Privatizing adolescence
Young people today lack private and shared spaces where they can interact freely and independently without adult intervention. There is the space dedicated to formal education and extracurricular activities, but outside this broad range of organized time, what is left for them? In the physical, analog world, only consumption: streets full of shops and shopping malls. The available parks are designed for toddlers. In a few squares, there are still some ping-pong tables. In any case, there comes a time when children disappear from the city. If we look at the types of people we find on the street, outside of school hours, we see older people or very young children, but it would seem that teenagers don't exist. Where are they? Locked away at home, of course, and, in many cases, in their bedrooms, where all the social life they once had in person, as a real, physical being and not a digital avatar, has been displaced. The virtualization of childhood and adolescence is an unprecedented phenomenon whose long-term consequences are unknown. Currently, the data on mental health problems in this age group are so alarming that they should prompt us to reconsider this social shift, which we have neither decided upon nor thoroughly evaluated. Those of us who had children at the turn of the millennium were later told that we couldn't do anything, that we couldn't oppose the digitization and virtualization of our own offspring. To be against it is to be old-fashioned, technophobic, and practically an internet-bound Amish.
As a mother, I often feel that I am the only one on the front lines, protecting the children I have given birth to from the onslaught of powerful forces that try to either alienate me or expropriate my right and duty to exercise my parental responsibilities. When we say, as the surprisingly aptly put it Simona Levi in this diaryTo say that banning social media for minors is tantamount to banning adolescence is to say, whose interests are we defending? Those of people who are not yet mature enough to protect themselves from large technology corporations, or those of the very same companies that colonize the childhoods of all humanity and profit by exploiting the privacy, socialization, and most important relationships of young people? Their image and identity are also exploited in what is an unprecedented process of privatization: the privatization of the most private conversations to extract economic returns unimaginable just a few years ago. I must say, it is certainly surprising that a leading figure in activism for our digital sovereignty, like Simona Levi, would equate this stage of life with its virtual expression. Did adolescence not exist before the internet? Don't citizens, and all of us who are concerned about the well-being of minors, have the right to decide what kind of relationship we want for those who are not yet mature enough to decide for themselves, who, moreover, have already been captured by the digital world from a very young age and have not been able to choose freely?
The idea that social media cannot be regulated is one of the neoliberal slogans they use to convince us that we should leave our children exposed to all the dangers they encounter. The rates of depression, the disturbance of desire caused by extreme and violent pornography (which in many cases contains real, not simulated, rapes), the distortion of self-image, eating disorders, induced suicides, and pedophilia, which run rampant on these platforms, are not alarming enough signs to warrant a ban on social media. Of course not! The history of capitalism is a history of closing off common spaces and turning them into private ones, and the last area they want to put gates on is, precisely, adolescence.