Nearly every student clutches a phone in one hand as they traverse the University of Central Florida campus, even while walking in groups. Laptops and tablets are lunchtime companions, and earbuds and headphones are routine accessories. While waiting for class to start, many students sit in silence, drawn into their devices.
It is a familiar and exasperating scene for Seán Killingsworth, 22, a former U.C.F. student. “What is this life I’m signing up for?” he asked himself during his sophomore year. “It was just like, I’m talking to a bunch of zombies.”
Mr. Killingsworth craved a space where he could chat with his peers without feeling as though he was intruding. When he was in high school, he ran into similar conundrums, so he would organize phone-free hangouts with friends.
Why not in college too?
In 2023, he helped bring the idea of no-phone social time to two different Florida campuses — U.C.F. and Rollins College. He called it the Reconnect Movement: During meetings, everyone was required to hand over their phone and socialize without devices, a concept that has become a big draw for like-minded students. Reconnect has now spread to six schools in four states. And in September it broadened its reach beyond students, hosting a phone-free event in New York — soon to be followed by Orlando and Tampa — that anyone could attend.
Reconnect’s popularity dovetails with a cultural shift in how smartphones and social media are perceived by adults and adolescents alike.
Experts have sounded the alarm about the potential mental health dangers of digital media, even though it’s hard to prove a causal connection between this technology and the rising rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression in young people. Campaigns to reduce or delay smartphone use like “Wait Until 8th” and books like Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling “The Anxious Generation” have struck a deep chord, particularly with parents. Meanwhile, new laws are popping up countrywide to ban phones at public schools.
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The post Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So? appeared first on New York Times.
