Smartphones have robbed teenagers of freedom. No law will change that

It is a truism that wherever you travel, there you are – a depressing reminder that though we escape our environment, we can never escape ourselves. But in the age of social media, it is also true that wherever other people go, there they are.

Cavorting in the Greek Islands on Instagram, uploading their safaris to Facebook, or meandering down cobblestoned streets on TikTok.

As much as I love travelling vicariously through the social media feeds of my friends and acquaintances, I worry the experience of travel has lost its very point – freedom.

Social media demands that we curate our experiences, to package ourselves for the consumption of others.Credit: iStock

Travel is an opportunity to lose ourselves in a foreign place, to test out our characters when faced with novel environments, and to see what choices we make when unshackled from the expectations of our usual society.

None of this is conducive to the self-consciousness required by social media – to curate our experiences and style our photos, to package ourselves for the consumption of the people we have left behind.

The immediacy of smartphone communications means that other people are never really left behind anyway. Everywhere we go, we are connected to home, which is wonderful in one way, and woeful in another. It’s impossible to feel truly free if we are bombarded with intimate details of everything we are missing out on.

Instagram has announced it will proactively place its teen users (aged 13 to 17) on a new “teen accounts” program. These accounts will be private, and only people who are established contacts of the account holders will be able to private-message them.

The teen accounts will have the most restrictive content settings, they will have a 60-minute daily time limit, and they will be inaccessible between 10pm and 7am, giving teens an enforced break at the time when they should be winding down and sleeping.

If you are 16 or 17, you will be able to change some of the settings so they are less restrictive, but younger teens will need a parent to set up their accounts, and the parent will be the only person able to change the settings. The adult supervisor will also have an overview of the account, including the ability to see who the child is messaging.

This comes as it was reported that 12.5 per cent of children had been sexually solicited online over the past year and 3.5 per cent were subject to sexual extortion, according to the global child safety institute Childlight.

Author Zadie Smith decided to ditch her smartphone. “I would be on that thing nine hours a day.”Credit: Getty

Instagram’s announced changes coincide with the Albanese government’s stated intention to impose age restrictions for social media. But they are not a result of it – Instagram has said it has been working on the restrictions for some time, to give parents peace of mind.

The holes in the plan are obvious though – it is unclear how the age of account-holders will be monitored or policed, and besides, teenagers are masters of the work-around. If Instagram is too restrictive, they will go elsewhere. The internet offers infinite choice.

Most crucially, none of this is conducive to freedom, which is the thing adolescents most covet. The trouble is convincing them that true freedom lies in privacy, in anonymity, in no one knowing what you’re up to, and no one judging you for what you’re doing.

The writer Zadie Smith famously uses a “dumb phone”, and has not had a smartphone except for a few months in 2008 when the technology was brand new. Smith is often asked about this choice in interviews. Something so countercultural is a source of fascination.

Last week, in a conversation with the New York Times′ Ezra Klein, Smith called social media “a behaviour modification system” which is well-designed to trap people into offering inauthentic versions of themselves. She also admits she found her smartphone addictive, for the short period she had one.

“I would be on that thing nine hours a day,” she said. “Easy.”

She cut herself off.

“Other people’s opinions matter to me, as I’m sure they matter to everybody,” she told Klein. “The thought of being exposed to those opinions every second of every day, of having to present my life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a media presentation – I cannot imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be.”

Smith’s decision not to have a smartphone is pragmatic. It protects her writing. The distraction and outward gaze of social media and smartphone use is antithetical to the inner focus and deep concentration required to write novels.

Charlotte Wood, the Australian writer who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last week, made a similar point in an interview with this masthead.

“I do think that our capacity for sustained, quiet engagement has been really kind of damaged by contemporary life,” she said. “It’s getting harder and harder to look within because everything about our world is designed to distract us, to look out, rather than to be still and look in.”

Wood’s Booker-nominated novel, Stone Yard Devotional, is about a woman who goes to stay at a convent in outback NSW, seeking peace and contemplation. Convent stays are not an option for most of us, but there is evidence that more people are rejecting the self-imposed tyranny of the smartphone.

Consumer demand for them continues to wane, and sales for the new-model iPhone are reportedly “underwhelming”.

My generation (X), and some younger Millennials, are the last generations who enjoyed the freedom of coming of age in the pre-smartphone age. When I travelled, we communicated through letters, poste restante and the occasional long-distance phone call.

All photographs were taken, artlessly, with a heavy Nikon, and the results are only looked at, now, by a small audience, during fits of nostalgia.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.