Let 2019 be the year when we realise what we click does matter
DID you hear about the child who watched so much television that her eyes turned square? I did. And so did every child during the 1990s, as desperate parents tried to tear us away from the box.
Today’s panicky equivalent is ‘‘screen time’’. Practically every parent I know is engaged in a strategic war of attrition with an addicted 4yearold over screens, tablets, iPads and smartphones.
Last week, to a collective sigh of relief, the Royal College of
Paediatrics and Child Health told parents to worry less. It published guidance that said there wasn’t evidence that time in front of a screen was toxic. Just be smart, engaged and controlled, it suggested.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple because screen time covers a multitude of sins. Please trust me when I tell you that listlessly refreshing Instagram to see if anyone has liked your artsy selfie is very different from Skyping your nephew who lives in Australia, although both are technically screen time.
This is why digital health advice is starting to resemble the Daily Mail’s quest to categorise the world into things that are carcinogenic and things that are not and frequently shifting them around. On the same day as the Royal College published its research, another study found a link between high social media usage and depression among young people.
Helpfully, the Royal College suggested that parents need to take a look at themselves. Are you outsourcing babysitting to the iPad? Do you find yourself subconsciously reaching for the phone rather than talking to your toddler? Perhaps you’re the problem. One of the saddest things I read last year was a young child’s response to a school assignment that asked what invention she wished had never been made: ‘‘My mum’s phone.’’
Screentime consideration is just one of several new responsibilities that come with being a digital citizen. Many of us learned that to be a decent member of society you needed to vote, pick up rubbish, buy a newspaper, be polite and break up playground fights. Now we’re faced with confusing new duties: should I encrypt my emails? Should I get involved in that Twitter row? Or quit Facebook? None of us really knows what we’re meant to do any more. So we drift, eager yet directionless, and nothing seems to change.
There’s a growing sense that democracy is being harmed by big tech, whether through the creation of powerful monopolies, microtargeted Facebook advertisements, propaganda, privacy breaches or a collapsing local media.
Less acknowledged is that you, reader, are responsible. We all are. We must accept some culpability for these problems since digital monopolies and their various ills are built on our clicks, shares and views.
We prefer free and convenient online services, irrespective of what data and control we hand over in exchange. We complain about the collapsing high street, yet buy everything off Amazon. We worry about artificial intelligence, but will spill our deepest thoughts (also known as ‘‘training data’’) to Google if it can answer our questions fractionally quicker and better than anyone else.
The same is true of our frothing digital debate. Many of us bemoan the angry, emotional rhetoric of online life and mistakenly think it’s only the other lot who dismiss, insult, patronise, shout and caricature.
There are no rules about how to be a good digital citizen, except to make careful decisions.
The overall conclusion of the research into screen time was that parents should think about it, have a plan and manage it themselves.
This is true of our wider online responsibilities, too. There are no exact rules about how to be a good digital citizen, except to make careful decisions about your online behaviour. So if you don’t like Google’s tax affairs, try other web browsers such as Ecosia (which spends some of its profit planting trees) or DuckDuckGo (which doesn’t collect all your data). If you’re worried about Facebook’s business model, try a decentralised social media platform such as Steemit.
Given the incompatibility of industrialscale smartphone distraction and informed citizenship, downloading adblocking software might be as important as voting. Similarly, rather than joining a gym, consider how to rebuild your attention span.
I expect 2019 will witness a surge in ‘‘digital detoxes’’, as people relearn the importance of switchoff times and aeroplane modes. In surveys, people say they care about their data and worry about tech, yet hardly change their behaviour. Let this be the year we realise that what we click does matter and act accordingly. — Guardian News and Media.
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The People vs Tech