Smartphones are the source of a HUGE mistake, not of all social ills.
Seriously. And the sooner parents and lawmakers get it, the better.
Earlier this week, Henry Oliver wrote a passionate piece to argue that smartphones are not the source of all social ills. I fully agree, but I also think that, especially as far as children are concerned, he made a bad job overall to describe certain issues and how to deal with them, for at least a couple of reasons.
First, some excerpts
Here are, in italic, six quotes from Oliver's piece, with my comments attached.
1: This is two quotes actually, separate but related:
Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters.
I prefer smartphones to what came before. It’s easier to be uncontactable
With all we know in 2024 about how tech companies work, I doubt they themselves would question the "attention merchants" label, and if I listed here half the bookmarks I have about the first sentence, this post would be three times longer. On the same topic, the second sentence, and the whole piece in general, doesn’t mention at all that, if it's easier to be uncontactable by humans, it's almost impossible to be untraceable by the same companies, which in the big picture is probably a bigger problem.
2: [N]ow the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that smartphones and social media have “rewired” the brains of a generation of children, which makes them depressed and anxious. ... But Haidt’s claims are not uncontroversial... The evidence is less certain than it appears.
In a world that's still arguing about stuff that's way easier to measure, from superconductivity to average temperatures, expecting any claim on social science issues like these to be really uncontroversial does not seem realistic to me, but never mind. What I am sure about, from both my own experience as parent and decades of volunteering for teenagers, is that the solutions that Haidt proposes have merits of their own, and above all that they are much, much more feasible and scalable than what Oliver suggests. I'll get back to this in the final part of this post.
3: Do we really believe that the effects of this new technology are so different to, say, the arrival of landline phones and cars?
(at least) As far as children are concerned... Hell, yes. No one, child or adult, could ever influence, or be influenced by, hundreds to millions of peers simultaneously with one phone call. As far as cars are concerned, and without negating what Oliver says about them in the next point, the same children who hurt themselves with smartphones know pretty well by themselves how stupid it is to run in front of a car, not to mention that children don't get to drive cars wherever they want, whenever they want, when they are still in primary schools.
4: The most persuasive argument isn’t that phones cause unhappiness on their own, but that it exacerbates an existing trend. Children used to be much more free to play outside and take risks. Cars ended that. It is impossible to allow modern children the run of their neighbourhoods as they had in the 1950s when we have traffic levels (with heavier, faster cars) of modern times... Similarly, teenagers began reading far fewer books decades before smartphones were invented. Phones may have exacerbated that trend, but they certainly didn’t cause it.
This part makes much more sense. Please check the "Stranger Things" part of this proposal of mine to see how I suggest to rebuild cities to fix the "play outside" problem. However, it still leaves important things out, and doesn't end looking in the right direction anyway. The last sentence is true, but not a valid reason to have a personal smartphone before one is 14 or older. Even the reading issue is true, but does it prove that smartphones aren't bad for children in many other ways? If anything, that's an argument for giving every child not smartphones but ebook readers, that is devices that would bring thousands of books right on their nightstands, but without openings to cyberbullying.
Again on cars: yes, they do make kid's lives much harder, but what ended outside play (yes, since decades before smartphones) is overparenting that suffocates children with parents' fears of everything that may lie outside, from aliens to scratches, with parents' pressures to be champions in as many fields as possible, as early as possible, and with parents attaching smartphones to their children just to control them every minute. Still, none of this justifies the confusion I'll cover shortly.
5: Without the danger of passing cars, [her daughter] has something closer to an old fashioned childhood: free time, where she takes risks, without being constantly supervised. If we can solve that problem, many children will likely be much happier. It isn’t all about phones.
I've said myself that parents must let children play alone outdoors, before worrying about social media. This said, allow me to complete, not criticize, the "danger of passing cars": I obviously do not know how things are where Oliver lives. But I've seen lots of neighborhoods, in Italy and abroad, where the same children who wouldn't live long if they tried to play in the middle of the streets could safely walk on sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, to school or to some friend's place, if only their parents hadn't been made paranoid or snob by systemic pressures (coming also, who would have known, through smartphones).
