Life For Teenagers Without Social Media

 

About a year ago, the Associated Press ran an article profiling two teenagers who were bucking the social-media frenzy by consciously limiting their phone use.  Since that time, teenagers without social media have only become more newsworthy.  As of June of this year, fourteen states have enacted some form of statewide ban on the use of cellphones in classrooms, and the trend is for more states to get on the bandwagon. 

 

What is it like for a teenager to do without most of the social media that their peers use?  Reporter Jocelyn Gecker profiled two teenage girls:  Gabriela Durham, who hopes to pursue a dancing career once she graduates from her Brooklyn high school, and Kate Bulkeley, who is a fifteen-year-old high schooler who is co-president of her Bible study club and has participated in a Model UN conference.  She ran into a problem when the other conference participants wanted to exchange only Instagram addresses rather than phone numbers.  And sometimes she relies on friends with Snapchat to tell her about important student government messages.  But overall, she is glad her social-media use is as low as it is.

 

Kate's parents knew that their daughter's school had a cellphone ban, but it wasn't enforced.  They were concerned about the bad publicity surrounding teens' use of social media, so when she became a freshman in high school they told her she couldn't use it.  Fine with it at first, she found as a sophomore that she needed Instagram to coordinate after-school activities. 

 

But the 15-year-old says she still only uses social media about two hours a week.  This is far below the average weekly use by teens, which runs over 35 hours a week for half of today's teens, according to one study cited in the report.  Kate simply sees most uses of social media as a waste of time, and prefers to use her time studying and encountering friends in the flesh, so to speak.

 

Gabriela Durham received a cellphone as soon as she was old enough to use public transportation in New York.  This was much later than her peers, who have often been using their cellphones since early in elementary school.  Her mother, Elena Romero, enforces a strict ban on social media until her daughters are 18.  They have fallen off the wagon only once, secretly using TikTok for a few weeks until Romero found out about it.

           

As a dance major at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, Gabriela dances outside of school every day.  Dancing and dance practice, plus commuting on the subway, take up time that she might otherwise use for social media.  But she is scandalized by peers who say they log up to 60 hours or more of social-media use weekly, saying it's "insane."

 

Both girls admit there are inconveniences to not being on social media in high school.  So much of what goes on socially happens online, and so they miss out on jokes, memes, rumors, and a lot of other things that people in the pre-cellphone days were familiar with from high school.  But back then you didn't need advanced technology to be in the know.

 

These young women serve as test cases to prove that reasonably happy and fulfilling lives can be led by teenagers who nevertheless make minimal use of social media. 

 

I think it's important to note, however, that both sets of parents began their restrictions by delaying the time when their children received a cellphone for the first time.  As an educator, I long ago learned the lesson that it is much easier to start out with strict rules and then ease them gradually, than it is to begin with laxness and tighten up later. 

 

Parents who have not laid any cellphone restrictions on their children and suddenly get convicted that they have to do something, may find it very difficult to remove privileges with social media that their children have grown accustomed to already.  Education, whether in college or the nursery, is a long-term enterprise.  So it behooves parents to give serious thought to how they will deal with cellphones long before their children start asking for one.

 

I am acquainted with a family of five who seem to have negotiated the cellphone issue pretty well so far.  Their oldest child is fourteen.  After she was homeschooled up to the age of twelve, her parents put her in a local Christian school for a year.  But she came home complaining that "those other kids spend all their spare time on their phones!" and eventually moved her to a home-school cooperative, where cellphones are not in evidence.  This shows that good habits can be ingrained in children to the extent that they embody virtuous attitudes themselves, even when placed in tempting situations.

 

This is what all parents want for their kids, I hope.  All children are different, and in the same family one child is biddable and does everything she is told, while the other one raised in the same environment rebels against all strictures and cheats every chance he gets. 

 

But the current trend of recognizing on an institutional scale that constant access to social media by teenagers does on balance more harm than good, is vastly encouraging to those parents out there who saw the dangers years ago and have been taking positive action ever since. 

 

While there are still situations in which using aspects of social media are logistically necessary, the hope is that the same philosophy of delaying social-media use becomes generally acceptable in K-12 educational institutions, whether forced to change by state legislators, or guided from within by enlightened educators at all levels. 

 

The damage has already been done to millions of children and teens, however.  And my point about suddenly withdrawing social media from those who have made it an integral part of their lives is still valid.  The results are likely to be comparable to Prohibition, which became effective in 1920 and only made alcohol-consumption problems worse. 

           

But if the educational system is adapted to minimize social-media dependence at all levels, there is real hope that the current increases in teen depression and suicide can be reversed. 

 

Sources:  The article "Life as a teen without social media isn't easy.  These families are navigating adolescence offline" by Jocelyn Gecker was dated June 5, 2024 and appeared at https://apnews.com/article/influenced-social-media-teens-mental-health-e32f82d46ea74b807c9099d61aec25d5.  I also referred to data about state-adopted school cellphone bans at https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-us-states-school-phone-bans-2090411.

