The Real Digital Divide

I was recently invited to lunch at an elite club in New York for work. When I made the mistake, unbeknownst to me, of pulling my dumb phone out of my pocket, I was promptly scolded by a doorman, who commanded me to “put it away.” “No phones allowed, sir,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice the relish with which he meted out the discipline, but my embarrassment soon passed. My envy, however, did not. This rarified stratum of American life had retained the power to stigmatize ill-mannered uses of tech. If only the rest of us had such freedom—if only it extended to the poor, working-class, and middle-class, too.

But our fates have been different. A few years ago, the New York Times published a number of exposés about Silicon Valley elites sending their kids to phone-free schools; meanwhile, the rest of us were sending our kids to schools where the imperative was to “overcome the digital divide,” which made access to electronic devices a matter of social justice. This clever marketing strategy, cooked up by Silicon Valley PR, put a kindly face on efforts by companies like Google and Microsoft to co-opt classroom instruction and re-route it through their products, turning the school day into just one more source of data harvesting.

Parents, however, were given an unobstructed view of what “time-on-device” was doing to their kids during Covid, when the overreaction of teachers’ unions forced instruction entirely online, in some cases for several years. True, what America’s children received over Zoom was not very different from the lifeless miseducation they had been getting in-person. But a year of online schooling cast education via electronics in a new light, revealing it for what it really was: a drain on the life of kids.

The unions’ miscalculation unleashed parental outrage nationwide, energizing a political reaction against Silicon Valley hegemony, which had been previously shielded from governance by a crude faith in technological progress. Once Americans decided that they wanted to regulate social media platforms and smartphones, it did not take long for lawmakers and policy wonks to figure out what to do. Turns out that the classic measures, namely passing a law that makes certain behaviors illegal, and then punishing those who do not comply, remain reliable for politics in a digital age. With that age-old formula—discipline and punish—many laws have been passed in states around the country, and ones with genuine legislative potential are moving on Capitol Hill. (The jury is still out on whether our libertarian jurisprudence will allow these laws to stand, but, as I have written in these pages before, there is good reason to hope that it will.)

My colleagues and I at the Institute for Family Studies, I’m proud to report, conceived many of these regulations, such as requiring parental consent to open a social media account for children under eighteen. We have also been the biggest drivers of laws requiring age-verification on pornography sites, which nearly twenty states have implemented. There is a push for app stores to behave like brick and mortars and require ID checks when purchasing apps that are harmful to kids. In November 2023, we released a comprehensive brief, “Making Smartphones and App Stores Safe For Kids: Federal, State, and Industry Measures,” recommending this and related policy. The paper appears poised to, once again, motivate legislation among the states.

Laws to make smartphones safer are essential for the simple reason that there is a massive market for them among kids—according to one study, 53 percent of children have a smartphone by age eleven—and like so many other products of the digital age, they have been exempted from any consideration of child safety whatsoever. What could come of it but predation?

New regulations are important, but we must not neglect simpler methods, ones that do not seek technical adjustments to devices and platforms, but that require kids to get off of them, if only for a little while. Free air is better than safe air. That’s why I am an avid supporter of laws that bluntly restrict access to smartphones during school hours. This idea was pioneered by lawmakers in the state of Florida, and has since been adopted in Oklahoma, Vermont, and Kansas. South Carolina and California are following suit.

There are stronger and weaker versions of these laws, but their bi-partisan nature is invigorating. And so is their effect. Teachers and administrators in the locales are marveling at kids once again being kids—talking to one another, standing face to face, living eye to eye. It’s beautiful.

The real digital divide, it turns out, is between those who can get a break from their devices and those who cannot. Perhaps genuine social justice demands a redistribution of this freedom to every social class in the country.

Michael Toscano is executive director of the Institute for Family Studies.

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Image by Katerina Holmes, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.