One in four young people never answers the phone. When it rings, he ignores it. Simply. And if the “disturbers” are friends and relatives, at most they simply reply with a message because more than half of them think that an unexpected call is a harbinger of bad news. Other than phone addicts. Not, at least, according to the more traditional use that was made of the medium: according to a survey by Times of London most people (almost 70%) between 18 and 34 years old hate telephone conversations and become anxious at the mere thought of answering and speaking into a receiver. Thus, to vocal “chat”, they prefer the text message or, 37%, the voice note. The latter is chosen by only 1% of those between 35 and 54 years old.
«But we grew up with social media and it is normal that we use our smartphone to post videos and chat and not to talk – says Eleonora Locci, 23 years old, an influencer in her final year of Italian-French law in Florence who has managed to “accumulate” 800 thousand followers on TikTok and 150 thousand on Instagram thanks to her “live studios” launched during the pandemic (a sort of library digital: her fans followed her while she studied) -. However, I love being on the phone because I have always had friends and relatives far away, between Brazil, France and the United Arab Emirates, and I need to hear their voices. Many of my friends, on the other hand, prefer to send messages rather than reply but it is a question of habit and generational culture».
«The problem is that of contact, even if only by telephone, because they have to adapt to each other and knowing how to use the rules of dialogue – claims Massimo Ammaniti, psychoanalyst and honorary professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of Sapienza, in Rome -. Young people they use the smartphone to chat, share videos, do “sexting”, that is, sharing sexual content but not for talking. They are all indirect forms of communication that avoid dialogue and which the experience of the Covid pandemic has favored.”
“Mediated” forms of communication that can degenerate into a real contact phobia so much so that, in Japan, there has long been talk of “muon sedai”, the “silent generation” of girls and boys between 20 and 30 who respond to traditional voice calls with chats and messages. «The phobia of contact leads the boy to lock himself in his room, to no longer want to go out, to delimit and limit relationships with others – continues Ammaniti, author of several manuals on adolescent psychopathology (his latest book will be released tomorrow: The paradoxes of adolescents, edited by Raffaello Cortina) -. Solutions? Dialogue is fundamental, and must start from parents, who must set a good example. Today adolescents experience paradoxes. They are freer, they have a cell phone, they can move around, they often have their first sexual experiences in their room at their parents’ house, they find it increasingly difficult to set limits, but they experience an underlying malaise. Having too many opportunities doesn’t help them, on the contrary, because it raises too many questions for them».
Another adolescent paradox? «They are extremists, for them everything is either black or white but, here too, we must learn to listen to them. In the United States, they respond to university demonstrations by involving the police when instead these are situations that dshould be addressed by adults through discussionwithout resorting to repression. Adolescence is nothing more than a “normal disease”. A period of life that must be experienced with its ups and downs.”
