Anecdotally, really really well! based on Haidt's watershed of 2009 I'm seeing what's in the pipeline at bachelors and masters level education 10-12 years on. Most of my L6 and L7 are young adults aged around 20-25. They've either had about a decade of exposure to smartphones and social media, or for some reason they have opted out.
There is a very significant difference in their abilities and attitudes. I can almost see it in their eyes in the first tutorial.
Motivation is higher.
Punctuality and commitment are massively better (they turn up to tutorials and don't email me at the last minute with an excuse)
Concentration and listening is better, They are not constantly twitching and looking to their phone.
Emotional range of affect (ability for seriousness and good humour) is higher.
Positive interpersonal skills are better. This isn't an introvert-extrovert thing, it's about focus, openness, body language, eye contact, thoughtfulness of speech, vocabulary. It's just a different experience to meet people who are phone-free.
Even ability to use technology is improved. Counterintuitive maybe. But they seem better at searching, referencing and organising information.
I pretty much breathe a sigh of joy when I see a student has a dumb phone or tells me they "don't do smartphone and social media". I know there's going to be more to work with, and the outcomes are going to be interesting.
The irony is of course, that these "weird ones" would have been us geeks 30 years ago. The same group you'd expect to have a more intense relation to authentic knowledge, curiosity and better academic outcomes.
Things have flipped so that technology overuse is now normative, and the "geeky" thing to do is be moderate, circumspect and sceptical.
Twitter and TikTok are still pretty big for the "weird girls". Witch culture, far-left politics, nerdy fandoms, and outsider music all have pretty big communities online, a lot of which are made up of teenage girls or queer-adjacent kids.
The "weird boys" mostly end up on reddit and Discord, as expected. I remember spending time with their group at one point and asking one of the kids what he was doing on his phone all night, he said he was arguing with another reddit mod on Discord about rules for their new sub. This was at a campfire.
The comic book store or DIY concert hall don't exist as watering holes for nerdy Gen-Z. I think there's something profoundly sad about that.
