Mother in Law: Scrolling into the new year

This is your periodic, uninvited, new year reminder that social media will eventually be the death of us all unless we choose otherwise. More specifically, this is your reminder that there is a choice.

If you are in the trap where you think you absolutely definitely have to be on Facebook because of Brownies updates, or school updates, or other life admin, can you seriously say that the Brownie leader/school/etc do not also contact you another way too? In over a decade of parenting my children have attended approximately twenty thousand clubs and none of them have exclusively used Facebook for updates. When Deceptively Angelic Child no. 2 (DALC2’s) school trip ended an hour early recently, they contacted me and my husband by text, email and on Dojo. Various parents also told us on group chats. I reckon in total we were told 9 times, and if we hadn’t picked up any of those 9 messages the school would have phoned us and it would all have been ok. 

'It is my way of reading the news' is my husband’s defence to continuing to frequent the app whose owner is going to be responsible for Tommy Robinson becoming prime minister. To that I would say the following: (a) curating your own selection of news will dangerously narrow the mind (b) particularly if you have chosen to only follow NFL superfans and (c) you neither need the quantity of information, nor the frequency of taking in that information 10 times a day. When we were kids my parents would have found out what was going on in the world by watching the news once a day after work, and only consume information about sports and other interests (in print or on TV) at the weekends. They were no less well informed.

I genuinely won’t judge you if you do spend hours and hours a day scrolling. I don’t care. But when I walk my dog at night and people haven’t shut their curtains (my favourite thing) and I see a couple sitting at either ends of the sofa staring, mouths slightly opened, into their phones rather than talking to the person in the actual room with them, the person they have chosen to share their home with, I …well… I don’t want to be that person myself. I at least want to be connecting with them by staring at the same screen watching Parks and Recreation again.

But you know who does care about you scrolling? The Silicon Valley lot. They are paid to work out ways to keep you on their app for a few seconds longer. And whilst to an extent you are curating your own feed, you aren’t really. They are. Their algorithms, their ads, their rules.

I haven’t watched the program everyone keeps telling me to watch where they take the phones away from school kids, but I will. In the meantime, I am a bit more relaxed about my kids’ brains rotting from social media scrolling than I am about my own. The more forbidden I make it, the more they will want it. Since the beginning of time (the 1960s/70s) kids have wasted time on vacuous activities involving a screen. That’s not to say my kids are allowed social media in general, because they aren’t. But in respect of the consumption of huge amounts of crap, the best I can do is set a good example and ensure they are offered ample opportunities to do other things that interest them.

And that’s what I want to be - a good example - consuming useful information, concentrating on one thing at a time, giving conversation my full attention, using my time wisely, and being creative, or mindful, or active, when I’m bored.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article