The opening of smartphones to third-party apps led to fierce competition among companies large and small to create the most engaging mobile apps. The winners of this race were often those that adopted free-to-to-use, advertising-based business models because few consumers would pay $2.99 for an app if a competitor offered one for free. This proliferation of advertising-driven apps caused a change in the nature of time spent using a smart phone. By the early 2010s, our phones had transformed from Swiss Army knives, which we pulled out when we needed a tool, to platforms upon which companies competed to see who could hold on to eye-balls the longest.
The people with the least willpower and the greatest vulnerability to manipulation were, of course, children and adolescents, whose frontal cortices were still highly underdeveloped. Children have been drawn powerfully to screens since the advent of television, but they could not take those screens with them to school or when they went outside to play. Before the iPhone, there was a limit to the amount of screen time a child could have, so there was still time for play and face-to-face conversation. But the explosion of smartphone based apps such as Instagram in the exact years in which teens and preteens were moving from basic phones to smart phones marked a qualitative change in the nature of childhood. By 2015, more than 70% of American teens carried a touchscreen around with them, and these screens became much better at holding their attention, even when they were with their friends. This is why I date the beginning of the phone-based childhood to the early 2010s.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024), 115–16.
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