What Were We Thinking in 2008?

In 2008, after I’d written a book with the subtitle “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future,” I was labeled a “Luddite” more than 50 times in various lectures, panels, and radio interviews. I argued that social media, multitasking, and computers in the classroom were threats to knowledge, taste, and bookish habits, and so came off as a clueless Boomer. The same thing happened when other tech skeptics of that era spoke out against the spreading digital zeal in those heady days of Web 2.0.

Back then, all the momentum was with the digital breakthrough, particularly in K-12 education. In 2000, the state of Maine initiated a program to give every middle schooler a laptop, and soon a half-dozen states launched similar plans. One element of No Child Left Behind, “Enhancing Education through Technology,” gave schools nationwide funding to integrate tech into the curriculum and make kids “technologically literate” by eighth grade. Billions of dollars backed these grand designs. In 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District alone agreed to pay $1.3 billion for 700,000 iPads for teachers and students to use for schoolwork only. As a result, every student was soon attached to a screen whose software tailored the exercise to each user’s needs and talents. 

It sounded so good, but didn’t pan out. The momentum has flipped, and not only because test scores have dropped. Jonathan Haidt’s documentation of the emotional damage done to adolescents by cell phone use has inspired bans in schools far and wide. The disappearance of book reading in high schools and colleges—caused in good part by the habits of the screen—is now an accepted and regretted fact. Every week brings fresh research on the cognitive damage wrought by daily hours of gaming, scrolling, viewing, and texting (Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024 was “brain rot,” that is, the mental decline caused by internet overuse). Apologists used to say, “The tools are neutral—we just need to teach the young how to use them wisely.” Nobody believes that anymore. The relationship is too intimate; the screen isn’t a passive object; lives are steered by it.

It’s a remarkable collapse from the optimism of the 2000s. We heard glowing promises of digitized classrooms that would customize learning and raise test scores, of online communities that would cure youth isolation and loneliness, and the crowning of Millennials as savvy pioneers leading America into the 21^st century. There were texting contests that awarded scholarships to winners, teachers who praised Wikipedia as a breakthrough in collaborative learning, and foundations that issued happy reports on the new digital youth.