Individual Responsibility

 I have spent the past 48 hours listening to people hammering the tech bros for making these products and the governments that failed to regulate them. Anyone in fact, but the principal culprits. You. Me. Us.

Yes, the tech companies are bad. I don't dispute it for one moment; have said so for ages. But let's be honest: we knew. We knew the damage these platforms were doing. We could see our children staring mindlessly at their phones, reaching for their phones, seeking validation from their phones; we could see how the algorithms were reaching into their souls, undermining their capacity to think, to sustain attention, to develop social faculties that were supposed to be part of the odyssey of adolescence.

Responsibility
Hugh Cameron (1835-1918)
Photo Credit: 
Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums [Public Domain]

We could see how they were being wounded by getting de-friended (a horrendous term); how they were missing out on unstructured play; how when they met their friends they didn't talk but carried on Snapchatting as if invisible to one another; how they had stopped reading books."Who cares that children don't read any more if AI is going to take our jobs anyway?" one parent said recently in a radio interview when asked about the collapse in literacy. But isn't that the point? In a world of chatbots, AI slop and deepfakes, critical thinking (gained, so often from literature) is more important than ever

So let me be straight with readers, with parents, with myself: adults have acquiesced to this catastrophe, have looked the other way, while often glued to our own phones, thereby setting the worst example. I mean is it any wonder that teenagers are addicted to screens when that is what they have absorbed from parents who flick through emails when they could be listening  to their children? This may sound a bit judgemental, but it is time for candour. I'm guessing we have all witnessed families at a restaurant with mum and dad, brother and sister all swiping furiously, perhaps all reading about how social media is poisoning family life, before swiping to the next TikTok short, doubtless created by Putin's or Xi's bot...

So why didn't we act? Why didn't we call time on this gigantic experiment in which our children were the guinea pigs? I suggest the reason is both simple and devastating. We didn't think it was our job.

Again and again I heard parents calling for government to intervene. Why haven't they legislated?..

We live in an epoch, it seems,when a critical mass of parents believes it is the government's responsibility to bring up their kids; when a minister is needed to do what should be a doddle for any half-competent group of adults: namely, call a parents' evening and agree collectively to take phones away from the kids, or delete social media, or whatever...

I am not saying government intervention is never justified. Regulation is often necessary and sometimes imperative, but so, too, is individual responsibility...

Yes, the tech companies have lied and deceived... With every fibre of my being I believe these horrendous, amoral people should pay a heavy price. But ... please - please! - let us acknowledge the other aspect of this squalid chapter in history: millions of parents were complicit in this disaster, as were the many head teachers who could see precisely what was going on and just sat back and let it happen.

Allow me to finish with a revolutionary thought. If you think social media is bad for you, stop whining and turn it off. If it is bad for your kids, take it away from them. It's that simple, folks. You don't need a parliamentary debate. You don't need legislation. You just need to press Delete...

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times, 2026)

 Critical thinking and moaning or complaining about things are sometimes lumped together. It is true that critical thinking may well try and identify weaknesses and flaws in ideas and that moaning concentrates on what's wrong - thus both can be seen as focusing on the negative. 

But critical thinking also tries to identify how to improve things,how to ask questions, how to evaluate and to understand. Here, Matthew Syed blames both the tech companies and the parents for the present state of affairs but also puts forward the idea that parents, not outside agencies such as governments, are ultimately responsible for children and their use of phones.

Groups of collective parents such as Kids for Now and Smartphone Free Childhood are examples of action taken by concerned individuals.