2023-12-24 20:16:55
In previous installments, we analyzed why it is advisable to delay the use of cell phones and tablets in minors to prevent them from losing their attention span and becoming trapped in mechanisms that are designed to generate addiction.
We complete this trilogy with a disturbing element: the impact of new technologies used by minors in their socialization process, that is, in the process by which they acquire knowledge, competencies, skills and abilities to function in the adult world.
Socialization: a long road
The path to socialization begins from the cradle. Children learn the uses and customs of the environment in which they live, discover how to handle objects, hold conversations, solve problems and resolve conflicts.
Most of this learning comes from the two fundamental agents that participate in their development: the family and the school. But they are not the only sources of knowledge that children and adolescents face.
They also have the reality in which they live and the content that the media offers them. That content, vast, diverse, unfiltered, is at your fingertips at any time, anywhere, enclosed in a device that fits in the palm of your hand. They are the consequences of the so-called multi-screen environment that has been consolidated in practically all homes: for each member of the family, a mobile phone.
Controlled learning
Why is it so important to take into account the risk entailed by this window to the world that technology represents? In the process of growth of minors that takes them from childhood to adulthood, some learning occurs through trial and error, others through imitation of what they see in their environment, and some through the instructions given by their reference adults. at home or at the educational center.
Minors move in environments that are normally protected and supervised by adults who look after their well-being. They function as a kind of bubble in which many of the problems that plague the lives of adults do not appear. What was called “older things” in homes.
A gradual entry into the adult world
This protective bubble was not completely watertight before the arrival of mobile phones. In the analog world, the media, through information and entertainment, functioned as valves that allowed a controlled entry of content that, although not prepared for children, represented a good opportunity for adults to help convey the message of what is right and wrong.
This is how the traditional process of media socialization worked in a world with very few screens, prior to the technological explosion. The children and adolescents were understanding, along with their parents, through the stories that came to them through television and movies, how to face various situations in the adult world and how to develop their critical thinking to be prepared to make decisions in situations. complex.
It was a gradual process (the input of information from outside was not massive), controlled (adults decided when the screen was used and for what) and interpreted correctly (parents and teachers can indicate what is good and what is bad about what appears onscreen).
Without protective bubble
With mobile phones, the protective bubble has been blown up. The process of media socialization has been distorted by the immense volume of undecoded content. Children and adolescents face a torrent of information alone, without an adult to help them understand it, since they are not by their side when the numerous messages that they are not able to interpret are reaching them.
The consequence is that minors, unable to determine a clear scale of values, constantly doubt what is right and wrong, and replace the necessary critical thinking with a dangerous relativism that tends to validate the most viralized option, the one that accumulates the most. “I like it”, even if it is not the most fair or morally appropriate.
Locked in their room, consuming hours and hours of unfiltered audiovisual content, without contact with reference adults who can help them understand what they are seeing, the networks bombard them with unfiltered audiovisual messages. They may not be bad, they may simply not have the right tone, perhaps they abuse humor and irony and are not easy to understand. They may be really harmful, but they don’t know it or, if they know it, they don’t know the significance.
Without adults by their side to interpret them, the process of media socialization occurs incorrectly. That is why it is so important to educate them in criteria, so that they know how to choose what to see and what not to see, and have the confidence to ask.
At what age should you give a cell phone?
If we add some of the most dangerous risks for minors, such as mental health, the danger of addiction, the problem of attention deficit and the loss of the media socialization process, the benefit of delaying the moment in which we give them a smartphone.
Within each family they will have to consider what each child is like, if they have a tendency to easily “get hooked” on screens, if they have enough critical sense, if their will is strong and they organize their time well, if they usually have adults around them who They will help them interpret the world, if they maintain a fluid relationship with them to ask questions about what they have not understood, and, above all, if the benefit that having the cell phone brings will be significant for the minor.
But this is a debate that would be for another article.
Taken from The Conversation
Cover photo: Taken from Red Cenit
#Reasons #delaying #mobile #phones #breakdown #socialization #process