In a recent conversation with my son, Callum (who is 14 now) I was trying to encourage him to reduce the screen time on his phone.
The irony of all of this does not escape me in the fact that I pay for his phone and gave him it and he was so delighted, while I knew it would be a toxic and destructive influence. But to keep him off the phone would be socially problematic and so I was prepared to accept to compromise or perhaps I was just too weak to be strong enough to do the right thing.
There are times when his screen usage is out of control, but we have decided (as we did with our daughters) to try to teach him to limit his own screen time instead of just setting boundaries and then letting him go nuts the minute he has the opportunity to control it himself.
This is definitely a ‘for better or for worse experience.’
There’s a real dynamic that exists here to try and explain adult concepts to someone who is just moving in towards adulthood who can’t really understand it and has a difficulty limiting free access to the sweet shop.
But one thing that struck home in a conversation the other day was asking him why he thought Snapchat was free and why he didn’t have to pay for it.
This confused him quite a bit because he realised that he was using a service that in many other areas he’d have to pay for, and he couldn’t understand then why he wasn’t (or someone wasn’t, including me).
And so, I explained to him that he’s not the customer, he’s the product.
I explained that he’s being sold every time he swipes on to Snapchat and that lots of people in the West Coast of America are making lots of money from the data that they sell and the attention that they gain.
Of course, this is true for almost all aspects of this work like WhatsApp or Facebook or Instagram or any of these things and perhaps it seems less so for the areas where adverts are included but it’s not really because they get to sell your data too and show you the adverts.
And so, in so many ways it’s much better to pay for something visibly than it is to pay for it invisibly.
Probably a good lesson for us all to learn is that we are being sold all the time in full view and with our full consent but when we realise that it’s happening it perhaps makes us a little bit more uncomfortable than we would like.
My attention is rare and valuable and probably getting sparser as I get older.
Why would I give it away to someone else for nothing to allow them to make money, when I could use it myself for much more personal benefit.
Blog Post Number - 3001
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