Japan city drafts ordinance to cap smartphone use at 2 hours per day
(english.kyodonews.net)84 points by Improvement 5 hours ago
84 points by Improvement 5 hours ago
Recommendations are well and good, but I can't see them having much if any impact on what people do. It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices. Especially those that target children.
Smartphones are banned at school in Aus, for a strong net positive. Kids still sneak them into toilets and so on (and vapes), but the overwhelming impact has been positive.
It’s surprising that more schools haven’t done this. I suspect that we’ll look back in 10 years with it being common and ask ourselves what took so long.
> surprising that more schools haven’t done this
We have a depressing state in America where you can predict the parents’ income based on whether their kids’ school bans smartphones.
In Australia all the private schools have done it for ages, it’s just only recent that public schools did it.
Sure we still did sneak in a bit of phone usage in the bathrooms and behind secluded buildings but it’s a huge difference from being able to freely scroll social media all day.
So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".
Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.
How do you know that it has had an overwhelmingly positive impact? Can we, for example, see a marked increase in PISA scores for Australia from after the ban?
Or is this one of those "I hate phones, therefore banning them must be good for kids" things?
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.
> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.
> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf
I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.
I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.
Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.
So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
Given that teachers are no longer competing for student attention in class, that is one single and quite important positive which doesn't require an academic study and referencing to demonstrate.
I'm not sure what you were hoping to achieve with the request for evidence, but what you're asking is not yet subject to a longitudinal study. The move has certainly been praised by educators, and that should be enough given it's the first or second year year of implementation in many cases, and what they are advocating for isn't a social taboo, nor draconian.
Meet kids who have smartphones in school. A lot of them aren’t able to maintain eye contact in a conversation. It’s a remarkably jarring change that looks like it will wind up stunting the development of low-income kids for a generation.
Basic common sense? We are dealing with CHILDREN IN CLASSROOMS here. Leaving aside the obvious psychotropic properties phones and social media have on people of all ages, in what universe can preventing children from diverting their attention from live classes ever be good?
What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
If you want to measure something for this measure happiness or strength of social circles. Good luck with that.
> It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices.
Once again, I must reiterate that parents choose the schools their children attend, and that means that they choose the solution. I argue strongly that we, as a society, should not impose arbitrary restrictions on parents and children. If we afford the freedom of letting parents be parents, there is no scientific basis for reallocating smartphone use responsibility to the state.
If you interested on this new, there was another ordinance in Kyoto city which restrict Kanpai(cheers) must be done with sake. If you kanpai'ed with anything other than sake in Kyoto city, you violate this law.
There is no punishment for breaking these ordinances.
Remember, in other countries, especially eastern ones, the recommendation of even your local city means allot. There is a deeper trust of government bodies so this will likely have an impact.
And starting small is probably good, lets the idea iterate before rolling it out wider and this often comes down to making a choice, this city just thought this would be best and I suspect unless this goes horribly wrong it will help
I live in the 23 wards of Tokyo and certainly do. The local governments in other countries I've lived seem to just take and give very little back (while paying their unelected c-suite ridiculous salaries), but ours has given us thousands over the years for child related expenses.
Your child related expenses are not “given”, other taxpayers have paid for it. And for them, they have very little given back, if we factor in very high tax load in Japan.
Just because someone ride the wave of payouts for kids doesn’t mean government is giving back a lot. Japanese government, just like any other government out there, extremely inefficient and corrupt, absorbing huge amounts of money in taxes and giving very little back. Particularly to those who actually earn those money.
Having a base level of trust in your government can have incredibly positive effects on society. In the US, I dream of the day where government could try out ideas without the pitchforks coming out. Sure, some ideas will be terrible and that’s OK as long as we throw them in the trash can.
Smart phone use is banned while driving in australia.
Detectors and cameras are used to find and fine those who break the law.
Not the first time Japan has done something like this[1] and I honestly welcome it. It's not a strict rule, gives people flexibility to at least talk about it and disagree with little consequence. Another severely online commenter mentions protecting peoples privacy and exploitative practices but we're wayyy beyond those types of conversations. Limiting online-ness in a gentle way that's not gonna piss off a bunch of people and get the feels for it seems to be a very Japanese thing to do.
https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/17744?phrase=Onaga%...
Why is there a city doing this?
Isn't it the job of a public health agency? Like, at a national or even international level?
Or of a scientific body?
What legitimacy has an administrative, and often political, structure, to make a non-binding health recommandation (thus, an advice), with a scope limited to the city, even though the matter has nothing to nor specific to this city?
It looks like a political stunt, not something initiated by health specialists.
Why aren't they issuing ordinances for people to switch to electric cars?
To learn foreign languages?
To study sciences?
I really don't know what to think.
Like, if they think that the bottleneck, the motivation source, to get people to improve their lifestyle, is to have an ordinance issued, then they really need to study the basics of psychology and sociology. And of public communication.
In China, parents track their kids with ‘gps smart watches’. Oh yeah there is also a gamified social network for kids only, giving credit for the schools stationairy shop based on likes/popularity. What could go wrong? [0]
You do realize those GPS smart watches are everywhere in the US as well right? Some parents opt for the less invasive tool of air tags hidden in clothing or backpacks, same idea though.
Smart watches are actually super useful for kids, it lets them still talk to their parents (or other trusted people) w/o the distraction of smart phones. Plenty of kids age 7-12 or so have them and they are basically used to call kids home for dinner at the end of the day.
We are discussing local news in a small town in Japan, thousands of miles away for most of us; and how social media is an attention-wasting time-sink for other people. We need to help those other people.