6: And amongst all this clamouring, we risk overlooking the immense benefits of phones and social media.
Standing up against the overmighty state is much easier with social media.... There’s a reason why access is limited in China and Russia.
On a more mundane level, phones and social media give us access to the world in a way that was unimaginable to previous generations:
This is one of the weakest part of Oliver's piece. Point 6.1 is true in theory, not in a world where much top-down political control happens just through social media that government have learned how to turn into partners, or block altogether, since at least the Arab Spring. As far as children are concerned, instead, the same point is just irrelevant, because it just doesn't matter how many good things adults may do with a smartphone. To see it, take that sentence, replace "social media" with "assault rifles in every home", then go check how many of the same people who do think that's the best idea ever would give their children an assault rifle to use unattended, 24/7.
For the other point, which is one of the two main issues I have with Oliver's piece, here is how he describes that unimaginable access:
In the last few days social media has meant I booked tickets to a Sally Rooney event, discovered a new piano recording by Vikingar Ólafsson, watched the science explainer videos of Sabine Hossenfelder, messaged a scientist on Twitter and been sent their research paper, discovered and read a short story by Somerset Maugham, learned that Beethoven had a low genetic predisposition towards musical accomplishment, discovered a magazine of Nigerian literary criticism, and watched a video with my children of a komodo dragon eating a pony whole (recommended). Other things I have done include reading a poem by John Donne, using AI to explain a technical article I didn’t understand, chatting with subscribers to my Substack about Shakespeare, and writing about how late bloomers find their calling in life. And this is not to mention the pictures of my baby nephew that I get sent on WhatsApp.
The problem here, that Oliver himself lays out very clearly, is that he is not a meaningful sample on which to base any conclusion or policy on these issues. Not at all, and I say so as a compliment. Oliver is a successful writer with, quoting the first endorsement on his own website, "a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful".
In the same days when Oliver and every other adult with comparable natural skills, birth lottery luck, education and income as Oliver were doing all those marvelous things above, many more human beings of all ages, as in "one to ten thousands times more", were using the same phones and social media for little more than losing sleep to kitten videos, conspiracy theories, culture wars and so on.
Oliver himself tells us that he homeschools his children, that is that his children are automatically shielded from all the pressures or worst they'd have to endure in a classroom full of peers with smartphones. Again, good for them, but hardly a valid sample for general conclusions.
The other example Oliver makes, a woman evidently born with all it took to make "her passion become her career" as a social media strategist (that is an active user, among masses of passive ones of phones and social media) further strengthens the same point: what Oliver and everybody else like him can achieve only thanks to "phones and social media" is wonderful, no doubt. But it's no evidence on which anybody should base any policy or advice for the other 99 point something per cent of human beings.
The main problem: misunderstandings promoted to laws of nature
Yes, of course adults and kids who lock themselves inside smartphones wouldn't do it if the rest of their lives didn't suck. We can also accept, at least as first approximation, that "phones and social media" just exacerbated pre-existing negative trends, rather than creating them. That's nothing else than the very nature of everything digital: it greatly, greatly amplifies and accelerates everything it touches, both good and bad.
But there is digital, and then there is digital. In his piece, Oliver does outline the solution, that is "find ways of maximising the benefits and minimising the negatives - as we do with many things", but doesn't tell, or see, what the most effective ways are and why.
Here is the most important point that is completely absent from Oliver's piece, and so many still fail to see: the internet, the Web, social media, personal "stationary" computers (including laptops) and smartphones or tablets are five SEPARATE things, that must remain as separate as possible, at least in the minds of parents, educators and policymakers. The dumbest tech-related mistake done in the last 15 years may be just the equation internet = smartphone, which reached the status of law of nature for NO reason whatsoever, except digital ignorance.
