There is a question that has been on my mind since the start of the Covid 19 ‘lockdown’ in the UK.
Would Children and Young People in the UK rather be isolated, but with their phones and access to social media or back to normal life at school, but without their phones.
The first mention of social distancing made me think that today we don’t really have to be socially distant if we don’t want to be. What we have experienced is really physical distrancing. Even if we can’t be physcially close to others we can be in constant communication with each other these days digitally. Whether this virtual contact feels the same for us as being physically close to someone is another question, but for young people who communicate a lot via their phones, how ‘distant’ will they be feeling during the lockdown? According to a study at Glasgow University the ‘average’ teenager spends between 1 and 3 hours on social media. Does that make them feel connected or is it a reminder of physical distance?
I thought that this question might be a good way to get discussions going about what we use phones for and what the lockdown was like for the young people that you work with. This kind of discussion could go well with this assembly.
