Remember in May this year when the Daily Sceptic ran a piece about people not reading anymore and the Spectator published its own version in August and the Atlantic finally caught up and ran a variation on the theme this month? Well, here’s another think piece for them to follow up in a few months’ time: teenagers are not bothering with the internet either.
Way back in 2023, while teaching a confidence class in a secondary school, I first had an inkling of this latest generational calamity. We were discussing ChatGPT and what was then Bard. I asked GCSE age students how they were using them. Blank looks all round. Eventually one boy explained why he doesn’t: “I have to log on.” I put this down to classic teenage laziness and thought nothing more of it. But the evidence of largescale internet ignorance is growing: a conversation with a 15 year-old girl who has had a smartphone since she was five (yes five) about learning to cook. “Where do I find recipes?” she asked… A similar aged girl who spends nine hours a day on her phone but didn’t know there were yoga exercises on YouTube… The teenage boy who had no idea how to book train tickets… The girl who was visiting London and didn’t know “what do to there?”… the child baffled that we could watch a video to teach us how to remove permanent marker from skin – and so on.
I’ve been asked variously by teenagers: does the death penalty exist in Britain? Who is President of America? When was the Second World War? Where is Turkey? What do they eat in Scotland? What are sausages made from? When I’ve suggested that the children could Google the answers, I’m met with a shrug and shake of the head: “I hate searching it up,” they reply. They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
And this, I have finally worked out, is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reams and reams of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll.
The wider internet and its wealth of possibilities has receded to the same wallpaper effect as books: it’s there, but the majority of children are not curious to find out what it has to offer. For non-digital natives like me who still carry memories of completing their Civil War history homework by trudging up the lane to Great Uncle Allen’s house hoping that his Chambers Encyclopaedia had something to say about General Fairfax, or turning up backpacking as a 19 year-old girl in Mexico City with nowhere to stay, the wonders of Google will never cease to amaze. But for digital natives, the internet is as ordinary as tarmac.
My husband is not yet persuaded. He asks with narrowing eyes, “What about that boy you told me about who fed his personal statement through ChatGPT and got an offer from Oxford or the girl who found a music producer online and got her song released, or the boy who self-published a book about badgers?” Well of course, I explained slowly, as there have always been children who read books and therefore excelled educationally, there will continue to be children who use the internet to learn facts and enhance and share their talents. But for the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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