Smartphones and long commutes fracturing the social nature of community | Alexander Downer
Banning smartphones and social media is a good first move but its up to us to ensure the next generation add value to their communities, writes Alexander Downer.
This is the week when the federal parliament’s legislation to restrict access to social media by under-16s comes into force.
Although there are real doubts about how enforceable this legislation really is, there is no doubt that the Parliament’s intent is laudable.
The dramatic increase in the incidence of depression and other mental health problems amongst young people can be traced back to the proliferation of smartphones.
Smartphones came into popular use around 2012-2013.
U.S. evidence suggests that it is from around that time that the mental health of Gen Z began to decline.
In 2011, 23 per cent of U.S. teens had a smartphone.
By 2016, 79 per cent of them had one, including 28 per cent of children between eight and 12 years old.
The figures for Australia are likely to be somewhat similar.
Here between 2010 and 2020, there was an 81 per cent increase in teens and young adults’ admission to hospitals for psychiatric emergencies.
The data shows that this was more of a problem for girls than boys, but either way, it’s pretty sad.
A similar trend was also apparent in the U.K., the Nordic countries, and Canada.
As an American neuroscientist has recently claimed: “Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age”.
Just through casual observation, you can see that young people, and people a fair bit older as well, spend a disproportionate amount of their time gazing at smartphones.
Of course, they may not be looking at social media; they may be texting their friends or simply reading the Advertiser app which I do on my smartphone!
But it’s what they’re not doing, which is a bigger problem.
For children, they are not playing with each other, interacting in the way earlier generations did. That changes the nature of social interaction.
The local policy of banning the use of smartphones at school is very sensible.
By doing that schoolchildren are inevitably going to spend a great deal more of their time playing and interacting with each other during recess and lunch breaks rather than just staring at their phones.
The State and Federal Parliaments have both made a real effort to address this problem, which is commendable. But the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of children rests with their parents, not with politicians on North Terrace or in Canberra.
When parents give their children access to smartphones, they should think through very carefully what the implications of that are.
Let’s be frank. All of us spend too much time looking at our smartphones, me included.
The result is calamitous for the community. We should all be helping to bind our community together through social, charitable and sporting activities.
Over the last fortnight, the former long-serving state MP, Stan Evans, died.
Within five days of his death, his wife, Barb also died. They were in their 90s, so that may not have been unexpected, but nevertheless for all of us who knew and loved them it was a very sad event.
The point about the Stan and Barb Evans is that in all my life I have never known two people more committed to their own community, in their case the community of the Adelaide Hills. They weren’t paid for these activities, they just did them. They helped with everything from Hills football and cricket to Meals on Wheels and local politics, be it state, federal or local. You never heard them say they wouldn’t bother to support a local community organisation because they were too busy. It’s people like Stan and Barb Evans who gave real substance and life to the Adelaide Hills community.
Today, a big proportion of the local population there are commuters.
Commuter communities tend to head off to work first thing in the morning in the city and return in the evening tired from a day’s work and confronted with the normal household challenges.
That means there are fewer people like Stan and Barb to run community organisations and support the binding together of the local community.
The consequence is communities have become more fragmented. And the social consequences of that is that other people live in greater isolation than once was the case.
So there you have two trends which are socially very unhealthy: the obsession with smartphones and the loss of community activists not driven by financial or political ambition, but by dedication to their local community.
These trends are difficult to change, but with the wise counsel of parents, children could be persuaded to spend less time out of school on their smartphones and more time engaging in community activities.
And the parents themselves might like to join voluntary community organisations rather than demanding governments solve all of the community’s woes.
The truth is, if we did those things, our society would be a good deal happier than it currently is.
Ultimately whatever the media and politicians may think and say, the health of our communities depends much more on us than them.
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Originally published as Smartphones and long commutes fracturing the social nature of community | Alexander Downer
