life was very hard then. Today what would make an unsatisfying job easier . Meaning and purpose. Stories about people, death of a salesman. Stories of people struggling against. It would let everyone be whatever you want to be. This is the way the world ought to be. That leads them in the absence of this other wisdom, civilization into joining the marches and smashing windows, that is an extreme case but it does happen. Cancelel culture. Take away their jobs, their livelihoods, make them disappear. Read George Orwell into the antitotalitarian or the totalitarian history. Millennials believe themselves to be pretty morally pure. The incorruptible this would give them warning signs, the kind of knowledge of limits that have to be retained in this fallen world that we inhabit one of the tragic conditions of life is very good people and wellintentioned people can end up doing awful things. As we come o to the end of or time on that sort of pessimistic note, lets hope this is slightly less pessimistic although to some extent i think that is unavoidable. Isis this a whole that we can dg out of it. Can this be dug out in time to sort of rescue the next generation are the generation after that. One pessimistic note and optimistic, the tools for millennials were liberation. The tools are so routine. They dont see these tools as somehow ennobling them and powering them in any unique way. The recalcitrance youve got to rebel a little bit in order to come into your own. Some of that rebelliousness will bey politically incorrect. That could get them into trouble. So if youre going to college ngyou dont want to do anything thats going toe. Make the colle admissions office. They are going to check you out and look through your social media and type you into google. If you have any pictures out there, if youve said anything on twitter that we need to worry about or youve done anything that may be an embarrassing before we admit you, so i worry that the ambitious keep their head down. They are going to want to stay out of trouble. We have to let young people get in a little trouble. We argue with it. The optimistic thing is all of the signs show that this formation didnt work. What weve got to do is present presented to them a different model of life, of growth. Building your social media network, this isnt a great ambition. This isnt the way to go in order to become a success in life. Watching great film, great stories, thats good stuff. Thats mesmerizing. About a villain, a horrible guy that talks like you are my friend, interesting. The model of how to make yourself into a more astute, morally and intellectually grounded person malcolm x had a certain commitment after prison even though he is in the midst of all of the struggling and everything, a personal validity that he didnt have before. This is why i ended the book with him as an example. Thisd is where you find purpose and meaning in your life. You need a real religion. He was devout, he would pray. A religion where you ritualize your belief in actual practice. You need to read great books and watch great movies. And its time to grow up. This is what all the people watching here. Find that young person in your life. Theou brilliance and heroism, yu are in the shadow of that civilization. That should be where you place your existence. Thank you, you were great. The world changed in an instant but mediacom was ready. Internet traffic soared and we never slowed down. Schools and businesses went virtually and we powered a new reality because at mediacom, we are built to keep you ahead. A nationally recognized trainer and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescents and policing. A professor of law and director of the Juvenile Justice CenterGrant Initiative at the Georgetown Center university center. From 2 1998 in 2001 she was the lead attorney for the Public Defenders Service for the district of columbia. Re