“Addiction is a big word,” said one commentator, grandly dismissing the proposal that we follow Australia’s ban on social media for children under 16. Hearing this, I reached for some of my own big words. Addiction is certainly relevant in this context. If you accept that users get hooked on gambling machines, I don’t know why you’d scoff at the notion of addiction to social media.
Social media platforms, like pokie machines, are specifically designed to create and foster addiction, using a system of intermittent variable rewards. This is why, according to their own testimony, executives of social media companies don’t allow their children to use them. They want to avoid the damage, whether it’s anxiety, self-harm or depression.
It should be parents who regulate online use, is another argument. On that logic, we could allow casinos to serve 12-year-olds alcohol and let them loose on the one arm bandits, so long as they’ve asked their mother. It’s clear that prohibition doesn’t work, and that regulation requires nuance. But it’s surely reasonable to restrict the activities of children.
I’ve taken an interest in legal bans ever since I worked as a solicitor in a commercial law firm. We acted for tobacco companies, compiling submissions against the smokefree environments legislation. I spent hours writing opinions on statutory interpretation and ways to circumvent the law.
Back then, resistance to the legislation was loud and emphatic: if a ban on smoking inside was enforced, the hospitality industry would be ruined. This narrative was reinforced by commentators. It was accepted as fact, and it proved to be entirely false.
For tobacco and tech companies, it’s obviously all about the money. At the social level, bans seem more likely to be resisted by older people (often men) who will not be told what to do. They won’t use smaller rubbish bins or cloth shopping bags or paper straws. They don’t want speed limits or gun control, or to take off their menacing gang patches.
A legal ban on smacking caused New Zealanders passionate about hitting their children to march in the streets. People resist and catastrophise until you force the issue, and then they adjust. Currently, the debate about social media allows some commentators to dress up their instinctive, ideological rejection of state intervention as “acceptance of the digital age” and “being cool about the kids”.
It’s a social issue for adults, too. In a Grey Lynn restaurant last week, the waitress earned my amused approval of her verbal style when she said, “It’s not an obscene amount of food.” Meanwhile, at the table next to us, there was no verbalising at all. Two couples sat hunched over their phones, ignoring each other. Their excessive screen use began to bother the young people at our table before I’d even noticed it. My adult children found it depressing and absurd; they were bothered by the light and the noise from the smartphones; they described it as irritating. We could hear pings and notifications, and even the electronic whirr of an online game.
When their food arrived, the glazed diners photographed the dishes, then uploaded and scrolled while silently eating. It was a joyless subversion of normal behaviour. They were being operated on, mechanically benefiting a giant corporation, while depriving one another of social interaction. If they’d had children, they would have silenced them with screens and headphones. It was a spectacle of monotonous enslavement – of addiction – that spread its malaise through the room.
Given the way mores change, it’s not unimaginable that their addict behaviour could one day be considered as unacceptable and decadent as if they’d lit up cigarettes and turned the room blue with their smoke.
Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic.
