By FERNANDO LIONEL QUIROGA*
What should guide the decision are not so much arguments for or against technologies, but rather the harmful effects they have produced, the scientific basis for which is quite expressive.
Serious public policies are based on social facts, not on local experiences, whether successful or not. Success and failure, in fact, are always issues located within a specific context. They demand reflection and the exercise of criticism, something that is far removed from the “historical fever” and enthusiasm that usually accompanies the fetish for novelty.
Émile Durkheim’s concept of “social fact” refers to ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are located outside the individual, since they are socially imposed, in a coercive manner, upon them. Hence the naivety of expecting individual responses to such problems. Relying on them implies failing to see the social meanings that guide our trajectories and determine, to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu’s ironic formulation, our own “choice of destiny”.
The recently published announcement by the Ministry of Education regarding the project of law that prohibits cell phones in schools This is a sign that its use in the school environment has become more problematic than successful. This is what several studies in various regions of the planet have shown, which have been regulating or even prohibiting its use in schools, such as France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, etc.
In these studies, in general terms, there is no shortage of examples of the harmful effects that these devices have on the intellectual development of children and adolescents. Here are a few: cyberbullying, nomophobia (short for no mobile phone phobia) or extreme fear of being without access to a cell phone or digital services, such as the internet and social networks, increased anxiety, precarious sleep, misinformation, desubjectivation, disinformation, the overwhelming predominance of use for entertainment, hikomori (Japanese term used to describe people, usually young people, who isolate themselves socially for long periods, often living in seclusion in their rooms or houses and avoiding any type of face-to-face interaction with society), memory disintegration, cognitive fatigue, among others.
A beautiful book, rich in sources of serious studies about each of these aspects, is that of the French neuroscientist Michel Desmurget – The digital idiot factory.
But there is another problem, a central one, in my opinion, which is the most profound of them all. What the intensive use of cell phones has produced (intensive use, here, is what is usually called the “new normal”) and which has presented itself as a social fact, is the loss of attention span.
What the frenzy of smartphone use and screens in general has produced as a side effect of non-stop entertainment is the impoverishment of attention span. To achieve this, it is essential to understand what we are losing in exchange for the magnetism of screens. According to the German philosopher Christoph Türcke, attention would be the fulcrum of the very foundation of humanity, of Homo sapiens as we know it, from a process of approximately 300 thousand years of evolution.
According to the philosopher, “in the early days of humanity (attention) was among the most difficult things. It was something that did not yet exist anywhere in nature. It could only be put into motion collectively: when compulsive repetition (a term coined by Freud in Beyond the pleasure principle), ritualized from the horror experienced was directed to something higher – to a common recipient. Its imagination was equivalent both to the inauguration of mental space and to the constitution of human attention.”
It was through the reproduction of horror (sacrificial rituals) through the imagination itself as a “self-defense mechanism” that man was able to control natural horror. Through the production of a discharge capable of producing a refuge from experience in the face of horror. It was through the search for redemption, for relief from such experiences produced by nature: natural threats, storms, catastrophes, invasions by enemy tribes, etc. that humanization would have occurred. “Redemption was sought, culture was found,” writes Christoph Türcke. Attention, therefore, cannot be restricted to the set of social dispositions such as civic-mindedness, solidarity, and empathy.
Attention is the cradle of all culture. It is the decisive point that has allowed us, after millennia of evolution, to reach modern civilizations. Christoph Türcke’s idea about attention is interesting. According to Malebranche, attention is a “natural prayer”. The development of imagination arises from attention. Imagination is born from profound boredom, idleness, and disinterested contemplation. It is from this apparent emptiness, from this interstitial and amorphous space that imagination finds its true vocation.
Now, what happens in the digital atmosphere is the total capture of this function. And finally, we arrive at the political intentionality of this condition, whose main characteristic is the disintegration of the mentality. The soul is the last natural resource to be exploited by capitalist savagery. But this has been the same story since the colonization by the Society of Jesus, one might observe. Yes and no. The difference between that and the current model of neoliberal colonization driven by the forces of an overwhelming and apocalyptic oligopoly is that, instead of operating through the method of inculcation, it does so through something that we call here a “cognitive decompression” as a result of the behaviorist logic underlying digital artifacts.
Having observed these points, even if they are roughly summarized, we can see that digital technologies go far beyond the meaning of “tools” when incorporated into the school environment. However, even though they are, and we must acknowledge their enormous potential in favor of teaching in the most varied areas of knowledge, we must also look at their most harmful effects, such as cyberbullying, the impoverishment of ethics, the unfair competition for attention between school content and the wonderful world of social networks, etc. It is necessary to change perspective in order to understand whatever the notion of tools is.
Herbert Marcuse, in the book Technologies, war and fascism, reflects on the use of technologies, especially through Nazi propaganda and techniques of instilling collective fear as key elements in the formation of a “new German mentality”. They (technologies) are, therefore, tools. But they are overwhelmingly tools at the service of capital. Hence, their incorporation into the classroom and school must be guarded against the naivety of treating them as neutral tools.
Finally, it is because of the ambiguity inherent to technology that the bill currently under consideration is likely to be controversial. The current situation calls for a debate of an essentially ethical nature. It is not a question of locating the core aspect of whether or not to use cell phones in schools, precisely because there is no core: ambiguity is its main characteristic.
In this sense, the historical message that the theme provokes us to think about concerns a decision worthy of one of the famous Socratic dialogues. “Should we ban cell phones in schools or not?” – is one of those questions involved in confronting, on the one hand, the historical fever that promotes the unbridled dissemination of digital technologies in as many areas of life as possible and, on the other, the ideology embedded through algorithms in digital platforms.
What should guide the decision are not so much arguments for or against technologies, but rather the harmful effects they have produced, for which there is a very expressive scientific basis. The weight of the decision suggests a reflection on which side of the scale has given way the most, so that from then on, and even if for the current moment this means the total removal of these devices from the school environment, the decision should be made based on ethics and science, and above all, oriented towards guaranteeing the future of the new generations.
*Fernando Lionel Quiroga is a professor of Fundamentals of Education at the State University of Goiás (UEG).
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