I I received a message from a former colleague, a once cheerful person who is now a provocateur of “alt-right” nostalgia to an aging society. Whatever he wanted, I would have told him to get on with it, but it just so happened that I didn't really agree with it: campaign to limit children's cell phone use. It is a bipartisan organization that

As surely as anything bad happens to children, people will blame it on phone use. Perhaps there is a crisis in their mental health, someone is being bullied online, someone is being threatened over an image they have sent, they are part of a criminal organization, part of a murderous enterprise, or they are committing self-harm. You may be doing this. Somewhere in the story, smartphones probably don't play a role. Those affected often wish they had limited their phone use, or at the very least, are keenly aware that they had little knowledge of what was happening to their children, who of course were constantly on their phones. is used. Then politicians and pundits get involved, exploiting the sorrows and trials of others to their discursive advantage, lecturing schools on the measures they are already frequently implementing and forcing parents back to “dumb phones”; Preaching to kids to ban devices completely.

And steadily, it becomes another indicator of reputable parenting. If you're doing it right, your kids will get a Nokia at age 14 and won't know about Instagram until they're 25. And all the kids who have had iPhones since age 6 and can operate them with one thumb, they texted with their eyes closed, well, they were clearly poorly raised. The main reason I dislike such campaigns is that they turn parents into jailers whose authority they must circumvent, which I can't help but think inhibits openness. Beyond hard work, respect, and responsibility, I like to instill the values ​​of “tell me what's going on” above all else. No information is too small. Beef is not trivial. No gossip is too far away. If someone from a completely different age texted another person a shrimp emoji and that person mistook it for a sombrero, I'd love to hear about it. Also, if I want to spend a significant amount of time every day engaging in a fierce battle with a teenager, I want it to be about something important: which is better, a dog or a cat? How many crunches should I eat in a day? – It's not about compulsive phone checking behavior that's just as good as mine, or even slightly better.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel scared multiple times a day looking at the state of modern connectivity. TikTok is basically a never-ending reinforcement exercise. If your hobbies are K-pop or cafes with animals, there's no problem. All you see is a nicer young Korean woman and a piglet drinking a cappuccino. When I was 14, I was so obsessed with trench warfare that I regularly thought I was going crazy. I don't even want to think what my social feed would look like, a combination of self-diagnosed mental illness and military recruitment ads.

Snapchat, on the other hand, works as if someone created the app out of a disturbing dream. What if everyone could see not only who you're talking to most of the time, but also who you're talking to? They are I was able to talk to the most people and rank entire circles by their asymmetrical loyalties and affiliations. Imagine if you could always see where everyone is with Snap Maps. But if you turn it off to avoid detection, you'll look suspicious and he'll probably start people gossiping about you on Snapchat. The level of hyper-surveillance that teens exert on each other is incredible. The last thing you want to do is rush in with an oar and make the situation worse.

But I think so, and I always say one thing: Whatever it is, it's not the end of the world. Today's social apocalypse will be tomorrow's boring anecdote. Yes, the internet has a very long memory, but it also has a lot going on at the same time. I don't have the strength to stay angry forever or even for two weeks. It's strange that no one has proposed a cross-party parenting campaign to help us all maintain a sense of balance. That should be our main job.