IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 11

Book Reviews
A. David Wunsch

Their Own Devices
Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives are Reshaping the American Dream
By Julie Albright, Prometheus Books, 2019, 368 pages.

f Freud hadn't al -
ready chosen the
title, Dr. Albright, a
faculty member at
the Universit y of
Southern California, might have
used Civilization and Its Discontents. Or maybe she would have pre-
ferred Trollope's milder The Way We
Live Now. A metonym for this most-
ly depressing work can be found on
page 279 where she announces
" Eighty-four percent of teens now
complain of back problems from
being slumped over their phones. "
Really, 5 kids out of 6? The footnote
for this statement refers one to an
article in the Guardian newspaper
of November 24, 2014, where I
searched in vain for the 84 percent.
Or try this: " A third of infants under
one year old are using smart
phones or tablets before they can
walk or talk [italics added]. " Using?
What does this mean? Used as a
teething ring? Going to her source in
the Los Angeles Times, we find that
these statistics come from a study
based on a low income, minority
community in Philadelphia. Albright
never refers to the population from
which this conclusion was taken.
There is no indication of what expo-
sure these children might have also
had to television, dolls, or a plastic
oral pacifier. The study says that 36
percent of the parents interviewed

said that their child had " touched or
scrolled a screen. " If this doesn't
alarm you perhaps Albright's obser-
vation, taken from an article in the
Huffington Post, that 20 percent of
18 to 29 year olds are using their
smart phone " during sex. "
Albright's book focuses on a
group of Americans who live a life of
digital hyper-connectivity. Mostly
under age 50, this would include
what are called Generation X (born
between 1965 and 1979), Millennials
(born between 1980 and 1999), and
their offspring - some, as we have
seen, still infants. A leitmotif of her
book is that these " digital natives, "
as she calls them have been unteth-
ered from the American Dream - a
term she uses to describe the subur-
ban house, car, a working dad with a
long-term job, stay at home mom, 2
or 3 kids, church membership. The
dream - which never functioned for
African Americans - disappeared
well before the age of the smart
phone and Internet, a victim of the
women's movement of the 1960's
and 1970's and the increasing aspi-
rations of a growing group of educat-
ed women. More women have been
getting bachelor's degrees than men
for over 37 years.
Albright's natives are untethered
from what she sees as the tradition-
al signifiers of adulthood. They
aren't marrying, or having children;
they eschew car ownership, don't go
to church. She calls them in one
instance " generation rent. " That this

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.3031753
Date of current version: 2 December 2020

DECEMBER 2020

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

renting has anything to do with a
shortage of affordable housing in
America is never noted. Her case
histories involve people who couch
surf, live in tiny apartments, or
sometimes reside in a hut or trailer.
Because their work - often consist-
ing of short term assignments -
involves the Internet, they don't
need a fixed base. Albright cites sta-
tistics showing that " the diffusion of
Facebook between 2008 and 2010
has been correlated with an in -
crease in the divorce rate in the
same time period. " Looking at the
actual article we find this disclaimer
from the article's authors, which
casts her confident claim in a some-
what different light:
" However, the study does not
establish a cause-and-effect
relationship because that
would require longitudinal
and/or experimental data. In
fact, as we explain below, a
negative correlation between
Facebook and marriage well-
being can be explained by
either a causal link or through
self-selection. Therefore, the
current study is a necessary,
though not sufficient, step
towards understanding the
role of SNS [social network
system], especially Facebook,
in marriage well-being. "
In general, the book suffers from
a tendency to conflate correlation

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