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The Swedish government announced at a press conference on January 28 that Swedish primary schools will introduce a total ban on mobile phones. The school will collect students’ mobile phones when they arrive at school and students will not get their phones back until the end of the school day.
Apparently, the principals of Swedish schools already have the legal right to implement such a decision at their own school. And according to some information, such a practice already exists in 80 percent of Swedish primary schools. So, it may not be so revolutionary that the government and their supporting party, the Sweden Democrats, are now taking this step. But it is still a sign of the times.
In the mid-1990s, the mobile phone broke through with full force in Sweden and other European countries. In 1994, the mobile phone became the “Christmas gift of the year” in Sweden. But the real revolution occurred when the mobile phone became a computer.
In 2011, 27 percent of Swedish households had a smartphone. By 2014, the figure had increased to 70 percent. And then came social media and its gradual development of reels and shorts. And now we have a generation of young people – and a whole world – who interact with other people via their technological devices.
And one problem, of course, is that phones are getting us used to focusing our attention on written text and on the spoken word.
It is a fact that we are still beginners with digital technology. And it is therefore reasonable that we are now starting to react to some of the childhood diseases that it has given us.
Sweden’s Minister of Education, the liberal Simona Mohamsson, told the newspaper Aftonbladet: “Mobile phones are a constant part of students’ lives. Mobile phones and social media are also places where harassment and bullying take place.”
And it is a fact that the problems with mobile phones are multiple. Of course, it is about the distraction that mobile phones create in connection with teaching. But it is also about the sometimes-brutal social interaction that can take place between children and young people on social media. That school is then allowed to be a sanctuary is probably a good idea.
And it is perhaps a general trend in the world that people are becoming more distant from the internet and social media. It is a well-known fact that people post fewer posts on social media that are about their own private lives. That is, fewer posts about travel, dinners with friends, pub crawls with colleagues. And it may simply be that people have grown tired of the inherent narcissism that is present in this phenomenon. How interested are we in finding out that our acquaintances have more friends and do more interesting things than we do? Probably quite a bit.
At the same time, the use of social media has moved towards the sometimes rather soulless scrolling of short films. This can be described as a problem. But the question is whether it will not create a resistance movement. As it becomes obvious to more people that the time spent scrolling through what the algorithms offer us is wasted time in our lives, more people will be encouraged to turn off their mobile phones.
It is easy today to get help online to free yourself from internet addiction. Concrete goals for how to spend less time online are proposed and then you just must try to rediscover the real world again.
Of course there is reason for concern. It is not good for young people to be passive in front of the internet. There is also reason to worry about what an increasingly developed artificial intelligence will do to our lives. But as someone said about AI music: given the monotonous and artificially produced music many people already listen to today, we are not worth anything other than AI music.
Perhaps the AI revolution will also mean that we learn to appreciate the human side of art again. Musicians are welcome to play wrong or do something original. If it is real musicians playing for a real audience.
So, the ban on mobile phones in primary schools that the Swedish government is now announcing is just part of an expected trend. We are starting to resist technology.