A Montreal man is launching a class-action lawsuit against several parent companies of major social media platforms, alleging that social media is designed to leverage dopamine – a neurotransmitter and hormone associated with pleasure (sometimes called the brain’s “reward centre”) – to entrap users into spending endless hours scrolling.
It’s hard to know whether a judge will be convinced that Meta Platforms (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and the owners of TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit should pay compensatory and punitive damages. Regardless, the fundamental premise behind the lawsuit couldn’t be less controversial.
According to datareportal.com, humanity spends a collective 500 million years on social media per year. Almost everyone can relate to how difficult it is to avoid becoming a major contributor to that statistic.
Why then are smartphones, machines with which one can instantaneously access the addictive platforms crafted by mad scientist techno-utopians in Silicon Valley, still permitted in most Canadian school districts? Look around a restaurant patio, and you realize that many adults struggle to stop themselves from checking in on the latest notification – these cunning gadgets manage to outcompete beer, hamburgers, and conversation for people’s attention.
One can imagine how much more difficult it is for a student without a fully formed prefrontal cortex to resist the urge to scroll in an early morning science class, in which the only competing factors for one’s attention are scientific notation and reverse osmosis.
Some jurisdictions in Canada are introducing bans, but they often don’t go far enough to make a real difference. Here in B.C., Premier David Eby’s government issued a provincial order mandating that schools come up with a policy restricting phones by September. It’s a good start, but we should go much further.
First off, the order leaves the writing of the policies to the school districts, leading to varying levels of strictness. It is up to districts, for instance, to decide whether to apply the ban only to class time or throughout the day. Vancouver appears to be exempting high school students, although they are still consulting with “stakeholders” (a criminally overused buzzword).
Another flaw is that teachers will end up being the ban’s enforcers – another headache in an already tough job.
The ideal approach is zero tolerance. A Washington Post article (“Want to go back in time? Visit a school where cellphones are banned”) describes an American school that took this route. Students are required to keep phones in a locked pouch until the end of the day – simple. The principal was interviewed, and described the policy as “completely transformational”. He pointed to a cafeteria full of chattering students, and totally devoid of phones, as visual evidence.
If a zero tolerance policy had been implemented while I was in high school, I would have considered it a totalitarian interruption of my primary pursuit at that time – Clash of Clans, a multiplayer game in which you run a kingdom and amass gold and gems. That’s a good demonstration of why we need such a policy.
Editor’s note: My Counter Current column is published once every two weeks in the Islands Marketplace paper on Salt Spring Island. This piece was published on August 9th, 2024.
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