It was when I read a call for families to “bring back landlines” that the penny dropped.
The image of a teenager queueing in the hallway, twirling the cord of a beige phone, waiting for their turn to speak, feels like something out of a museum. Yet, this yearning for a pre-digital age captures perfectly the impulse driving the government’s youth social media ban. Nostalgia. Gen X-ers and Boomers craving a bygone world that digital technology has rendered mute.
The Albanese government’s social media ban for people under the age of 16 begins on December 10.
The world has changed beyond recognition, and older generations don’t grasp how profound that change has been. The eSafety Commissioner, who on Wednesday added Reddit and Kick to the list of sites banned for under-16s from December 10, herself gave the game away with a recent LinkedIn post lamenting that kids these days all want to be YouTubers. She urged them to head back into the band room and the village hall to show off their creative talents, as if those are still the thriving centres of youth expression they once were.
But here’s the thing: there is no going back. There is no world without social media, no return to the old ways of building an audience, a career, or even a sense of belonging.
When I was a teenager and avid music fan, I’d spend weekends flicking through Smash Hits and buying singles at the local record store, maybe even mailing off a stamped envelope to join a fan club.
That world doesn’t exist now in any meaningful form. The shops are gone, the magazines folded, the mailing lists replaced by follower counts and notifications. Whether this is good or bad can be debated. What can’t be debated is that this is reality. And yet, my fellow Gen X parents, backed by well-meaning Boomers, seem to think our kids can just revert to “real life” if we flick the off switch on social media. That version of real life is gone.
E-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant on Wednesday added Reddit and Kick to the list of services banned from use by under-16s from December 10.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Every generation fears the technology that follows it. In the 1950s, comic books were blamed for delinquency. In the 1980s, television was said to rot the brain. In the 2000s, video games were supposedly breeding violence. Social media is simply the latest scapegoat. The difference is that this time, the technology isn’t a hobby or a pastime – it’s the infrastructure of culture, communication and even commerce. Trying to unplug our teenagers from it entirely is like banning them from using electricity because we fear the lights are too bright.
Of course, the concerns are real. Parents are right to worry about cyberbullying, unrealistic beauty standards and addictive algorithms. But fear alone doesn’t make good policy.
The government’s blanket ban is a knee-jerk reaction to a complex problem and risks severely disadvantaging Australian teens in their creative and entrepreneurial pursuits compared to their international peers.
All over the world young people are building skills, audiences and careers online. A 16-year-old in Seoul can launch a fashion label from their bedroom and sell to millions through TikTok. A teen in Los Angeles can turn a YouTube channel into a production company. These kids are developing the digital fluency that future economies will demand. When we cut off Australian kids from those platforms, we don’t protect them; we sideline them.
Imagine if, in the 1980s, we’d banned kids from using personal computers because we thought the screens would ruin their eyes. We’d have lost a generation of coders, engineers and designers. The same risk applies now. The next generation of entrepreneurs, artists and content producers is being forged online, not in band rooms or on the landline.
There’s no doubt that social media is more pervasive for teenagers than the video games of the ’80s, and the risks of harm are far greater. But rather than banning it outright, we should be focusing on how to make it safer and smarter. That means setting minimum standards for algorithm transparency, enforcing genuine age verification, holding platforms to account for harmful content, and embedding digital literacy in schools, so kids learn to navigate the online world with critical thinking, not blind trust.
The social media world is not some alternate reality our children “escape” into – it is the reality they live in. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can help them thrive within it.
Nostalgia is a comforting emotion. It’s lovely to imagine our kids riding bikes until dusk, calling friends on the family phone and discovering music by browsing shelves instead of feeds. But nostalgia is a terrible basis for legislation. If we legislate for the world as it used to be, we’ll leave our young people unprepared for the world as it is.
We don’t need the landline to return; smartphones really are so much better. We need leadership that understands that the future is already here and that helping kids thrive in it is far more powerful than wishing them back to the past.
Shaun Rowland worked in the digital industry for many years and is the father of two girls aged 12 and 14.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
