📵 School phone bans: what’s the downside?

Also inside #6: 🗣️ Free speech, except for hers!, 🙏 Nitya, 🇬🇧 London meetup

Polarization is trendy these days, so it’s no surprise that the debate around screen time — are screens bad for us and our kids? — can sometimes be very black and white.

We have the Jonathan Haidt ‘rewiring of childhood’ side, including movements like Smartphone Free Childhood, wielding evidence linking social media usage to mental health problems, particularly among kids. It feels right. It plays into my confirmation bias: I don’t like social media so I’m primed to agree with arguments against it.

And then we have the ‘screen time concerns are a moral panic!’ counter-movement, pointing to evidence that banning phones in schools makes no difference, and to previous moral panics over the advent of the printing press, radio, TV and so on. This side plays into my anti-confirmation bias, wanting to consider the point of view that doesn’t feel right to me (that would even mildly embarrass me if true, undermining work I’ve done on things like software and stickers to help people reduce their screen time).

That’s how I arrive in the grey zone. That’s right — the boring, lame, indecisive, cowardly grey zone. The zone where all you really say is ‘it depends’, where no one clicks on your headlines, where none of your content goes viral. A terrible zone to make a career out of.

But as I sit in the grey zone, I want to pose a question to the debate: what’s the downside?

Recently, for instance, a paper showed that restricting phone use in schools did not affect overall phone/social media usage, or improve mental health for teenagers. OK, so no point banning smartphones in schools — perfect for Team It’s All A Moral Panic! But why not just do it anyway? What’s the downside?

After all, the study isn’t saying that smartphone policies make anything worse for teenagers — just that there’s no link between them and usage or mental health. And the matter can hardly be settled by just one paper.¹

Team IAAMP think they’ve found the downside. From a recent newsletter by Taylor Lorenz:

There is also overwhelming evidence that [banning cell phones in schools] would inadvertently harm the most marginalized and needy students and put them at a significant educational disadvantage.

I’ve not come across this argument before, so I took a look at the ‘overwhelming evidence’ and found it quite underwhelming. The article Lorenz cites mostly comprises anecdotes, and the strongest argument it makes is (paraphrasing here) ‘technology — though not necessarily smartphones — can often really help in the classroom’, which I don’t think even many strong proponents of school smartphone bans would disagree with.

Sure, sometimes it might be useful to let students have their smartphones in class for a particular exercise. That doesn’t mean they’ll always learn better if they have them around.

So that leaves me unconvinced that there’s much downside to school smartphone bans, provided that they make exceptions for times when smartphones can be useful for learning. Good news for my original confirmation bias.

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🗣️ "WE NEED MORE FREE SPEECH!" SAYS MAN SUING TO BLOCK WOMAN’S FREE SPEECH

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg upheld his uncompromising stance on freedom of speech by suing Sarah Wynn-Williams, a woman who is saying things he doesn't like.

"In this great nation of ours, we all have the right to say exactly what we want," commented Zuckerberg in a video posted to Instagram. "And that includes me telling my lawyers to destroy this woman for the mean things she said about my company."

The move, which is fully consistent with Zuckerberg's recent declaration of 'More Speech' and his rollback of content moderation on Facebook and Instagram, has caused spontaneous rallies around the US supporting his clear First Amendment principles.

Since this morning, demonstrators have thronged the streets outside Meta's HQ in Menlo Park, California, holding signs declaring 'Free Speech, Other Than Sarah's!' and 'We Will Not Be Silenced! (Check With Mark)'.

This story, originally published on Attention here, is about Careless People, the new book by Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time working at Facebook, which Meta’s lawyers kindly donated free PR to via the Streisand effect. Here are some of the more bizarre stories from the book.

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🙏 SHOUTOUT: NITYA

I recently had an awesome time brainstorming with Nitya Kuthiala, the first ever reader of Attention to get in touch about collaborating — woop woop!

Nitya is interested in all things online, having completed her MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute a couple of years ago — but is particularly fascinated by the strange world of online dating. It was brilliant to learn from Nitya’s work looking at Indian women’s experiences on dating apps both in India and in the UK — we came up with a bunch of exciting ideas for ways to translate some of her research into Attention-land, so watch this space!

If you have any random, crazy, ridiculous, tiny idea of how to make tech fun or make fun of tech, I’d love to hear from you — hi [at] louis [dot] work.

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🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

• Great joke about GDP, and let’s be honest there can’t be that many — Hacker News. (Thanks to Darius Kazemi for sending!)

• Entrancing investigation of how AI model data sets come about — Models All The Way Down. Worth the scrolling.

• Tool that locks you out of addictive apps until you literally touch grass — Product Hunt.

And in case you missed it, our article from Friday:

Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

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🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

If you’re reading this, I’ve managed to do newsletters in consecutive weeks for the first time in a while, which feels good. A positive step towards publishing often. But it also reminds me that the piece of Attention I’m missing is other writers. I want this to be a publication, not a blog. So I’m going to get over my mental block around pestering people over email, and reach out to people I know asking them if they’d like to contribute.

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🇬🇧 LONDON MEETUP: REMINDER

Still a few spaces left for this Wednesday’s meetup in London! Here are the details:

6pm Wednesday 26th March, at The Montagu Pyke in Soho, London.

The very chilled and unlikely-to-be-followed agenda is: make tech fun again.

Please let me know if you’re joining by replying here, or emailing hi [at] louis [dot] work!

1. You may disagree with Jonathan Haidt but it’s great that he bases his opinions on collaborative reviews, where he tries to sort through the entire field of evidence and invites critics to add papers he’ll disagree with.