Topic 5 – Is Social Media Ruining Childhood?
Before we get started…
One of the mental stumbling blocks I had during this debate revolved around the shared experiences of childhood. Both sides employed general statements such as, “when we were kids,” or “when we were growing up.” I don’t know about you dear reader, but I am certain that given our cultural diversity, age, and geographical location that our childhood experiences most likely varied considerably from person to person. For example, I doubt anyone else in our group was at a summer camp where a child threw a box of live blasting caps (his father worked in the mining industry) into a camp fire resulting in several serious injuries. All joking aside (but yes, that did happen) I am hesitant to harken back to some sort of poorly defined universal childhood experience. These statements also suppose that childhood was better for us in the past than it is for our students today. How one would even attempt to measure this escapes me completely.
What did our debaters think?
What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing! The Agree Side.
- Social media interactions are superficial, fleeting, and do not develop the lasting relationships that children need.
- Use of social media platforms open children up to a host of dangers (cyberbullying, sexually explicit material, and online predators) that they are not equipped to deal with at a young age.
- Children are particularly susceptible to online advertising given their inability to discern when they are being misled.
- Various health concerns correlate with the habitual consumption of social media including depression, anxiety, obesity, etc.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. The Disagree Side.
- The fear of change and moral panic blind us to the potential of social media as a learning tool, and its capabilities should not be denied or ignored.
- Social media allows isolated individuals to find like minded communities and spaces in which they belong.
- Social media can empower students to make changes in their own communities and beyond (through activism and advocacy)
- Education (particularly in terms of engagement) can be transformed by the calculated use of social media with proper training and supervision.
My thoughts on the topic
I believe that social media has not ruined childhood, but I do believe technology has changed childhood.
Childhood for students born in the 21st century is quite different from the one I experienced (I am reticent to age myself, but let us just say I fondly remember the 1980s). Social media simply did not exist; my worst moments were not immortalized on video, shared, or archived. My mistakes did not follow me for life. Social media makes certain nothing is forgotten and it is affecting children profoundly. As Bizieff (2021) notes excessive social media use is associated with a range of mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. She also argues that social media has opened up new avenues for harassment (i.e., cyberbullying).
So social media is ruining childhood then? It is a little more complicated than that. The problems I mentioned existed long before Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. When I was a child my peers struggled with mental health issues as well. As a young male I was fed a lie that men don’t cry, complain, or acknowledge their feelings. The name of the game back then was repression. Several students in my high school took their lives. Bullying was everywhere. Let me be clear: these things were not okay then, and they are not acceptable now. What concerns me about social media is its pervasiveness. When I went home from school I was granted a brief respite from the harassment. Children using social media do not have that luxury. According to Bizieff (2021) there are over 3.96 billion social media users worldwide. It is everywhere. Now your bullies have access to you 24/7.
Surely parents are to blame? Matt Walsh (2021) argues that parents have failed in their responsibility to restrict, monitor, and govern the online interactions of their children. Dr. Brenna Hicks (2021), a child counselor, emphatically insists that children should never have unfettered access to social media. In our debate social media was compared to swimming. Surely no parent would throw their young child into the deep end of the pool without lessons? Any sane parent would teach their child to swim gradually under close supervision. Our debaters indicated that social media was no different, children need to be gradually introduced to social media and be taught digital literacy skills to keep themselves safe. So with the right training they can safely use it? Imagine a world in which no one had grown up with a swimming pool, or had never been near deep water. Would parents know how to teach their students to swim, or would they be learning themselves at the same time? Consider how young social media is. It is barely 20 years old. Parents are learning about it at the same time as their children. Is it fair to expect them to know all the dangers and mitigation strategies to ensure their children are safe online?
Does social media ruin the childhood of all children? What about those who have reaped its benefits? According to the organization Smart Social (2022) students across the United States have utilized social media to organize online campaigns to support a myriad of causes and bring about real change in their communities. Social media allows students from geographically isolated areas to engage with people around the world with similar interests. As Hauge (2020) points out technology as an agent of change is intrinsically tied to “public voice.” Is giving children a platform and a voice ruining them? I don’t think that it is. Social media is often abused, but I don’t think that it is right to deny its potential benefits either.
Topic 6 – Cellphones should be banned in the classroom
What did the debaters think?
Be Gone with Thee! The Agree Side.
- Cell phone usage can lead to technological addiction.
- Removing cellphones from the classroom will improve student productivity and reduce distractions.
- Cyberbullying will be greatly diminished without cell phones in the classroom.
- Cell phone usage causes stress and anxiety for the majority of students.
- Cell phones facilitate and increase academic dishonesty.
Give Peace a Chance. The Disagree Side.
- Cell phones can be an asset to learning and instruction with proper planning and supervision.
- Engagement increases when cell phones are utilized within lessons.
- Using cell phones increases accessibility to technology as most schools do not have enough resources to provide all learners with their own laptop or tablet.
- Cell phone enabled technologies (VR, cameras, etc.) provide exciting and engaging learning opportunities.
