Blog 2: the first social media ‘seatbelt’… Australia vs Teen-net

What an interesting week – the might of the billionaire tech unicorns restrained by a block on access to people aged under 16. They aren’t taking the phones away or putting the responsibility for this on to the companies, not the teens themselves, nor on their parents. Such an action is unprecedented, and the world is watching.

Australia has very good reasons for trying to ban exposure to social media. Experts cite trolling, unhelpful influencing, depression and alienation as well as vanishing social cohesion and capacity for concentration among their reasons for this action. I can’t help but be reminded of a joke circulating (on social media) a while ago, where, with despairing teens confronted by the challenges of a world in crisis, the adults question the actions of desperate youth made manifest by saying ‘it’s the phones, isn’t it?’

One lass was quoted as saying ‘they’ll have to prise the phone out of my cold dead hands’… perhaps unwittingly quoting Charlton Heston in his support for the NRA – if they want my gun, they’ll have to prise it out of my cold dead hands’. How interesting that the smart phone is now synonymous with social media. The tool through which everyone interacts with… everything.
we’ve imagined banning social interaction before. Think of Dirty Dancing, or other similar films where a ban on teenage activity of some sort is enforced for a short time and then lifted through the advent of a wave of new understanding from the adults.

it’s interesting. Bans on teenage access to things don’t necessarily work. Do we want these recipes young minds to enter the ninth level of hell via the dark web? Are they being taught to hide who there are through a tangled web of deceit and vicarious experience? Reddit has already challenged the Australian ruling.

so are the perceived problems, which basically come down to people treating other people really badly, caused by social media? I’m not sure at all, but the speed of communication and the quality of these events, plus an overwhelming increase in the desire to be unpleasant are exacerbating factors, surely?

There are schools where phones are taken away at the start of the day and returned at the end. There are schools where this doesn’t happen, and students arrive with no writing implements and spend the day engaged in the brain rot of incessant and inane chatter. The banality of this is one thing. The active need to be nasty is another.
is there a real increase in sheer nastiness? Enabled by anonymity and speeded up by 5G?

there have always been bullies. The reason for bullying behaviour are complex. But what sort of a feeling does it give a kid to know that they’ve made someone else feel terrible? Are they so divorced from humanity that the concept of ‘the other’ is so entrenched? Isn’t this what we’re trying to fight right at the heart of educational praxis? So is education at fault and is there something we can do to reconcile each other to each other? Even very young children have an incredibly powerful sense of justice and what’s not ‘fair’?

so here’s a bit about Paolo Freire and his pedagogy of the oppressed.power the principle of ‘it’s unfair’ to extend to our neighbour, not just ourselves. Maybe we as teachers empower our students to see how where and why they are being influenced by the texts all around us – through the examining the design of things, buildings, road systems, adverts… to increase media studies and thereby critical literacy. Maybe we need to be empowered to encounter ourselves and decide what’s permissible – and kind. After all, isn’t cooperation the reason why the human species survived and became dominant? And while all the other species around us are raising an eyebrow at our lack of understanding of sentience, can’t we convince the most hardened sceptics among us that at the most basic level of interaction we really need to reach out and take a hand rather than bite it?

Maybe the Australia experiment will help – and the world is waiting and watching. Maybe we can use this opportunity to get the age old message out there again : love your neighbour. It’s worth it.