Tag: mental-health

The Digital Dilemma: On Youth

Every modern technology challenges us all. Technologies’ relentless path is unstoppable. Technology inevitable is a two-edged sword (good and bad). Not everyone will accept these statements. This is my observation of the last 50-years in the UK.

1976 was an incredible year. It’s being celebrated as the year of Punk Rock. That’s just one snip out of the scrapbook. In fact, the music scene was over briming with diversity in that year. Low-cost microprocessors were coming on to the market. Forward thinking innovators, like Sir Clive Sinclair[1] were thinking about how to put these into the hands of everyday people. Trade Unions were signalling concern that this technological revolution would mean the loss of millions of white-collar jobs. Politicians ran around in fear of a severe threat to the established social order.

Let’s just say, there was no less a public clamour about how to react to the transformations that were coming down the road as there is here in 2026. What is a 16-year-old to make of all this at any time? I was 16 in 1976. Now, what’s it like to be 16 faced with current relentless and often troublesome pressure of social media?

That’s one phenomenon that I didn’t have to deal with as an energetic engineering apprentice with the thrust for speed and motorcycles. That said, all the stuff we hate about social media, bulling, harassment, intimidation, hurt, and suffering were still ever present in society.

My starting point is that banning things is to be avoided if there’s a better way. It’s profoundly illiberal to reach for the law to ban as the only approach to problem solving. My caveat. If there’s evidence of systematic harms being caused to a vulnerable population then a ban may be inevitable. In this I can cite the restrictions that are placed on young drivers and motorcyclists. Without legislation restricting activities our society cannot accept the resulting death toll.

Age limits are part of a civilised society. So, a dilemma exists. What level of harm triggers a ban? That is assuming that an enforceable ban is the most effective way of achieving reduced harm. In reality, a ban by law does not aways work. Either people find a way around it or it turns out to be unenforceable. It can also become smothered in processes and procedures to be rendered useless. Exceptions and qualifications.

How about banning mobile phones or social media for young people? That’s two quite different moves.

Mobile phones are part of the digital landscape. No one should go through future education without a necessary exposure and grounding in the digital world. It’s their world. It’s not going away. Social media is different, but it’s a nebulous product. It’s not so easy to sit down and write a useful and workable definition of what’s included in social media. Even if a law is written about social media, within a brief time it will turn into something different. It’s a combination of communications technologies.

What we do need is regulation to minimise harm done. That needs to be agile but comprehensive. A most perplexing task. Up until now, regulation is the digital realm has been ad-hoc and focused separately on application areas. Much more work is needed.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

Navigating the Digital Landscape

Maybe there’s no simple right or wrong answer. Polarising a debate doesn’t bring better results.

The landscape, the environment, the society that children grow-up in is ever changing. Moving to ban smart phones and tablets for children is gaining some momentum. Taking these components of modern living out of schools and limiting exposure to their influence is in the minds of campaigners. Organised movements and some politicians are going that way.

My childhood wasn’t dominated by digital technology. It was an analogue world. That single fact doesn’t make it “better”. Here, even my language suggests one good and the other bad. Perhaps I should be positive about the advantages of an analogue world. Afterall, it did stretch across the whole of human history right up to the time that personal computers found a place in our homes. However, that societal transition didn’t bring about Armageddon.  

There was a moral panic in my late teens. As analogue video technology became widely available then so did pre-recorded video cassettes. Now, they look prehistoric when they crop-up on the shelves in charity shops. Chunky, magnetic tape-based machinery became a rival to regulated broadcast TV. At the time, media legislation was way behind the curve.

In the early 1980s, social commentators got highly agitated about the harm that easily available video content could do. True, with some justification, although this reaction went overboard. The media would keenly focus on any crime that could be tagged to “video nasties[1]”.

What’s my point? It’s that media technology will continue to evolve at pace. Even now with our small screens, being carried everywhere people go, are systems that remain relatively crude. Imagine what will happen if technology that directly connects to the human brain becomes widely available.

Teaching children to be able to cope in this rapidly changing world matters. In my opinion, sheltering them from this technology landscape isn’t a good idea. Yes, censor the bad stuff but taking away smart phones and tablets has a downside.

Abstinence is favoured by strong believers in that way of living. Tightly controlling exposure to everyday society on the basis that the dangers of corruption are everywhere. Over the long-term, what is observed is that an approach based on prohibition isn’t sustainable.

Like it or not, there’s a schizophrenic reaction going on. As I was last week. sitting in a busy airport lounge, I noted the number of parents and children glued to their small screens. For the flight home of almost four hours, the proliferation of smart devices was notable.

Promoting legislation that prohibits the use and carrying of smart devices during the school day[2] is foolish. It ticks the populist box of the concerned parent but it’s stoking a new moral panic.

Learning to live healthily in the landscape, the environment, the society that children grow-up in, that’s part of the school day.

