Millenials: Married to Technology, for Better and for Worse - Essay Example

March 10, Millenials: Married to Technology, for Better and for Worse That Millenials are married to technology is an understatement because some of them who do not have their cellular phones with them feel like they have died. The Millenials are the first generation to use e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and cell phones, with many of them using these technologies in childhood or adolescence (Tyler para.4). Millenials are called Generation Y and the Net Generation too, and they compose 80 million people in America who are born between 1978 and 1999 (Tyler para.4). They are now around ages 15 to 36 years old. Because they grew up making decisions with others and using tools that provide instant gratification for support and other needs and desires, Millenials are different from other generations in how they form and develop their workplace and close relationships because constant technology usage and communication has affected how they think and express what they think about. Millenials grow up always connected through technology because parents are working harder than ever, therefore conditioning their kids to get used to helicopter parenting from childhood to adolescence through technology. Their parents already gave them their cellphones at a young age. Some Millennial kids had their first cellphones at age 8 (Tyler para.8), while others, much earlier. Parents do this generally because they want to ensure continuous communication. After all, many households nowadays have parents working full-time. Even mothers who stay at home work through having their businesses or Internet-based jobs or are busy with community affairs. One of the ways they can ensure that their children are safe and that they can influence their decisions is through helicopter parenting (Tyler para.5). Jeanne Achille, CEO of Shrewsbury, a public relations firm, notes that she receives constant information streaming from her daughters, telling her what they are doing and even what they plan to do (Tyler para.1). She admits that she would never have given her own parents this level and frequency of information before (Tyler para.3), which underscores that, as a parent, she is one of the drivers of her children’s frequent usage of and dependence on technology for communication and relationship-building purposes. Families are significant motivators for using technology with such pervasiveness among Millenials. Parents also affect school and workplace practices, as they extend their helicopter parenting to their children’s schools and careers. Kathryn Tyler reports about parents who meddle in academic courses, such as parents protesting low grades, even for those who are lazy or who cheated (para.20). Tyler also accounts the times when parents intervene in workplace decisions. Some examples are from Ann Reynolds, director of university career services at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Reynolds narrates that she has received feedback from employers about “parents calling to find out why their child was not hired or offered more money. A few want to be involved in negotiating salary…” (Tyler para.27). These actions indicate the downsides of helicopter parenting, which is the removal of children’s autonomy. Still, many parents would not have had their parenting approach differently because technology signifies their presence in their children’s lives. Aside from parents, society itself has many other institutions that prepare Millenials to work with technology constantly. Schools are teaching children how to use technology for academic projects, but some feel that technology has replaced their ability to read and think deeply. Sherry Turkle underscores that it is good for students to know how to use PowerPoint in making presentations, but “it isn’t the same as critical thinking” (para.9). She is saying that students now know more about using technology than using it for deeper purposes. The media is also responsible for selling technological tools and making them appear as the answer to instant gratification needs. Kay S. Hymowitz talks about media that feed male adults’ needs for delaying their adulthood. She argues that apart from lack of responsibilities, the entertainment media is “devoted to [men’s] every pleasure, [and so] todays young man has no reason to grow up” (para.2). If they can connect to the Internet or watch TV to fill up their time, then adolescents feel that technology is all they need to grow up. These social institutions are developing and reinforcing Millenials’ love affair with technology. With these influences, Millenials’ workplace performance is affected because of their dependence on communication tools and the Internet which increases frequency of dependence in family and peers for decision making. There are two effects of constant communication and collaboration, the first is learned helplessness. Robert Epstein, visiting scholar at the University of California in San Diego, and West Coast editor of Psychology Today underscores that parents should let their children make decisions on their own: “Parents’ most important task is to help young people to become independent and autonomous. When we infantilize our young, we stifle their development” (Tyler para.17). He is saying that hovering children on every detail of their life can make them helpless in making complex decisions later on as adolescents and adults. Robert W. Wendover, director of The Center for Generational Studies, a research and training company, agrees with Epstein regarding the negative effect of helicopter parenting on Millenials. He states that “kids leave everything to mom and dad… It’s easier to use the parent as a surrogate than to think for yourself. There is a point at which the child fails to learn resourcefulness,” which results to “learned helplessness” (Tyler para.23). Instead of being honed to think critically for their own interests, these children are no longer developing autonomous decision-making processes. The second effect of constant communication and collaboration is closer relationships with loved ones and peers. Barbara Dwyer, CEO of The Job Journey, a soft-skills training firm for high-school and community college students asserts that good parent-children relationships is good for society. She states that “[t]his generation is closer to their parents than any other generation. They see their parents as friends. It’s a good thing” (Tyler para.24). At the same time, she