Two Views of Porn, and What South Korea Does About It

Pornography is a big business, something that millions of people around the world indulge in, and while viewing it can get you into trouble if you hold a prominent corporate or political office or if you get involved in the child variety, it’s a private affair and not a big deal most of the time.

Pornography is exploitation that twists and defaces a type of relationship that is the earthly model of how Christ relates to his Church, and it can spiritually damage and enslave anyone who gets involved in it, crippling one's ability to relate to the opposite sex in the way God intended.

Which view do you agree with?  Probably most readers will incline toward the first view, which says that in most cases, viewing porn is a private decision that should be left up to the individual, and the legal system should get involved only in situations for which there is near-universal agreement that innocents are being harmed, such as the production or viewing of child pornography.  But the second view (which happens to be mine, more or less) is rooted in a Christian model of humanity which sees human sexuality as a gift from God, which men and women have a responsibility to use according to divine instructions.  In the second view, pornography exploits those who are involved in producing it as well as those consuming it, and debauches (a nice old-fashioned word) the users, accustoming their sexual responses to images which cannot be approached by the reality of any actual woman.  As such, pornography—especially the online variety, which is by far the most common nowadays—is worth opposing, restricting, and fighting with the legal system, even at the cost of one’s own well-being.

Over the past year or two, my views on the relationship between God’s law and human laws have changed.  When religious conservatives who are in the numerical minority in a democratic country manage to gain access to levers of power, they sometimes indulge a fantasy which goes something like this: “Pass a law against a popular but immoral thing, and people will quit doing it.”  This happened in 1919 when the amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages, which came to be known as Prohibition, was ratified by enough states to become law.  Prohibition was a long-term goal of the Anti-Saloon League, an organization supported by many Protestant churches but with its power base mainly in rural areas.  What did not happen was that alcohol abuse vanished overnight.  Instead, the consumption of alcohol went underground, leading to smuggling, bootlegger gang warfare, and a lowering of the respect for law, all of which finally led to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.  The bottom line of this lesson is that law works better as a mirror of a society’s mores than it does as a bridle that tries to jerk the society in a direction it generally does not wish to go.  That is, laws against a so-called “private” sin such as pornography should be enacted only when a substantial number of citizens in a country think it should be illegal.  So, while I am personally unhappy that online pornography is as popular and successful as it is, my view is that passing lots of laws against it, at least in the U. S., would probably be a waste of time.  But not in South Korea.

According to a recent Associated Press article, a good many South Koreans not only dislike online pornography, they are trying to do something about it.  Making anything illegal on the Internet is a challenge because of the intrinsically global nature of the medium.  But that hasn’t stopped South Korean law enforcement officials from arresting about 6400 people in only six months for producing, selling, or posting pornography online. 

Almost a third of South Koreans are Christians (counting both Protestants and Catholics), which makes it the most Christian nation in East Asia by far.  And Christianity in South Korea tends to be taken seriously by its adherents, who now send more missionaries overseas than many Western countries do, including those which evangelized their nation in the first place.  Many of these Christians make up a cadre of about 800 volunteer Internet “Nuri Cops” who regularly spend time patrolling the Internet for South Korean porn, turning in the results of their searches to police for further investigation and prosecution.

About now, you may be wondering what kind of person would devote their spare time to viewing pornography with the sole purpose of wiping it out.  To some, it may sound suspiciously like a member of the Anti-Saloon League who insists on tasting all the wine and beer before pouring the rest into the gutter.  I would imagine it takes a particular type of person to do this work without being harmed by it, and perhaps no one is totally immune.  But you could compare this type of work to the religious orders during the Black Plague of the 14th century in Europe who devoted themselves to the care of the ill, although many of their number ending up catching the disease and dying of it themselves.

For some readers, this comparison will seem completely wacky.  What possible parallel can there be between caring for the innocent victims of a physical disease like the bubonic plague, and snooping around on the Internet for websites that seem to provide harmless (or at least, not very harmful) entertainment for people in the privacy of their homes? 

It boils down to whether one believes in the soul as well as the body.  If there is the death of the body, there can also be such a thing as the death of the soul.  Enslavement to sin—any sort of sin—is a road that leads the soul to death, and one way to help souls escape death is to make it harder to find opportunities to sin.  That is just what the Nuri Cops are trying to do. 

While I would like to see something like that take place in the U. S., we would first have to have a cultural shift of seismic proportions:  one that would involve a resurgence of authentic belief in Christianity at the highest as well as the lowest levels of society, in the cities, editorial offices, studios, and corporate headquarters as well as the farms and private homes of America.  In the meantime, all I can do is congratulate the South Koreans for acting on their beliefs, and hope that maybe they will return the favor that Western missionaries did for them by evangelizing us some day.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article “South Korea’s cyberporn vigilantes” on pp. F3 and F5 of its print edition of Dec. 16, 2012.  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on “Religion in South Korea” and “Prohibition.”