China will impose the “minor mode.” It is not a musical note. It is a new system to limit the amount of time that children and adolescents remain kidnapped by their mobile phones.
For now it is just a proposal from the country’s Cybersecurity Agency, which intends to elevate it to the status of law.
It will consist – if they have reached this point it seems unlikely that they will turn back – that parents or legal guardians will have to establish guidelines based on the age of their children, choosing on their devices the interface established for each age.
Children up to three years old will not be able to stay in front of a screen for more than 40 minutes a day, and gradual periods of use will be established until the age of 18, with maximums of up to two hours; It does not seem likely that in a country with tight state control like China, the mass withdrawal syndrome that will be generated when adolescents exhaust their daily minutes will lead to a revolution.
In fact, Beijing already imposed a maximum of three hours of online video games in 2019 and nothing happened; The shares of some companies fell, but little else. That measure worked and China now wants to extend it to mobile phones in general. He wants to stop his children’s addiction to the Internet.
By the way, as the agency itself explained in a statement, it will take the opportunity to intervene in the content that its young people receive so that they understand “the benefits of Chinese socialism.”
It is the great debate of this beginning of the school year also in Spain, and in Catalonia, where there has been an erratic trickle of schools and institutes that have announced that they were declaring themselves “free of mobile phones.”
Some tolerate them at some times during patio time, others only on certain days, and a third group prohibits them completely. Well: a fourth group has not made any decision.
A few days ago, the Minister of Health, Manel Balcells, announced that the Generalitat is finalizing a law so that all schools veto them. It was the head of Health. It is worth highlighting this, because he brandished the announcement as it is a health problem. An addiction. The Chinese think the same. An epidemic of devastating effects on the ability to pay attention and therefore concentrate and therefore learn.
This idea is also gradually gaining ground. In just ten or twelve years, the smartphone has demonstrated its infinite possibilities, for better and worse.
The first alarms were raised by those who were involved in the conception and development of networks and apps, engineers and marketing experts who have described and denounced how they designed machines and platforms to waste our attention and our time.
Facebook’s former vice president of user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined the company in 2007 and left a decade later, said that after everything he saw inside (and helped develop), he intended to use Facebook “the most least possible” and that he kept his children as far away as he could “from that shit.” “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we have created are destroying our society,” he warned.
Ten or twelve years and dozens of statements and alarming studies later, the pendulum is swinging firmly in the direction of regulation or prohibition, in schools and – for now, in China – beyond. Will it be the end of the hijacking of our attention and that of our children? Now we’ll have to see, when they get home, what we play.
