nothing like the sun

and I just

sorry

I have a lot of thoughts.

Because it is also extremely out of touch to presume that access to social media provides safety and community the same way it does when the average tumblr user was a teen. Tumblr hasn't changed much (that's why a lot of us like it here lbr) but as a whole, the social media landscape is vastly different than it was even five years ago and it keeps changing alarmingly fast.

Dating myself here, but when I was a teen, apps weren't really a thing yet. I used tumblr and facebook on my laptop and while I had a smartphone by my late teens, the facebook messenger app was kind of janky and tumblr didn't have one. People mostly imported all their photos from their phone or their camera to a bigger device and then posted photo albums on facebook that you could untag yourself from if you didn't want to be in them.

And you got warnings like "the internet is forever" and "your future boss could see that clearly drunk picture of you at a college party", but it frankly didn't have the immediacy to concern me. If I was uncomfortable with a picture, I untagged myself, or asked people to take photos down, and they did. Maybe someone downloaded a picture of me, but I never found out about it. Honestly, it was kind of thrilling--the thought of friends from high school seeing pictures of all the cool stuff college me got to do.

Here's a brief list of some social media related things that have happened at the school I teach at this academic year (keep in mind that all students are supposed to hand in their phones at the start of the day. Many just don't and tell us they didn't bring them to school, and we can't search their bags or their persons, nor would I want to):

Fifth grader filmed other fifth grader using the toilet, then posted it on TikTok

Fifth grader uses WhatsApp voice messages to terrorize a classmate with constant threats and insults (note that WhatsApp and Signal are not being banned for under 16s!)

Ninth graders invent the game "dick or boob" (it's punchier in German) where they livestream to an audience and whatever body part the audience wants to see, they show. The police had to come to school for that one, since it counts as the dissemination of child pornography.

Students en masse using second and third devices to use AI on written exams. They hand in one device, keep the other, and use it to cheat.

Using social media for bullying (photo manipulation of peers via AI, drawing cum on a classmate's face to imply they're gay. This is all still fifth graders)

I don't say any of this because I think banning social media is a good idea. As it's happening, it's naive and short-sighted and most importantly it will not work.

But it tells us something: the UK government is scared. And they absolutely should be. Because things are going very, very badly in education right now.

In most European and North American countries, literacy is on a sharp decline, particularly for students from low socio-economic brackets. At the same time, the diagnoses for various learning disabilities are up. More and more teachers report disobedient, even violent behavior on school grounds--again, mostly in low socio-economic brackets. If you've ever had the misfortune to enter a staff room, you'll hear endless complaints not just about kids these days but most especially about parents these days. They aren't raising their kids to be respectful, they aren't working on literacy at home, they aren't...etc. etc.

What these teachers mean at heart is that when we were at school, there was a social contract that children had to respect their teachers and do as they say, and if children don't do that there will be consequences. That contract is no longer in effect. On either end--many children, especially children whose family lives set different priorities than schooling, see no reason to respect or obey teachers, not even on something so simple as "open your books to page 12 please". And schools are hesitant to enact real consequences because of the threat of lawsuits and the endless bureaucracy in an already overtaxed system.

And some of all that is definitely the influence of cell phones and social media in our lives. Endless scrolling shortens attention spans. I literally cannot watch a movie with my class because almost no child in it can watch one narrative for 90 mins without getting bored and disruptive.

Busy, distracted parents who are on social media themselves use their phones to occupy upset toddlers, which stimulates them more and also teaches them to ask for that kind of stimulation; parents who have never read for pleasure themselves don't often read to their children, and we know for a fact that early exposure to books and reading is a huge determining factor in later-in-life literacy.

On the flip side, more "traditional" parents who try to keep their kids off social media often simply do not understand the landscape and rely entirely on their kids to help them organize digital aspects of life which are mandatory today (schools send emails now! You have to be able to check your email! You would not believe how many parents can't!). They then entrust young teens with the responsibility to manage their own online experience (because they don't know how to do it) and an 11-13-year-old is probably not ready to be the person deciding these things.

But the time to regulate social media was two decades ago and the place to do it was in international cooperation. The horse has very much left the barn and closing it and locking it up tight does nothing but leave a very wet horse standing outside in the rain. Additionally, the paddock it's running around in isn't just the UK's paddock, it's a global paddock, so the horse can just mosey into any other barn. This metaphor has gotten away from me, but you see what I mean: Banning social media for certain age groups is too little, too late.

It also, as far as I can tell, is playing pretty loose with who will actually be held responsible when children don't adhere to the ban (which they won't). Every time this has been tried, multinational media corporations have very successfully argued that they are not responsible for other people's children and therefor the parents are liable for kids getting into social media.

And to an extent I agree: parents should monitor their children's social media use and talk to them about what media they're consuming. For reasons mentioned above, a lot of parents don't. At the same time, these corporations continue to do nothing about the use of their platform to spread extremism and prejudice in all its forms and just straight up violence and disturbing content (we once had a case at school when several sixth graders were found crying in a bathroom because they had happened upon a TikTok of a cat being put in a blender).

However, ultimately, the UK ban is combating the symptom of a problem without ever acknowledging its source.

Because we know exactly what to do about the crisis in education. We have known for decades. Teachers have learned this in university since before I was alive. We need small class sizes and early literacy intervention. We need more staff and more space and an education system that allows for international comparability and most especially does not penalize students for being poor. We need to be able to move with the times and not get hamstringed by budget cuts and buildings and materials so old they are falling apart.

Would that solve every problem? No, not at all. We still have higher rates of learning disabilities than ever (because, I would argue, more people than ever are seeking diagnoses and because the lives we lead and the education paths we expect demand a certain type of behavior more than they used to).

We have tons of overworked parents who cannot get a handle on their children's media usage because the proliferation of social media and personal device usage is so explosive and unregulated a lot of adults can't get a handle on their own usage and many, many parents are not in a position (in terms of their own time and education) to figure it out. (And if I catch anyone saying those people shouldn't be having kids I would like you to take your eugenics (*thanks to the person in the notes who pointed out my word mix-up) argument and exit).

The issue of "what social media is doing to our children" is too complex to be solved with a ban. It exists; people are not wrong to say it exists and that social media in the forms we have it today is not beneficial to society as a whole and children and teenagers specifically. Blindly banning the thing is not going to solve it but neither is saying that it's important and necessary and leaving it unchanged.

However, the solutions that might work are complex and difficult and involve things like:

comprehensive investment in education

international cooperation in governing internationally operating companies like meta, google, etc.

government support for families that enables households with two working parents to have time with their children, families with low literacy to have access to learning of their own

pushing more practically oriented education and career paths instead of expecting all kids and teens to thrive in a certain school environment

and, yes, oversight into who exactly is using social media how and restricting some content and function for some age groups. I'm not saying ban it, I am saying regulate it.

however

Like, I know every second I linger on these videos only gives me more tradwife content

But you don't understand

-how specialized your field is

-how integral the thing they're getting wrong is to the plot