The history of the omnipresence of screens in the classroom has a more or less direct origin in the Council of Europe recommendation number 1836 made public in 2008. According to the authors of the document, although the tools ofe-learning (the expression has already been passed down) had had a considerable impact on education and training, their potential in Europe had not yet been fully exploited.e-learning encompassed electronic media for teaching and learning, both in person and remotelyIt placed new demands on educational institutions, teachers, and students. Institutions needed technical infrastructure and software. Teachers had to receive specific mandatory training, while students had to have access to devices and materials and be trained in their use from a young age. It was believed at the time that educational resources accessible to everyone would be generated, thus combating social division. Parliaments were called upon to support the "open source" movement and to combat the supposed digital divide. In short, Member States were invited to improve technologies that could be applied to education through major investments. One of the first countries to enthusiastically embrace the recommendation was Sweden. However, it was also the first to abandon it in 2023 after observing its worrying (and verifiable) results. The Swedish government, and more specifically Minister Lotta Edholm, halted all this after learning of multiple reports comparing groups that worked with screens and others that worked with books. Academic performance was significantly lower in the case of the former, especially in memory capacity, concentration, attention, and reading comprehension.
In Catalonia, during the Bargalló administration (2018-2021), the Catalan Digital Education Plan 2020-2023 was launched, which already provided for a significant investment in equipment, although the pandemic accelerated its implementation and changed its timeline. The most prominent role, in any case, was played by Minister González Cambray between 2021 and 2023. During his term, the Generalitat allocated some €200 million of European Next Generation funds to promote the digitalization of classrooms, including the purchase of 30,000 interactive screens. Cambray himself described the event as "the largest process of providing equipment to schools in the entire history of the Department of Education." It should be noted that at that time, there were true enthusiasts within the department about bringing mobile phones into the classroom. I'm thinking, for example, of the Secretary of Educational Transformation at the time, Núria Mora. In a interview On Catalunya Ràdio, broadcast at the end of October 2021, he stated things that might cause some astonishment today. The core of the argument was that staff spend all day fiddling with their cell phones, and the school cannot ignore "that reality." I prefer not to draw any analogies with other similar arguments that have led to less-than-positive situations. I will limit myself to quoting a title by the pedagogue. Gregorio Luri –The school against the world– to show that there are other ways of looking at things.
But let's get to the core problem, which, of course, we can't abstractly limit to a technology but rather to its specific uses. From their very beginning, anyone could see without much effort that they weren't "networks" nor had anything to do with "social" things: they were private companies dedicated to relational leisure, and their pursuit. Today, they are the center of the so-called "attention economy" (that is, of distraction). These multinational relational leisure companies achieved something unusual: the provider and the consumer were one and the same. It has ended up degenerating among both the young and the not-so-young. A few years ago, it was said that anyone who wasn't in Second Life would sooner or later be condemned to invisibility (I won't, out of charity, name the author of that statement). It's not like the attention economy is the center of our world, but the damage has already been done: the distraction economy is now the center of our world.
