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The smart smartphone social backlash

September 27, 2013 By Anne Leave a Comment

It was inevitable. The backlash is in full swing. There were the headlines and talk-show chats about digital detoxing and then the how-to books about digital sabbaths and shabbats. Some of it was fashionable, some of it fearful – all of it good if it got us to thinking about managing and not being managed by our smartphones and other digital social tools.

So now there are all kind of strategies for being present with the people around us in a physical space, which only tells me that our humanity is even more powerful than our technology. This week, the New York Times ran a very readable piece about a lot of those strategies. Please go to the article to see them all, but a few great ones families reportedly have put in place are: a designated “cellphone lockbox” (some container that, when phones are in it, doesn’t vibrate or light up – maybe better under a sofa cushion!); charging overnight in a place far away from beds (preferably where Mom or Dad wakes up if a phone’s retrieved); dinner downtime (with consequences, like extra chores for anybody whose phone is found under the table); phones left in the car when the family goes out for meals; and phone-free parties and family gatherings.

And, hey, we non-famous people have it good. Celebrities have to find polite ways to set smartphone restrictions right in their party invitations. But like the writer of the Times piece, apparently, my favorite strategy was the Smartphone Stack game for people dining together at restaurants: the first person who checks his/her phone during dinner pays everybody’s bills! The takeaway from this and all the other strategies is that they’re becoming novel strategies less and less and social norms more and more, and the other takeaway – for me, anyway – is that humanity is more powerful than technology.

Related links

  • “From flipped classrooms to flipped households”
  • “Rachel Simmons’s house rules for social tech”
  • Rosalind Wiseman’s family tech policy
  • “House rules for teen texting”
  • “When to get the kid a cellphone”
  • About little kids & tablets – those other portable full-blown computers
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Filed Under: mobile, Parenting, Social Media Tagged With: backlash, digital detox, digital downtime, digital sabbath, digital shabbat, smartphones, social norms

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
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Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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