My Thoughts on the Topic
For me this debate breaks down to two fundamental questions:
- Why do we want to ban cell phones in classrooms?
- Would banning cell phones eliminate the problems we have identified in question 1?
Let’s explore these questions. During the debate I heard more than once that cell phone usage was causing technology addiction. I think we need to be extremely careful to differentiate between clinical addiction and habits. Habitual use of technology is not the same as being chemically dependent on narcotics. Panova and Carbonell (2018) point out “It is important to acknowledge that it has emphatically not been scientifically ‘proven’ that phone (over)use is equitable to drug addiction” (p. 11). Therefore banning cell phones will not eliminate technology addiction (Panova & Carbonell, 2018).
Surely cell phones are an unnecessary distraction? I think instead we should ask if student distraction is exclusively linked to cell phone use. I don’t think that it is. Cell phones can be distracting, in the same way that CD players were distracting, or comic books, or chatting with friends. A lack of engagement can be attributed to many factors. I suggest that varying instructional strategies, eliciting student participation in topic selection, and trying inquiry based learning may reignite student engagement. As Sam Kerry (2020) points out the solution to our problem may be staring us in the face: we could use cell phones to make our lessons more interesting and engaging using augmented and virtual reality. Of course if all else fails you can still take them away, but before you do ask yourself what you’ve tried as a teacher first.
Academic dishonesty is facilitated by cell phone usage in the classroom, of this I have no doubt. According to the Canadian Council for Learning (2010) technology is changing the way students cheat and think about cheating. As Smale et al. (2021) over a third of students have used their phones at one point to cheat on homework. So if we get rid of cell phones the cheating stops? I remember teaching in a classroom in the flip phone era, before texting was a big deal. A couple of my students were army cadets and I caught them tapping out Morse code to one another on a multiple choice test (Boy Scouts was useful for something). Fast forward two years and I caught a student with a fake label on a coke bottle where the ingredients list was replaced by chemistry formulas. His photo shop skills were excellent. My point is that cheating will still occur with or without cell phones.
I think the strongest argument against the continued use of cell phones in the classroom is the environmental impact it is having on the planet. We are cultivating a culture of plenty: we desire unlimited data storage, unlimited bandwidth, faster searches, and more access. As Selwyn and Agaard (2021) caution “the sustainability of digital education is rapidly declining” (p. 15). Data centers, server farms, and devices use tremendous amounts of non-renewable resources such as energy and raw materials. There will come a point where we won’t ethically be able to upgrade our phones every two years. This speaks nothing to the human costs of our consumer culture. How comfortable are we using devices produced by people in third world countries under horrendous conditions? Is this sustainable? I wonder if our time of plenty is rapidly coming to a close and if we are adequately preparing our students for it.
Hi Matthew,
Great post. I like the way you are sharing your thought on social media and cellphone! I agree that we cannot make a comparison between our childhood and today’s kids’ childhood because times are changing. Everyone has a different culture, age, and geographical location. Everyone’s childhood is different. We can’t set a unified standard that running outside and playing physical activities were good childhood and a childhood that is full of technology and social media nowadays is being ruined. This comparison is impartial and biased.
Echo
Great reply, I am also a child of the 80’s where my first glance of social media was limited to ICQ and dial-up. Same experiences with bullying and emotions too. I have a specific memory of a teacher telling me I wasn’t brave when I winced at the alcohol they put on a cut.
My concerns with social media (now that the debate is over) is also the way it opens the door to bullying at home. It’s easy to say just turn it off and ignore it, but there is that itch to know what people are saying about you, good but especially bad.
Also an excellent point about our swimming analogy and what about parents who have never learned to swim themselves. I’m glad our opponents did not pick up on that. My only counter argument surrounding that is to prepare kids with transferable skills and knowledge while doing your best to keep them safe. My mother could not swim, but she still went with us to the pool, keeping a close eye on the life preserver and the emergency phone. She let us take a risk, that she wasn’t capable of, while still giving us room to explore.
Thanks for the great post! I always enjoy your insights. I completely agree with you on your comments about “when we were going up”. An argument I was trying to make during the debate is that when we make those comments, we are implying that everyone’s social experience is the same. We are making a VERY big assumption about what a ‘normal’ childhood means.
When I listened to Matt Walsh’s video, I was almost irritated by him assumption that all children have the same needs and that his definition of childhood is the ‘right’ one. We can’t make the argument that children aren’t getting a ‘real childhood’ without making the outlandish assumption that we all have the same definition of childhood.
While I definitely see the potential of social media, I would be naïve to ignore the implications. As a mother who also grew up with zero social media (22 when I got my first phone and 28 when I bought my first smart phone) I think you’re absolutely right when you ask us to imagine how we would teach our children to swim if we were just seeing water for the first time. I do think this is the challenge we are facing. While I’m doing my best as a mother and a teacher, I do think that my own children will be better equipped in helping their own children “navigate the digital waters”. Heck, they’ll even be able to say, “When I was your age…”