[1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-video-nasties

[2] https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/19437/amendments/10018472

Guilt: Double-Edged

Guilty as charged. At the end of a crime drama that’s what I want to hear. There’s been a resolution. Justice has been done. The baddies have been locked up and the aggrieved are vindicated. Oh, for the simplicity of the simple story. I guess that’s why they are liked so much.

What I want to spin a couple of lines about here is that whole subject of guilt. In reality, that multi-layered feeling is more complex than the two sides of the coin of my crime drama example. A world of purely nothing but good and bad does not exist.

There cannot be a single modern human who has never experienced a form of guilt. Even those who are on the edge of sanity or living as a total hermit will at one moment or another experience remorse, regret, or shame. A lingering uneasiness about what has happened, what’s happening or what might happen.

It’s built into our brains in a fundamental way. Because we can reflect on thoughts and events and learn from them, so we can analysis, even at a superficial level, poor decisions, failures, mistakes or tragedies.

Then comes the internalising thought that – I should do better or have done better. Surely, I should have seen that coming. How did that happen to me? Why me? What did I do? In the answer to those questions a feeling responsible permeates. For past events this can be compounded by knowledge that comes from hindsight.

These emotions can be entirely illogical. For example, feeling guilty about a random event that I have absolutely no responsibility for. An occurrence where, whatever I did, it would still have happened in one shape or form.

On the positive side, a feeling of responsible born of guilt can be a powerful motivator. Moments that tip people from a bad course of action to a good one. A true moment of learning.

On the negative side, guilty feelings can be destructive. They create resentment and even suffering. Especially when associated with any kind of injustice, intolerance or manipulation.

That gets to the point that I had in mind. It’s when people use of guilt as part of the general management toolbox. I’ve experienced that one often enough at work and elsewhere. Putting in those extra unpaid hours because if I didn’t the outcome will reflect badly on me. Doing that job, that I didn’t want to do, because someone was insistent that my saying “no” would result in failure. Not competing would let the side down.

My point. Don’t do it. For anyone who has authority over another, moral or actual, this is a foolish way to get things done. It can work in the short term. The problem is that such emotional blackmail has a lingering tail. That tail can kick-back and so it should.

Our Bubbles

I’ll coin a way of thinking about the world that’s more empirical than the result of any in-depth study. Maybe it’s not even original. The idea came to my mind because of something someone said this week. It was part of seeing a wider world rather than their everyday experience.

As an aside, and not surprising given that I was 6 years old in 1966, my football team was West Ham United. Not because I lived anywhere near West Ham, or had any concept of what London was like, but that team had the best players. Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst.

Be patient, there’s a link. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles[1]” is so tightly associated with West Ham it’s as important as those years after the 1966 England World Cup win. The club anthem of West Ham is a strange song for a long-standing English sports team. Especially when the club’s origins are more to do with the river Thames, its industry and docks.

Now, I know. It’s impressive and it’s akin to the so-called butterfly effect. A small event happens but it sets off a chain of events that become much larger, and unrelated to the original event. The song has endured, I suspect, because it sums up sporting success and failure. Hard to grasp, continually bursting but enduring because there’s always another opportunity to win.

If I’m going to discuss bubbles then that’s the first thought that comes to my head. Those ephemeral objects that float through the air. Perfectly self-contained only hanging together by tiny molecular bonds. Pretty bubble floating through the air.

Here’s what was said: “We live in a bubble”. Meaning those commonplace, often tedious, daily concerns and troubles that enclose our place and time. Bubbles can only be seen if an observer steps outside their boundaries and looks at the innumerable other bubbles.

I wander around with ahead full of thoughts and notions. They are often repetitious and going around in circles. That annoying job I’ve put off. Those awkward words that I now regret. That wondering how I’m going to tell someone that I’m not going to do what they want done. The list goes on and on. There’re good thoughts too. How much I appreciate my partners tolerance. How fortunate I am when compared with those mentioned in the morning News. Remembering a past success and a nice cup of coffee.

“We live in a bubble”. It’s so easy to take a point of view based on nothing more or less than the contents of our minds in own bubble world. Mental bubbles overlap. Several people may have bubbles that are more or less the same. In politics, I could say there’s a liberal bubble, a conservative bubble, socialist bubble, a fascist bubble. There’re all out there somewhere in bubble world.

Being an early riser, my first conscious act is to hit the “on” button on my radio. This week, I caught a prayer for the day by Steve Taylor[2]. He was making the point that it’s often our sense of separateness that is the cause of a lot of suffering. I interpret this as people being stuck in a bubble without comprehension of all the other bubbles in existence.

When we transcend our separate mental bubbles there’s a chance of better understanding. I’m not brave enough to say that this act would sort the conflicts in the world, but it would be a good start.

[1] https://youtu.be/H62SuMpMhc0

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002g4mn