The Generation That Doesn't Remember Life Before Smartphones

This is what it means to be a teenager in 2015.

Down a locker-lined hallway at Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis, Zac Felli, a junior, walks to his first class of the day. He wears tortoiseshell glasses and is built like he could hit a ball hard. He has enviable skin for a teenager, smooth as a suede jacket. Over one shoulder he carries a slim forest-green and tan messenger bag that would have been social suicide in 1997. But 1997 was the year Zac was born, so he wouldn't know anything about that.

A squat, taupe monolith flanked by parking lots, Lawrence Central smells like old brick and floor polish and grass. Its gleaming floors squeak if you move your foot a certain way. The school has existed on precisely this spot of land since 1963: maroon block letters over the door, tang of chlorine from the indoor pool. None of that has changed. Here's what has: After Zac turns the doorknob of Room 113 and takes his seat in Japanese III, he reaches into his shoulder bag, pushes aside his black iPhone 5S and Nintendo 3DS XL, and pulls out his Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet with purple detachable keyboard, which he props up on his desk using its kickstand. By touching a white and purple icon on his screen, he opens Microsoft OneNote, a program in which each of his classes is separated into digital journals and then into digital color-coded tabs for greater specificity. And then, without a piece of paper in sight and before an adult has said a word, he begins to learn.

HOW DOES ALL THAT CHANGE THE MONOTONY AND JOY AND PAIN AND WONDER AND TURMOIL THAT IS THE AVERAGE TEENAGER'S LIFE?

Zac probably started developing memories around 1999, the year Napster upended the music industry by turning songs into sharable files that nobody owned. Or maybe in 2000, the year Google became Google. Regardless, he is part of the first generation of human beings who never really lived before the whole world was connected by pocket-sized electronic devices. These kids might never read a map or stop at a gas station to ask directions, nor have they ever seen their parents do so. They will never need to remember anyone's phone number. Their late-night dorm-room arguments over whether Peyton or Eli Manning won more Super Bowl MVPs will never go unsettled for more than a few seconds. They may never have to buy a flashlight. Zac is one of the first teenagers in the history of teenagers whose adult personality will be shaped by which apps he uses, how frequently he texts, and whether he's on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat. Or whatever comes after Snapchat. Clicking like, clicking download, clicking buy, clicking send—each is an infinitesimal decision in the course of the modern American teenager's life. They do this, collectively, millions of times a minute. But together these tiny decisions make up an alarming percentage of their lives. This generation is the first for whom the freedom to express every impulse to the entire world is as easy as it used to be to open your mouth and talk to a friend.

How does all that change the monotony and joy and pain and wonder and turmoil that is the average teenager's life? What is it like?

Like many of the other 2,350 students at Lawrence Central, Zac knows computers better than even last year's graduating class did. The students here use them constantly—up to two and a half hours a day, according to Lawrence Central's principal, Rocco Valadez. This year is the first that Lawrence Central is one-to-one, which in educational speak means that every student on campus has been provided with a leased Chromebook laptop computer. Valadez considers Zac one of his beta testers, one of ten or so students the administration turns to for reports and opinions on how the technology is working. Zac, incidentally, asked if he could use his own Surface instead of a Chromebook. Because Zac is a high-level user, Valadez obliged. ("I'm a Surface guy," Zac says.)

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

An example: It's the penultimate week of classes at Lawrence Central, and the pressure has been released from campus like a football gone flat. The instructor of Japanese III, at the moment ensconced behind a computer monitor that is reflected in his glasses, switches on the announcements. The American tradition in this situation—end of school, little work to do, teacher preoccupied—is that the students would be passing notes, flirting, gossiping, roughhousing. Needing to be shushed. Instead, a boy to Zac's left watches anime. A girl in the front row clicks on YouTube. Zac is clearing space on his computer's hard drive, using a program called WinDirStat that looks like a boring version of Candy Crush—deftly, quietly, he moves small colored squares around to clean up the drive. Green, red, blue, purple. (When he types, he types evenly—none of that hinky freeze-pause-backspace thing that every adult with a hint of self-consciousness does when typing in front of anyone else.) Above a ziggurat of loaner Chromebooks at the front of the classroom hangs what's called a Promethean board, a panel that looks like a digital tablet the size of a Shetland pony. On the Promethean board, the day's announcements play, including a news segment on a London School of Economics study. The anchor begins: "Test scores increase by more than 6 percent at schools that ban smartphones …" At this the students in Japanese III—absorbed in private computational fiddling, phones out on their desks like pencil cases—let forth a chorus of snorts.

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