By Patricia Mukhim
There has to be something seriously wrong with our lives when students attending post graduate classes remain completely silent and have not a single question to ask after a presentation and one that is provocative. This culture of silence however is part of the social norm of the Khasis. The reason? Right from the time when kids are growing up they are told never to ask too many questions; not to question elders and to take everything they say as nuggets of wisdom. Family conversations are stilted and rare. No wonder when we do question governments and institutions we do so as a crowd. Individual questioning is hardly ever seen because we are ever so afraid of making public our personal opinions.
It is my experience that if one makes a presentation anywhere else outside Meghalaya one would be bombarded with questions galore. Some students would even challenge the presenter but not here in our State. It makes one wonder whether it is even worth preparing for a presentation which students are obviously not interested in. Or does the problem lie somewhere else? On two occasions I have noticed students leaning on their friends and sleeping through the presentation right from the start. If the students were to drift off to sleep midway one could do a course correction and jerk them up with some dopamine-inducing joke or a very provocative question but that’s not the case. These students were already sleepy and the best they could have done is to leave the session and go home to sleep. Period.
But why are students listless and drowsy in the morning? Have teachers asked themselves this question? The reality is that we are at a very difficult juncture in our social history today. As tribes we wish to cling on to the past lest we lose our identity yet modernity draws us to its lap and cajoles us like nothing else does. We are wooed by gadgets and that single gadget that fits in our palm has become the be all and end all of our lives. There is no time for serious or even playful conversation at home. We are hooked to the smartphone that has reduced us to unsmart junkies. Young people across ages and some adults prefer to spend time with their smartphones rather than engage with real humans, unless the real human is a lover. The smartphone is perhaps a non-threatening space where the youth prefer to hide behind. So friendly are they with the gadget that they cling on to it far into the night and are hooked to it even past midnight and into the wee hours. By the time they sleep it is well past the time when the body clock ticks to tell us we should sign off and shut our eyes and minds so that we recover our energies. But who listens?
Come morning, the youth either have to attend school, college or university. At 7 am they are just unable to drag themselves out of bed even while exasperated parents yell at them to get ready and get out to their school/college/university on time. Those who are already working drag themselves out somehow only to reach their place of work after 10 am. But the mind is far from being able to absorb anything. It is yearning for sleep. All the teaching goes over their heads. Nothing registers. Marks drop; performance is mediocre and at the end of term they miss their goals by a huge gap. This is what life has become for many young people.
How do we deal with this crisis? Is there any institution that can detox the mind from the newest drug- the smartphone? Its pointless to expect parents to do it. Many families are disrupted because children are sulking at their parents for not letting them use the smartphone. With college and university students there’s very little that parents can do because the excuse is that there’s a lot of referencing to be done from online sources. When parents are not very educated they have little else to do but trust their children even when what’s happening in the study room has nothing to do with education but is soft porn that the youth consumes. Very soon it becomes an addiction.
No wonder teachers sense a complete lack of interest among students for any serious presentation on an issue, even one that directly affects their lives. Several studies have of course been conducted on the impact of smartphone addiction on young people.
BMC Psychiatry, an open access peer reviewed journal which analysed 41 studies involving 42,000 young people in an investigation into “problematic smartphone usage,” found that 23% had behaviour that was consistent with addiction. This included anxiety over not being able to use smartphones; not being able to moderate the time spent and using the mobile phone to the point when it had begun to negatively affect other activities.
The mobile phone has brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. In fact, smartphone use has transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the tone, tenor and texture of daily life for everyone including those that don’t own a phone or have social media accounts. However, research will reveal that the number of people without smartphones is on the decline. Most people even in distant villages consume news over smartphones and they did that overwhelmingly during the pandemic induced lockdown.
A rare student who still believes in chatting and laughing over jokes with friends says that it is now very hard to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class because everyone is staring down at a phone. Most others say that it has become harder to confide in friends and try to have deep conversations with them because they are distracted by every ping, every vibration that alerts them to a notification on their phones. In the book “Reclaiming Conversation,” Sherry Turkle writes, “life with smartphones means “we are forever elsewhere.” And that really is the crux- we are never in the moment.
The deep connect and sense of community has dwindled in college and university campuses. A University teacher says that often when he would arrive a little early for a lecture, he would find students sitting in the classroom in complete silence, each absorbed in their smartphones. Such students apparently are afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. As a result, the students are further isolated and their self-identity and confidence suffers. Needless to say most young people and adults as well are glued to their social media accounts. And of all the social media platforms, Instagram is the most popular because the young show off their dresses, their figures, the places they visit; the celebrities they meet and the eating places they frequent.
Studies by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have found that as Instagram grew in popularity over the decades, it had particularly strong effect on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality. But as of now no one can wean the youth away from Instagram. It happens to be the most popular medium for those not interested in politics and political grandstanding. All of that is for the Twitterati crowd which is also a bit of a highbrow crowd more intellectually inclined. Very few if any college and university students have a Twitter account.
That smartphones impact moods and are responsible for mood disorders, emotional fluctuation, poor family relationships is a reality today. Most young people don’t communicate with their families today. And yet there really seems to be no cure to this addiction. What’s dangerous is that this will affect the ability to think on one’s feet; the quick thinking needed for problem solving because the brain has become lethargic. We need sharp, intelligent young people with the reasoning skills to unbundle problems but if they don’t get enough sleep their brains refuse to perform to its optimum. What happens then? What sort of future are we looking at? It’s imperative for educationists and health scientists to do a deep dive on this issue because we can only ignore it at our own peril.