The specialist in neurodevelopmental issues argues the case for banning social media for under-16s: ‘Those who had a smartphone with free access to internet content before the age of 15 have worse mental health indicators’
The problem isn’t necessarily the screens. These screens are a portal into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, after all. There is so much information that, as recently as 30 years ago, was impossible for anyone outside small niches to access, which is now available in just a few seconds. It is nothing less than democratizing information. And connections between people have also gotten a lot easier. We take for granted now that we can talk with anyone in the world, at any time.
However, it’s the social media that these screens enable that is the problem, because they take the agency away from people. Inquisitive minds are no longer seeking out relevant information, they passively sit back and let the information come to them. Social Media sites hold engagement as their only value (just as TV media did before), and will shove absolutely anything in someone’s face to get them to keep scrolling. It doesn’t matter whether the content is enraging, uplifting, or even true: if it grabs someone attention long enough to see the ad, it is successful in their eyes.
We haven’t really put many restrictions on our kids’ screen time. (And how can I? I make my living looking at screens all day). But from the beginning, we have made sure our kids understand that we want them seeking content out, not passively consuming it. While the kids were younger, we only gave them access to social media like YouTube in a shared area, where we could see what they were watching and searching for, and watched with them. We curated their own mental algorithms, and if they stumbled on something we didn’t want them to see, we explained why. I can’t say they never succumb to brainrot, but they do seem to have developed the critical thinking skills that their peers have missed out on. (In other words, they know it’s brainrot when they see it, even if they watch anyway!)
The problem isn’t necessarily the screens. These screens are a portal into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, after all. There is so much information that, as recently as 30 years ago, was impossible for anyone outside small niches to access, which is now available in just a few seconds. It is nothing less than democratizing information. And connections between people have also gotten a lot easier. We take for granted now that we can talk with anyone in the world, at any time.
However, it’s the social media that these screens enable that is the problem, because they take the agency away from people. Inquisitive minds are no longer seeking out relevant information, they passively sit back and let the information come to them. Social Media sites hold engagement as their only value (just as TV media did before), and will shove absolutely anything in someone’s face to get them to keep scrolling. It doesn’t matter whether the content is enraging, uplifting, or even true: if it grabs someone attention long enough to see the ad, it is successful in their eyes.
We haven’t really put many restrictions on our kids’ screen time. (And how can I? I make my living looking at screens all day). But from the beginning, we have made sure our kids understand that we want them seeking content out, not passively consuming it. While the kids were younger, we only gave them access to social media like YouTube in a shared area, where we could see what they were watching and searching for, and watched with them. We curated their own mental algorithms, and if they stumbled on something we didn’t want them to see, we explained why. I can’t say they never succumb to brainrot, but they do seem to have developed the critical thinking skills that their peers have missed out on. (In other words, they know it’s brainrot when they see it, even if they watch anyway!)