Earlier this week I wrote about the newly announced under-16 social media ban for the UK. The post has so far been one of my most read on this blog so far (spotlight helps). This is unsurprisingly a hot topic, but has also got me thinking about my relationship with technology and the web around that age. Especially after speaking with a colleague who has a 16 year old son.
I grew up in a rural area, so communication technology was always lagging behind the urban areas. TV signal could be spotty at times, and if the wind was particularly bad then power cuts were not a surprise due to reliance on above ground wires. This also extended to the phone lines. Whilst we did get broadband early enough, it stayed around 2Mb/s until I moved away. The other big factor was that phone signal at the time was very much specific to certain areas of the village. At home, I had no phone signal (this is also pre-smartphone) so texting was not something I did that often. If I wanted to send a text I would have to walk down the road and then across to another where I would be in a clear space to get one bar of signal. Just enough to send and receive a text. Phone calls were out of the question. This was just part of life and accepted it, yet, every summer we would laugh at the tourists doing what we called the "signal wave" trying to get reception for their phone.
The combination of essentially no phone signal and pre-smartphone meant that the scourge of the mobile phone that affects young and old today was not an issue for me or my friends (many lived in other villages and often had less luck with signal). However, internet access became our default means of communication. Yes, there was still the landline, but there was an element of privacy (because it is a shared device) that is lost, plus others can hear what you are saying. Whereas services like MSN Messenger or web forums gave us access to a world outside of our villages.
This is why my default position is to be against such a ban. When I was in my mid teens the internet was the place to be when not at school. Hanging out with friends was not an easy thing to do, because all the villages were too far away to walk to (or even cycle), you needed a car. Bus services were too infrequent to use. Yes, we would still meet up, but this was mostly saved to the weekend when parents would happily drive us because they weren't at work. So, during the week, aside from meeting friends who did live in the same village, the internet was the place to be.
This is not to say that we spent our entire evenings online. In large part because to access the net we would do so via fixed in place desktop computers which often still had old CRT monitors. Using the internet was a very deliberate act. But then, we would log of and do something else. You can't take the desktop to the dinner table (and no, you weren't bringing the evening meal to the desktop).
Whilst PC gaming was still a thing, during this time myself and most of my friends did our gaming via consoles and handhelds. These had started to make the transition to also being connected to the internet, but the social element was very much around the game in question. Although, my focus was still mostly on single player games (and very much remains so).
Moving between devices, even if they were connected to the internet, meant that my life wasn't dominated by a single piece of technology, or even the expanse of the internet. Plus, "social media" wasn't yet quite a thing. Facebook didn't arrive in the UK until I was late into my A-Levels. MySpace was barely a social network if we compare it to the platforms today, in practice it was a music focused HTML web page tool. Bebo got kind of close, but that was a flash in the pan for about a year.
For me, my main social activities on the internet, aside from MSN Messenger with friends from school, were videogame forums. This ended up being just one that I spent my time in. One of my "real life" friends also joined, but I spent most of my time there interacting with people from around the world. People of different ages as well. On the surface this could have been very dangerous. But in practice is was a bunch of people who just wanted to talk about videogames and occasionally music and films. A couple I would talk to outside of the forum, I even took part in a couple of podcast episodes with them (the recordings have been lost to time).
This is a different type of environment to what exists today. Was the internet 20 years ago perfect? Probably not, it was very much the Wild West, I just managed to develop the social skills to navigate it safely (and perhaps a bit of luck as well). Today, it is not the Wild West, yet ironically in practice it is more dangerous. In large part because it has been mostly taken over by corporations who directly profit from the longer people spend on line. Whereas before it didn't matter if I logged off to go and do something else, this is seen by the big platforms of today as a problem. Which is why they have developed their algorithms to make the services as addictive as possible so that as many people as possible stay longer. If you have an addictive personality, then you have no chance. I am very fortunate that for me, the more the platform holders try to make their services stickier, the more it puts me off. But, do young people these days have the space to develop an aversion to this, without having to make a very deliberate decision to go cold turkey? Let alone those who are much older who can't determine between real and fake and have defaulted to believing anything and everything on Facebook...
If the Government wants to truly deal with the very real problem, then they need to focus on the big social media platforms themselves. Meanwhile perhaps there is the quality of the "old web" that can be reclaimed. One in which the benefits of shared communication without aggressive (and addictive) monetisation exists.