To pick up water with your hands

It was what I expected to hear. The German teacher at the Official Language School asked us to give our opinions on Sánchez's proposal to restrict internet access for those under sixteen. The debates proposed in language classes are always equally boring: climate change, artificial intelligence, new technologies... I exhale. Then someone said it was outrageous that children grow up with direct access to pornography, recording themselves performing lewd dances on TikTok, glued to the screen and... bullying Telematics. And another replied that in his day ("in my day!") all this was already happening in other ways. It was what he expected to hear, yes, but expressed in the German we know how to speak in that classroom.

Then I thought about what Marc Sarrats said a few days ago, which is what I tried to argue in my last article, but he went further. Salt shakerPerhaps what should be done is to prohibit access to networks (phones, ChatGPT, the internet...) for people over sixty. He said that young people will get over it, this feeling of unease, but that older people, on the other hand, won't. He exclaimed: "We've stopped saying that your twenties and adolescence are amazing. Being young is a fucking nightmare." Very thoughtful. Beyond the terrible time that is puberty, which is true, stating that we should prohibit phones for older people is a way of saying that, in an ideal world, the tools would be in the hands of people who know how to use them. Cliché, I know: it's the dose that makes the poison. Total cliché: technology is good if you know how to use it! It's unlikely a fourteen-year-old would know the dark side of the phone, and perhaps something needs to be done about that, but the thing is, I'm twenty-eight and there are days when my eyes burn from staring at the screen so much, and weeks when my iPhone reminds me that I've spent three hours a day doing scrollImagine, then, as Sarrats said, the fake news They swallow adults whole when they show you a video "of a deer entering a toilet while a guy is taking a dump" and believe it's authentic and not an AI creation.

I don't mean to say that adults should be exemplary, because I don't think your parents have to spend all day reading for you to pick up a book: a little sensitivity and the ability to instill a curious perspective on the world are enough. And then the children turn out as best they can, though. Seeing your father glued to a screen can be a way of wanting to escape, like those children of chain smokers who want nothing to do with tobacco. I also want to distance myself from those who frame the debate in terms of whether or not the state should intervene in the family unit, as if we weren't always being intervened upon by worse monsters, or as if the family were a refuge where everyone does as they please: most likely, the parents who defend this are raising children who are out of place. So, how can we talk about phones and teenagers without resorting to clichés?

If we return to the idea of ​​an ideal world where tools are in the hands of those who know how to use them, then one wonders who establishes the criteria that define those who know and those who don't. Who decides what common sense is and who sets limits on the path? Because the father who shields his son from the state thinks he knows; and so does the person who gets their information from trite and mediocre tweets; and even more so, the one who isolates the child from screens until the age of eighteen, fabricating a world that doesn't exist; and the German teacher thinks she knows, and the student who talks about pornography and TikTok, and the other student who reminisces about her time with nostalgia. And I think I know too. But I suppose if there's one truth in all this (forgive the cliché again), it's that technology is moving faster than we are. And that, whatever we do, we seem useless trying to grasp water with our bare hands. Furthermore, when we talk about social media, phones, and teenagers publicly, the same thing happens as with issues like climate change or gender-based violence: sadly, in a polarized and angry political debate, it has become just another battleground between parties, instead of being addressed as a social problem. And meanwhile, I insist, the problem is slipping through our fingers.