Joe Gentry

Telephones, transistor radios and TV (the 3 T’s) were the technology that I was exposed to during early puberty, a period of rapid brain rewiring when neural pruning and myelination are occurring at a very rapid rate which is guided by my adolescent experiences.

Let’s begin with the telephone. My family could not afford a private phone line (which were quite expensive) and we had a party line that served a number of neighborhood subscribers. Our party line was served by the switching station labeled Elmwood, with the corresponding first two letters (EL – 35) starting our phone number (which was 354-2270). This number was my mother’s landline number until she passed at age 98. When my father allowed me to use the phone, there was no privacy. Other subscribers could pick up and listen to my conversation or I could have picked up and listened into their conversations, i.e., Mrs. Klemens talking to her sister (they were on our party line). So I tended not to use the phone very often because of the privacy issue. If I wanted to talk to one of my buddies I’d walk to their house and have a synchronous encounter. Telephones had a minimal impact on my development.

Transistor radios bring back fond memories. Warm summer nights were much different growing up than they are now. Air conditioning was not an option in our house nor in any of our neighbor’s homes. So on warm nights, everyone’s window were pretty much wide open, hoping for a cool, gentle breeze. Family life was an open book as we could (sometimes) hear the goings on in our neighbor’s house. During my late adolescent early teenage years, friends would gather around whomever had possession of a transistor radio and we’d sit on someone’s front porch and listen to WLS (AM radio) and Dick Biondi or Larry Lujack on WCFL, both broadcast from Chicago or, most often, Boss Radio on CKLW from Windsor, Canada. CKLW often mentioned in their marketing they could be heard and had listeners as far north as Posen, Michigan! Of course, reception depended on frequency “skip” making the signal available. Another synchronous experience with friends. Oh, how I miss those simple nights of friendly banter, staticky early rock and roll and Motown sounds surrounded by neighborhood friends.

TV did not have a significant impact on my life until my high school years. We did not get a TV until the mid-1960s. Broadcasts were basically the three networks — CBS (WTOM-9&10) Cheboygan and Cadillac, NBC (WNEM-5) Bay City and Saginaw, and ABC (WJRT-12) Flint. We could get these channels, providing our 25-foot antennae could pick up a signal. Cable was just being introduced. The TV was a black and white set and it had a Zenith Space Command ultrasonic remote that was the size of a small Army phone. It operated by creating high frequency sounds produced by four aluminum rods that could turn the TV off and on, or move the channel knob clockwise or counterclockwise. My oldest brother would aggravate my father by jingling his car keys and the channels would start changing. TV did not play a big role in my attention span because of sports. Someone once said if you opened up Joe’s head the only thing that would fall out is some kind of ball –golf ball, baseball, bowling ball, ping pong ball, or basketball. My teenage time and energy was spent engaging in sports — synchronous sports. Playing junior golf at the Alpena Golf Club, baseball in Little League, Babe Ruth League or in the neighborhood at the Depot, bowling every Saturday morning in youth league, competitive ping pong at the Boys Club or playing basketball wherever an under-sized overachiever like me was allowed in — Freddie Skiba’s and Joe Klemen’s driveway, Townsend’s backyard, St. Bernard’s and St. Paul’s mini-gyms, Bay View courts or any public school gym we could weasel our way into.

Technology did not have a dramatic impact on my development during my adolescent and early puberty formative years. The telephone offered zero privacy and I could have listened to most anything on the radio or watched anything on TV and my parents would not have been concerned because most all programming was under censorship controls. Disc jockeys and TV shows were monitored for language, ideas and content. My first real experience with censorship was issues with the “Smothers Brothers” TV show (one of my favorite shows) and their anti-war content concerning the Vietnam War. At that point, my personality and brain were developed well enough to form my own opinions. I’m not approving censorship, my point is that my adolescent and early puberty formative growth period was influenced by my adolescent experiences that were primarily synchronous.

In his book, “The Anxious Generation — How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” Jonathan Haidt states, “Synchronous, face-to-face interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient and underappreciated part of human development. Yet the major media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction which can become more like work than play. Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age and in the right order.”

He also says, “Gen Z (born after 1995 to 2010) became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for children and adolescents. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are for successful human development.”

We should be concerned that today’s youth experiences are being chosen by strangers and algorithms and are virtual and asynchronous. Smartphones are an experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need. Haidt recommends four actions to counter this mental illness epidemic: 1. No smartphones before high school; 2. No social media before age 16; 3. Phone-free schools; and 4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence (to develop social skills, overcome anxiety and become self-governing young adults). Amen to this!

Joe Gentry is the executive director of the United Way of Northeast Michigan. Reach him at 989-354-2221 or jgentry@unitedwaynemi.org.