At the risk of dating myself, let me confess that I got my first cellphone as a birthday gift. It was my 18th birthday. This made me one of the earliest among my social group at high school to have a cellphone — not the first, but on the leading edge. Until then, my younger sister and I had shared access to my dad’s “car phone” (remember those?). We could take it with us when we were out and there was some reason my parents wanted to be in touch. My dad’s phone was huge and didn’t work very well. The battery could handle only a few minutes of actual talking; it was theoretically mobile but was really intended just for use inside a car, plugged into the cigarette-lighter (remember those?) outlet.
I still remember the phone. The feel of it in my hands. The way it slipped into the pocket of my jeans. I had long since forgotten the technical details, but a quick visit this morning to the delightfulMobile Phone Museum website leads me to believe that it was aSamsung N100. If it wasn’t a N100, it was something awfully close to that.
That phone changed my life. Truly. I remember it the way I remember my first computer or when we got cable internet. (You could download an entire song in only minutes!) There were other technological leaps that came later: home and then business Wi-Fi networks, the gradual transition from disks to CDs to USB drives and then eventually simply to the cloud, touch-screens and smartphones, video streaming... it’s remarkable to think of just how much technological progress has landed on us in recent years and then to reflect on how much we’ve come to take it all for granted.
That first Samsung phone, with a phone number all my own — I still have the same number! — changed my life in a dramatic way. Most of the later changes were more incremental and less significant in isolation, but in their totality, no doubt more transformative. I mean, gosh. That first phone was basically still a telephone. You made and received verbal calls with it. That was basically the extent of its capability. Not quite a quarter century later, I’m writing this column by speaking into a different phone, which then turns my voice into the written word and sends it to a file on my computer, where I’ll sit down and clean up any garbles. So, yeah. There’s been some change, even if it seems less dramatic.
This little jaunt down memory lane, which I hope has amused readers of a vintage similar to my own, is obviously linked to the Ford government’s decision to bring out strict rules around the use of cellphones — smartphones we call them now, actually — in the classroom. Elementary-age children will have a total ban, unless the devices are being used for a specific classroom purpose. They’ll be on silent and put away for the day. Older kids, middle school and up, will be allowed to access their devices at lunch or between classes but not during class, unless, again, there is a specific in-class purpose for the use of the devices.
There will be room for teacher discretion, and, apparently, exceptions will be created for children in exceptional situations, such as those related to family custody or to medical conditions. Obviously, the devil will be in those details, but that’s a very smart and very necessary exception. I know a family whose child has a life-threatening medical condition that is managed in part by the use of real-time monitoring of their condition via phone-based apps — and also by the parents’ ability to remain in close contact with that kid. In that scenario, I think we can agree that exceptions make sense.
But other than that? I will be shocked if anyone other than the device-addicted kids have any real objections to this.
And that’s not a knock on the kids. I’m no better. Like most adults, I have a deeply conflicted love-hate relationship with my phone. It provides me with music, contact with loved ones, all kinds of video entertainment and games, and it’s also my primary way of reading books. Kindle app, woo! It’s also a constant anchor to work and the means through which I absorb most of my bad news and damned near all of my daily dose of minor irritation. I am constantly struggling with how to balance my use of the damned thing. I can’t function in my job without it. I’ve made my peace with that. But are there days when I really wish I could revert to an electric typewriter and a landline phone for all my work? Very much yes.
Like my parents, my wife and I had a plan to gradually and responsibly introduce our kids to devices like phones and iPads. And like many (most?) Canadian parents, that plan did not survive first contact with COVID-19. Overnight, the iPads transitioned from a sparingly used entertainment device to a surrogate for almost all their normal human interactions. My kids got their education through their iPads, stayed in touch with their friends through their iPads, and stayed entertained during those lockdown months with their iPads. My wife and I absolutely tried to provide other activities and outlets, but it simply wasn’t possible. By early 2022, any real hope that we’d be able to gradually ease their transition into “digitally active” creatures had collapsed.
And we can see the effects of that ourselves. We have discovered as parents that it is basically impossible to communicate with a kid who has a glowing rectangle anywhere in their field of view. I cannot imagine how much worse it must be for teachers who have only a limited amount of time every day to impart a set amount of knowledge to dozens of kids, each with their own glowing rectangle.
And I don’t have to imagine it. That N100 phone I referenced above? It had very, very early internet connectivity. It was extremely rudimentary, and way back in 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much internet to check out, anyway. But I can absolutely guarantee you — I have specific memories of this — that I was zoned out during class scrolling what little internet existed and was accessible on those primitive phones. I was a good enough student to either stay on top of the work or fake my way through it, but I cannot for a single moment tell you that I was actually paying the slightest attention in class. (If you see this, Ms. Staunton, I’m sorry for not paying attention in English. It hasn’t seemed to hold me back in adulthood, but still, my bad.)
I am just young enough to have lived through the first years of phones in classrooms. I’m just young enough to have parented young kids through their own digital immersions. I am not going to take their devices away, and I don’t regret, per se, that they have them, but I know exactly why limits are needed. We’ve got to get the limits right. But we absolutely need the limits.
And I wish I’d kept that damned N100. I wonder if I can find one on eBay.