Return to Analogue Eden
Nostalgia for a pre-digital world is the wrong way to protect children from harm
Recently, Facebook showed me a video of a stand-up routine by the American comedian Nate Bargatze, about being on the demographic cusp between Generation X and the Millenials. I am around the same age as Bargatze; maybe that’s why Facebook’s algorithm served me that video.
As the sociologist Dan Woodman points out, generation labels are often simply imported wholesale from the US. The cohort Bargatze and I are in – those born roughly 1977-83 – is sometimes called the ‘Oregon Trail Generation,’ after a computer game that I don’t recall anyone ever playing in Australia. We’re otherwise known as ‘Xennials,’ a word made up entirely of the names of other generations. Stuck in the overlap between generalisations, there’s really not much else to say about us, if there’s even an ‘us’ to talk about.
Woodman, somewhat sceptically, notes that ‘Xennials’ tend to be defined largely by their technological history. We are the last generation whose romantic lives began on landline telephones. We are ‘digital immigrants’ who had analogue childhoods then entered digital workplaces. We speak fluent Online, yet still know how to rewind an unspooled cassette tape with a pen.
Little details like that last one are the stock in trade of those nostalgia pages that mushroom across Facebook in particular. The memes in these groups often trill with defensiveness: “We didn’t have phones, curfews, or sunscreen and we were just fine, SHARE IF YOU AGREE.”
Nostalgia is a dangerous basis for public policy. So it’s unsettling to see the Australian Prime Minister trying to justify banning under-16s from social media by invoking images of a pre-digital Eden that would be totally at home in those Facebook groups:
I want young Australians to grow up happy, active and safe.
Playing outside with their friends - off their phones and onto the footy and cricket field, the tennis and netball courts, in the swimming pool trying every sport that grabs their interest.
Learning how to win and how to lose, learning how to work as a team.
Learning about resilience and being part of their community.
Discovering music and art, being confident in the classroom, at home, confident in themselves and around their peers.
Gaining and growing from these real experiences, with real people - face-to-face.
It’s jarring to see bloodless language about resilience and teamwork smeared in so much rose-tinted vasoline. It’s calculated to evoke gauzy memories of backyard cricket on hot nights and kick-to-kick in the park – and we were just fine, share if you agree.
There’s a notorious safety film made in 1948 in which Don Bradman teaches some boys about the dangers of street cricket – notorious not just for its stilted acting and chillingly blunt narration, but for committing several road safety violations onscreen.
But at least those kids didn’t have to deal with TikTok.
Yet the decade that Albanese and his social media ban boosters are really in thrall to here is neither an imagined 1940s nor a misremembered 1970s. The assumption that online interaction is less-than-real is a hangover from the Nineties.
The metaphor of ‘cyberspace’ made sense when the internet required you to physically go sit somewhere. Instead of waiting on your wrist or in your back pocket, the online world lived in a box that sat in one room of your house (or in an “internet café,” a term that would be almost impossible to explain to anyone born after 1995 or so). If someone else was using the home phone, you had to wait your turn. Nor was the access instant: the bizarre noises of the 56k dialup modem signalled your passage from one world to another, a sort of boingy, hissy Charon ferrying you across an electric Styx to the digital underworld.
All that now sounds as alien as this image looks:
The internet is no longer a place you go, but part of the medium you swim in, threaded through your bodily navigation of the world around you. The philosopher Luciano Floridi has claimed that we live now beyond the online/offline distinction, in a condition he calls ‘onlife.’
This is where Albanese’s appeal to unreality falls down. Social media is “real experiences with real people.” The kids are on their phones because that’s where their friends are. That’s precisely where they’re “discovering music and art.” There’s certainly no acknowledgement in Albanese’s elegy on childhood lost that social media might be the only way some marginalised teens can find their people. (Or, for that matter, that organised sport made life worse rather than better for a lot of his peers.)
Every new technology brings a moral panic that looks suspiciously like the moral panic that once surrounded its predecessor. Radio was decried as the end of reading; television was decried as the end of wholesome family radio time. Knowing this doesn’t stop us from repeating the pattern, and in any case it shouldn’t stop us looking critically at emerging technology and determining what we will and will not tolerate.
That social media can be a desperately dangerous place for kids is not in dispute, and how to moderate platforms at scale (without injuring underpaid workers) is a wicked problem nobody has yet cracked. Whatever the answer will be, government regulation is going to be at its core.
What we can’t do is try and put the toothpaste back in the tube by appealing to an old ontology of the ‘real world’ vs the online space. If we are going to keep kids safe online, we first need to shake off obsolete ideas about what the internet is.