Digital natives are the best-adjusted teens on record by statistical measures.

Evidence

By all statistical measures these digital natives happen to be the happiest, healthiest, most social, most civic-minded, best adjusted, and least violent and self-destructive teens since large demographic surveys began at the end of World War II. […] If kids cannot pay attention in school, it may be less because they have ADHD and more because we have a mismatch between the needs and desires of students today and the national standards-based education based on the efficiencies of a classroom created before World War I. Are kids being dumbed down by digital culture or by our insistence on success and failure as measured by testing geared to lower-order and largely irrelevant item-response skills? Are video games the problem, or, as I suspect, is the problem our widespread abdication of the new three Rs (rigor, relevance, and relationship) in favour of antiquated testing based on rote memorization of random facts that has little to do with the way kids actually read, write, and do arithmetic online – or will need to do it in the workplace? — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 419

Categorization

• QUESTION: Davidson’s claim that the ‘new three Rs’ (rigor, relevance, relationship) have been abdicated in favor of antiquated testing invites checking the actual Pew 2008 data and later replications or critiques of the happiness/health stats.
• XREF: Connects to the ADHD-vs-mismatch framing in other digital media critique literature, and to Carr’s The Shallows discussed two paragraphs later as the deficit-side counterpart. — connects to: Social media triggers unprecedented intensity of social comparison among the young. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1472; Digital-native teenagers are as vulnerable to misinformation as adults — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 47
• SEED: Angle: the debunking of the ‘digital native decline’ narrative could anchor an essay on how moral panics about attention are usually displaced anxieties about institutional mismatch.

Broader Connections

• Social media triggers unprecedented intensity of social comparison among the young. #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1472