Look again at all the wonderful things that Oliver did with “social media”: first of all, none of those things requires social media to work in ways that, no matter how personally immune Oliver is, are designed to be addictive. But even if social media were not addictive and were able and willing to filter out toxic content, the most important truth to grasp is that:
anybody, children included, can do all those things with a stationary device placed in one's kitchen or living room, instead of a smartphone
and that that mere change of device makes a world of difference
To see how big that difference would be for adults, imagine a world with all the same social media and online services as ours, but without smartphones, just with camera-equipped good old cellphones. That is, a world where you'd still be reachable wherever you are, and able to do everything Oliver wrote, but... in order to engage in flamewars, or share on Instagram all the food pictures taken in some fancy restaurant, you'd have to wait until you're back home, where you could attach your camera to your computer. In such a world, would you waste more or less time and stress than today?
Back to my main beef with Oliver's piece, that is Haidt and children with smartphones: regardless of the validity of his data, Haidt is not saying that smartphones, the internet or even social media should disappear. When you cut to the chase, the main if not only thing that Haidt says is only that giving uncontrollable personal smartphones to children less than 14/16 years old was a huge mistake that should end yesterday.
But this does not mean at all to give up all the good things children can do online. There is a lot that children can and should learn since primary school about the internet, the web, online communication, digital creativity and so on. But NOTHING of that requires a personal smartphone, with its intrinsic illimitability. This is what Oliver seems to completely ignore, or at least to completely fail to communicate, when he writes that "As with so many of the things teenagers start discovering, the aim should be to teach them the best use of it". What's the point of teaching or promoting the best use of the internet... just with the one tool that is much more dangerous than all the others, but not necessary at all?
What to do then?
The right thing to do is just what Oliver himself leaks out in a couple of sentences, that get hidden by all the rest. The first is when he writes to be "appalled that my thirteen year old brother has a smartphone and is allowed to waste so much time on it."
That's where the solution is. The difference between giving children a family computer they can use, possibly while other family members are around, only between homework and dinner, and a smartphone is very simple. It's the same difference there is between telling a child "hey come here and help me cut the bread with this knife", and giving her the same knife to carry around, 24/7 unattended, to use in any way hers or some stranger's brain may suggest.
In the first cases, the children get to learn and do cool, useful things, with almost no risk. In the others, "what could possibly go wrong?" is not even funny.
Adults are another story for another day. As far as children go, the reality we all actually live in is the one in which:
almost all real children less than 14/15 years old do not have the skills AND the education AND, above all, parents with enough skills AND time to help, to use smartphones without harm (ditto for teachers, in case you're thinking schools could or should ever do enough)
therefore, the children for whom a smartphone is at best an expensive ballast, at worst a mental health polluter and always an electronic tag are surely many more than those who can and do use smartphones to enrich themselves without any negative consequence
both categories of children could do almost everything Oliver does from a normal computer in their living room, which just by its own nature, location and built-in "time limits" would eliminate almost all the dangers
Corollary of all of the above: at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter how accurate Haid's data are. Or, as I wrote four months ago, it doesn't really matter whether "social media" is good or bad for "kids". Even if all THIS critic of Haidt's work, newer than those linked by Oliver, was all true, there is nothing to lose and lots to gain (even financially...) from giving children less than 14/15 years old only stationary home computers and broadband, NO smartphones. Only the first devices give access to pretty much everything positive children could need or want, age too quickly but still much slower than smartphones but block, just by being stationary where relatives can walk by, a BIG LOT of exposure and opportunities for negative outcomes.
So, please learn to distinguish between "smartphone" and "internet" or "social media". Give children stationary internet soon, but delay as much as possible the uncontrollable, unsuperviseable access to the whole internet and to the continuous, digitally distorted pressures from equally unprepared peers that smartphones couldn't avoid being, even if their makers wanted.
Who should do it? Easy: follow Oliver, again, when he writes "I don’t want to ban my brother from using... the internet wisely." This is NOT something that laws or mandatory "age verification" schemes that would never work as advertised could or should do. Thanks, but no thanks. Not giving children a smartphone before they are 14/15 years old is something that only parents can and must do. It's as simple as that, really.
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