A new report by Ofcom into young people’s internet use indicates they are spending more time online, gaming and watching YouTube. Predictably, most of the reporting of the study has thrown its hands up in the air like a cheerleading squad at gunpoint. Rotten kids, addicted to Fortnite and Kylie Jenner’s eyebrows. Why can’t they be intellectuals like we were as kids, watching up to five hours a night of whatever happened to be on ITV?
When does this shift into being selectively judgmental occur? Being a young teen is so, so boring. I don’t begrudge them their screens, or think they’re doomed. There is a valid fear that younger children could miss developmental milestones due to screen addiction, losing physical and intellectual capacity. Some research even suggests they are struggling to tie their shoelaces because of it. The thing is, I struggled to tie my shoelaces well into adolescence and I’m not sure I can blame screens, unless we’re talking about Ceefax and The Legend of Zelda. Learning anything beyond a sloppy granny knot just seemed like a boring use of my attention. It was my first girlfriend who told me I was doing it wrong. (I think she was talking about shoelaces.) Lots of kid’s shoes have Velcro fasteners, which is a more likely explanation. One could also point to studies that show gaming can be beneficial for hand-eye coordination, strategic skill and intelligence. Incidentally, at some later point, probably alone and going mad, I became obsessed with tying shoelaces. I became proficient at bar lacing, bi-colour lacing, chevron and lattice-work. And it was the internet that taught me. (If you’ve not been to Ian’s Shoelace Site, I promise it will change your world.)
Children will grow up smarter, more cognisant of their use of new media tools than people my age or older. For instance, they have already figured out the benefits of a finsta and a rinsta, a sentence I apologise for writing. In summary, the “fake insta”, accessible only by a few close friends, is where many young people post unflattering, crunk pictures of their real selves, while the “real insta” is reserved for the manicured, artificial persona they want to project to everyone else. I’m not saying this isn’t absolutely screwed behaviour; but it’s more self-aware than what people in their 20s and 30s are doing, quietly pretending the perfect images on their single account are the real reflection of themselves, in a self-hating way. And it means they are less likely to get fired.
The morally neutral fact is the world adapts, and young people’s level of technological engagement will become the new normal. It doesn’t mean future generations will stop going hiking, hooking up or having jobs. It just means a lot of the jobs will involve ambidextrous typing and hologram-conferencing and having ideas directly harvested from our brain stems by Zuckerberg’s grandkids. The internet has already transformed our world, and social media our sense of identity. Neither are going away. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. (At most, he’ll be minimised on the bottle interface, still running a background genie program and tracking your location.)
With reporting of this kind, I can’t help thinking children don’t need us to save them from the evils of technology. It’s more likely to be the other way around. Ofcom’s report indicated that most 12- to 15-year-olds think critically about the websites they visit, and whether the information there can be trusted. They’re not the generation who got walked off a cliff by fake news: we are.
