NEW YORK – A group of teenagers meet every Sunday in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where they laugh, craft and just talk.
It’s only unusual because there isn’t a single smartphone in sight, and that’s on purpose.
They are part of a small but growing group of Brooklyn students who founded The Luddite Club, named after a 19th-century movement against industrialization.
This comes as New York City labeled social media as a threat to public health in 2024, and the Adams administration continues to do so consider banning cell phones at school.
“During COVID, I was kind of looking at my screen time and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m spending more than half my waking time on my phone. Something has to change.’ And I got a flip phone,” recalls Jameson Butler, a student at Brooklyn Technical High School.
The club was founded on Edward R. Murrow High School but has since expanded to other schools in the municipality.
Amanda Hanna-McLeer was a teacher at Murrow when she noticed how many of her students were struggling with technology addiction.
“I’ve been called a Luddite for years, probably since 2017, and it wasn’t used in a positive way. It was very derogatory. Luddites are often seen as anti-progress, backward,” she says. A Luddite, she explains, is “someone who is against the abuse, not against the use of technology.”
“We all benefit from some amount of technology in our lives. But what we’re seeing now is the misuse of technology,” she told CBS News New York reporter Hannah Kliger.
One day, a film student named Ava De La Cruz showed her video of her weekly meetings with Luddite friends. It was a group she joined after feeling a pang of fear following the pandemic.
“Now all of a sudden I’m in high school and I’m about to go to college and my life basically feels like it’s completely eluding me. And so it was like I had to do something,” she says.
Teens in the group have different interests, go to different schools, but share a commitment to kicking their phone addiction.
“The average American screen time is almost eight hours. And so my days are eight hours longer,” says Butler.
McLeer was so inspired by their self-awareness that she quit her teaching job and threw herself into making a documentary about them, co-produced by De La Cruz.
“When there are no phones around during a Sunday meeting, they are drawing, painting, singing, dancing, writing. They are doing everything kids should be doing,” McLeer says.
They hope to release the film next year, but also launched a scavenger hunt of historic Brooklyn institutions as a way for young people to put down their phones and spend some time together, even if just for a little while.
According to the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, two-thirds of American teens report being distracted by cell phones during class, and data shows this can even impact academic performance.
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Hannah Kliger