underscores that helicopter parents are just a minority in the parenting population (Tyler para.25), so the large-scale effects of learned helplessness may be overestimated. Moreover, collaboration now is a practice in both schools and organizations through groups and teams. Children can benefit from being used to working with and thinking in groups. The ability to think critically, analytically, and creatively, however, is one of the contested domains for Millenials. Scholars are divided on Millenials’ technology connection’s impact on their brains, and consequently, how they think and act. Turkle is one of the scholars who have studied the impact of technology on people for twenty years. She is concerned that technology is robbing people’s ability to read sophisticated and long text and to analyze them: “The ability to trace complicated themes through a literary work, through a poem, through a play—these pleasures will be lost to us because they become pleasures through acquired skills” (Turkle para.5). She is saying that if people can no longer read, appreciate, and analyze long texts, it is possible to not learn the acquired skills of critical and analytical thinking. Indeed, many Millenials now find it hard to read long texts, more so, to understand them. Instead, they are constantly distracted. Turkle underscores that people nowadays are bombarded with distractions. Stillness, she asserts, is critical to thinking, where she cites Erik Erikson who explained “the need for stillness in order to fully develop and to discover your identity and become who you need to become and think what you need to think” (Turkle para.15). If Millenials have problems being still to think, then many of them will have problems in thinking long and deeply about issues and events that need these kinds of thinking processes. Apart from problematic issues in thinking, Millenials are grappling with the phenomena of multitasking. They can do many things all at once, such as playing games, while reading and chatting with friends online. Multitasking, however, does not produce the same quality results always as being capable of concentration on one task at a time. Turkle asserts that “…the new research is coming in that says when you multitask, everything gets done a little worse; there’s a degradation of all functions” (para.12). She refers to research that says that multi-taskers are not creating as good quality projects or outcomes as non-multi-taskers. By being tethered to different tools all the time and simultaneously, the brain can only process so much for it to produce high-quality analysis and findings. Another effect of technology on Millenials is focused on men, especially the extension of pre-adulthood stage because of technology and social institutions that pamper them. Hymowitz is concerned of how society and technology are developing immature adults. She explains that pre-adult men continue to become irresponsible or lack direction and motivation in lives because of parents who hover over them and help them anyway they can, a college education that becomes too comfortable as a source of a good life, and the labor market that is hard to understand and to succeed in (para. 7-9). Hymowitz is basically showing that society is creating Millenial boys who do not want to be adults at all, since life is good, but hard enough for them to want to grow up. It is a kind of paradox of being pre-adult because one is used to it and also because one fears leaving it. Moreover, Hymowitz argues that Millenial men experience delayed adulthood because they might feel that society does not need them anyway. She says: “Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. Theres nothing they have to do” (Hymowitz para. 21). She also makes society, including women, responsible for these men because they are not helping them have the values, skills, and knowledge that can prepare them to make long-term analysis and decisions. When people just let pre-adulthood men be, they are allowing them to remain that way for a long time. Despite these negative effects, others believe that technology is a good force in people’s lives, which means that Millenials are actually in a good position to learn from technology, as other generations had when new technology came in to change their lives and societies. Alison Gopnik does not fully agree with Turkle that technology turns people into people with “devalued and alienated lives” (para.6). Gopnik believes that there is nothing different from technology today in the way technology before affected people. For instance, she compares instant communication with love letters sent several times a day in the past (Gopnik para.15). Her point is that technology itself is not a new tool for communication and relationship-building. Furthermore, Gopnik argues that technology is helping people live richer lives in ways that other generations did not enjoy. Her questions are provocative: “Did we really once listen to our grandmothers with undivided attention? Were adolescent girls delighted by the rich and meaningful conversations they had with their mothers?” She asserts that constant connection and communication are not so bad because people can have a choice in building stronger relationships with their parents. If Millenials have technology at their disposal for creating rich relationships, then technology remains as means, not as ends, to their lives. Millenials are perennially tethered to technology which affects how they work, make and sustain conversations, make decisions and interact. They constantly use technology to communicate with others because they are used to instant communication. Though technology can hamper their ability to make decisions creatively and independently, Millenials continue to use technology to shape their lives and identity. They do not mind the constant connection, including what scholars say as helplessness and distraction, if these activities are critical to their sense of self. Millenals are married to technology and they are not going to get a divorce it any time sooner. Works Cited Gopnik, Alison. “Diagnosing the Digital Revolution.” Slate 7 Feb. 2011. Web. 7 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 Mar. 2014. Hymowitz, Kay S. “Where Have The Good Men Gone?” The Wall Street Journal 19 Feb. 2011. Web. 7 Mar. 2014. Turkle, Sherry. “Digital Demands: The Challenges of Constant Connectivity.” Frontline’s Digital Nation 2003. Web. 7 Mar. 2014. Tyler, Kathryn. “The Tethered Generation.” HR Magazine 1 Mar. 2007. Web. 7 Mar. 2014. Read More