French students cell phones
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"The American University is in the grip of mass hysteria." This is how Heather MacDonald begins her lecture 'The Diversity Delusion'. I think we can all agree that this is the case. It doesn't help that teachers are being fired for not giving students partial credit for no work done. When well-off and coddled students claim to be 'fearful for their lives' due to being 'surrounded by oppressors, transphobes and racists,' and when young doctors protest over 'fact-based' medicine, we can probably agree that we are in a pretty bad spot. But, as I recently found out, it appears things are only going to get worse.

I came across a book by Jean M. Twenge called the iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. This book - chock full of statistics, graphs and charts - provides a shocking picture of the generation that is now moving through universities and colleges, and it is not looking pretty.

The Lost iGeneration

We all know that there are obvious differences between those generations born in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. But what are they, exactly?

Born between 1995 and 2005, the Internet Generation was born at a time when live births to unmarried mothers were at their highest levels ever. They are also the most ethnically diverse generation, with estimates that "52% of Americans under 18 are white, compared to 75% of Boomers." And they spent their entire youth on the internet.

Socialized on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it seems that most picked up their intellectual interests on Reddit and Tumblr. They did it all with little to no adult supervision. And now, like in the movie Event Horizon, they've brought what they picked up there back with them and into the universities.

Most of the Internet Generation's waking hours are spent on video chat, texting, browsing the internet, and electronic gaming. For high school seniors in this age range, it's roughly 6 hours a day, and for 8th graders it's 5 hours a day. But to make matters worse, less than 20% of parents are aware of what their children are getting up to online. That's 6 hours of unsupervised activity on a medium that contains everything from porn to flat earth theory. Which explains why only 66% of this generation is sure that the Earth is round.

Well what's wrong with that - kids will be kids, right? Make mistakes and grow up. Sure, but that entails facing challenges - dating, socializing with real people, doing homework and working a job. They are doing those things, right?

Outside of the internet, what does the Internet Generation do with their time? Well they don't read. The percentage reading books or magazines nearly every day dropped from about 60% in 1976 to 15% in 2015. The percentage who reported reading two or more books for pleasure in a year dropped from nearly 80% in 1976 to about 50% in 2015.1

Ok so they're not bookworms. No big deal. Surely they're partying and hanging out with friends then? Nope. They're not dating and they don't go out without their parents. In the 1990s more than half of teens hung out with friends every day or nearly every other day. By 2014 that number had dropped to about 25%, or one in four.2

Ok so they're not reading for pleasure and 75% of them aren't hanging out with friends. They must be working then? Nope. As Tenge writes, "[I]n the late 1970s, only 22% of high school seniors didn't work for pay at all during the school year, but by the early 2010s, twice as many (44%) didn't."3

Ok so they're not hanging out, not working, and not reading for fun. Presumably that's because they're all too busy studying to get into college then? Nope, not that either - the amount of time spent on homework has dropped and 65% of eighth graders in American schools are not even proficient in reading, and 67% are not proficient in basic math. Two-thirds of all American children!

Well who likes math anyway when you can go on dates. They are at least dating, right? Nope - they're not doing that either. In the early 1990s, nearly three out of four 10th graders dated, but by the 2010s only about half did. As Twenge writes, "In short: iGen teens are less likely to take part in every single face-to-face social activity measured across four data sets of three different age groups."4

A lack of challenge combined with the contagious and addictive nature of the internet is why seventy-nine percent display symptoms of distress when kept away from their devices. They're basically (barely) functioning addicts before they even reach adulthood.

Strange Contagions and the Internet Generation
Apple iPhone
The first iPhone was introduced in 2007. Not long after that, in Silicon Valley (what we could call Ground Zero of the iGen epidemic), a suicide cluster began. These clusters fed on viral news vectored through social media. All day long kids were sharing updates about the deaths from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, spreading each suicide like a virus across the community. The result was an epidemic that left several hundred children dead and a suicide rate ten times higher than the national average.

If that doesn't scare a parent, then this probably will. Up until 2008 the rate of self-harm among children was relatively stable. But since 2009 the rate of emergency room visits for girls aged 10 to 14 has increased 19% a year. Suicide rates continue to rise, as well as rates of depression and anxiety.

I would argue that there is no coincidence in these numbers. There is something 'contagious' about the internet and its easy access via 'smart phones,' and it's damaging these vulnerable children. Twenge found that "8th graders who spend ten or more hours a week on social media are 56% more likely to be unhappy than those who don't."5

If the rise in self-harm and suicide isn't enough, there's the contagious nature of gender dysphoria. As one researcher reports, "Up until about ten years ago, gender dysphoria presenting for the first time in adolescence was virtually unknown in natal females." She continues, saying:
In the past decade, however, a new presentation of gender dysphoria has suddenly become widespread, in which teens or tweens come to identify as transgender "out of the blue," without any childhood history of feeling uncomfortable with their sex. Experts have dubbed this presentation rapid onset gender dysphoria, and are beginning to study it.

"We think this is an entirely distinct phenomenon from childhood-onset gender dysphoria," says Michael Bailey, PhD, a leading researcher on sexuality and gender, and a psychology professor at Northwestern University. "Indeed, we think it didn't exist until recently. It is a socially contagious phenomenon, reminiscent of the multiple personality disorder epidemic of the 1990s."

Although not much is known at this time about ROGD, it appears likely that it may be a kind of social contagion in which young people - often teen girls - come to believe that they are transgender.
As we discussed on a previous episode of The Truth Perspective, ideas, behaviors, and emotions are contagious. They spread by imitations and mimicry. Children now spend more unsupervised time being possessed by the internet than they do face-to-face with other human beings. The factors that conditioned them have now followed them into the colleges.

Now thirty-seven percent of college students report that it is acceptable to shout down speakers with whom they disagree, and 10% agree it's acceptable to use violence to shut them up. These kids, unaccustomed to life, find anything that is vaguely threatening - like clapping or differing opinions - a cause for official and/or violent intervention.

Anything with the scent of testosterone has become 'rape' because this generation barely learned what a relationship even looked like, outside of the awful influence of pornography.

And, without learning how to deal with things like conflict, debate, discussion, or differing opinions, these kids have become the prime target audience for the SJW authoritarians out to police everyone's thoughts and relationships.

In sum it seems that the Feminist war on the family has combined with the Internet Generation to create the perfect host for the SJW madness, and it looks like it's only going to get worse.

References

1. Jean M. Twenge's iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us (Kindle Edition) loc. 893
2. Ibid. loc. 1016
3. Ibid. loc. 478
4. Ibid. loc. 1067
5. Ibid. loc. 1095