“It is now clear that having a personal smartphone before the age of 14 can be very harmful, as can opening a personal profile on social media before the age of 16.”

There is a petition on Change.org that is being talked about a lot these days. The first signatories are Daniele Novara, pedagogist, counselor and director of CPPP (CPP Psychopedagogical Center for Education and Conflict Management) and Alberto Pellai, doctor and psychotherapist. It has been talked about a lot because a significant number of celebrities have signed it, from Stefano Accorsi to Paola Cortellesi, to Pierfrancesco Favino and Claudia Gerini. And it says something simple: it is time to regulate the use of smartphones and social media for the little ones.

The Anxious Generation

The petition seems to have been inspired by the release in Italy of The Anxious Generation, the book in which psychologist Jonathan Haidt links the mental health crisis of young people – especially in Anglo-Saxon countries – to the massive spread of smartphones. Haidt, who has been studying this phenomenon for many years, has collected a series of scientific studies that, according to many experts, do not definitively demonstrate the negative impact of technology on minors. But, net of the data, he tells a story that seems familiar: the transition from a childhood based on play to a childhood based on the smartphone. And therefore the obsession with parental control, which becomes poor supervision in a digital place perhaps even more dangerous than the streets of any city.

The conclusions – Haidt’s inspire those of the petition – are legitimate. And it makes sense, in fact, to imagine regulating the use of smartphones and social media for those who are growing up. A doctor at the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome, with whom I happened to chat, told me that when parents ask him if they can put a boy or a girl in front of a tablet, he responds: “Would you give them the keys to your car”?

Now, the truth is that there are no easy solutions. Regardless of the prohibitions and prescriptions, what seems fundamental to me is to stop and reflect on the all-encompassing role that, over the years, we have entrusted to these tools. Which are born, in most cases, with specific purposes: talking to friends, sharing photos, shooting videos of dances. But to which we have all entrusted a gigantic role: being the gateway to the world for an enormous number of people.

Because, think about it, that’s what each of us does when we open a social network. From our own home, we feel like we’re interfacing with the world, with the lives of others, with places that are familiar or not. At first, we did it because those we saw were our friends, the people we loved. Today, we do it to entertain ourselves, to pass the time, to see what’s going on. And it’s more comfortable to look at the world through the peephole, to feel like we can control it, tame it, open it and turn it off at will.

The feeling of control is an illusion

But that’s not quite the case. The feeling of control is an illusion: between one content and another, the platforms’ algorithms select a portion of the world for us. We see a filtered version, reduced to a format, of reality, which we have accepted without thinking too much. And that version brings with it an imaginary, a vision of the world. The idea, for example, that free time is a currency that we can sacrifice on the altar of building a social identity. That, in other words, everything must and can be measurable, potentially monetizable. A vision of the world that is dangerous for everyone, but even more devastating for those who are growing up.

Or, again, that everything must be immediate, easy to understand, able to capture our disastrous attention. It is the reduction of the world to an entertainment product: something that TV, in part, had already done in the past. And that today, with the social media infrastructure, is becoming increasingly present.

I don’t know if the ban is a right solution. What seems useful to me is education on the tools, first of all. But not an education on use, on living these platforms despite everything. An education that also aims a little at desacralization: those digital spaces are not the world. They are an alternative version, driven by commercial logics that almost never love us. Recognizing this is the first step.