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Analysis Essay
In “ Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation” by Twenge, the author talks about how
smartphones affects the people who are in the generation of technology, especially teenagers and
adolescence. She shares her own personal experiences interacting with children that are involved
with smartphones. Twenge found out that her childhood was much differentiated from the
children that are growing up now. Smartphones are a huge influence of this cause. Since Twenge
is a psychologist that do research on generational differences, there will be lots of contrast going
on in her essay. This contributes to her purpose of this essay which is to inform and warn the
generation of technology about the danger of smartphones as they can potentially affect a
person’s health.
As mentioned above, Twenge is a psychologist, so it is essential for her to analyze the
research that she found and merge them together to form a conclusion. She stated in her essay
that she used to spend her evening bonding with her family and gossip about certain things that
happened during the day. But as she talks to a teenager nowadays, she discover that they do not
really do any of this. They would spend most of their time on social media such as Snapchat,
Facebook, and Instagram. In her conversation with a thirteen year old girl Athena, Athena
mentioned that “we like our phones more than we like actual people” (Twenge 2). It is almost
like they can not live without their phones. This is one of the issues that the author addressed in
her essay. Teens are gradually becoming antisocial because they are way too attached to their
phones. She often uses rhetorics in her essays to depict an image for the readers. When she talks
about an abrupt shift in teen’s behavior and emotional states in 2002, she stated “the gentle
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slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs” (Twenge 1). She is showing
us a metaphor comparing the similarity between the line graphs and steep mountains to portray a
visual of the shifts.
Twenge mentions many issues as part of her exigence in the essay. One of the most
important message that she talks about is how smartphones cause an abrupt shift in teen
behaviors and emotional states. She puts plenty of her own research in this essay to support her
claim. As she poured over yearly surveys of teen behaviors and attitudes, talking to more teens
like Athena, she finally came to an understanding that their generation is “shaped by the
smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media” (Twenge 4). She calls this generation
the IGen, which are the people that were born between 1995 and 2000. People that grew up with
smartphones and having an instagram account before they start high school. Most important of
all, they do not remember a time without the internet. The author’s tone here is very informative.
She is clarifying her own research to the audience in a very direct way, in a way that claims the
hazard of smartphones.
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