No there isn't: "In response the mayor promised". Namely, the mayor and their gang achieved THEIR objective first and blah blah the rest.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/508614/school-phone-ban-...
p.s. I exaggerated slightly, it took me 3 days before I installed TikTok. I'd watched silly viral videos that appeared on the news for years and so I was intrigued about it. I've loved it ever since. Just gotta get it set up right so your filter bubble is what you're into. I get half my tech news from HN and the other half from TikTok.
What counts as "a book" here (the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu seems a bit of challenge to rip through in a day) ?
All the same it's a high number, .. I'm guessing more than a few were light pulps and the best you could find given the library at hand?
I read a lot of books, several thousand, from 12 to 17, and kept a log of them - later I worked in (and led) a team that digested a few thousand technical documents a day (with a heavy dose of computer assistence to find|pick out key parts), there's a lot of material you can fly through quickly and not miss much, there are rare books that can take a year or a lifetime to fully digest and finish with.
That's definitely problematic and not where anyone wants this to go, right?
Ah yes that's quite a different matter.
My thoughts are that sure, when you are living and working alone, as happens to many of us at times, it is possible to successfully apply "force". Like making objects of temptation unavailable, maybe using a time-locked safe or taking a week away at tech-detox bootcamp.
IIRC Johann Hari in "Stolen Focus" seemed to think this only ever created a temporary relief, a bit like dieting and then gaining rebound weight.
What I wrote about in Digital Vegan was based on my interaction with heroin addicts, and is all about the friction that comes from peer pressure and groups that reinforce (mutually enforce) behaviours. Friends are a bigger problem than self-will in the arena of addiction. External force, even in peer relations, tends to have the opposite effects.
Not dissing your idea, which is accurate, but I can't not-find it funny to then remark that most Americans couldn't even take a 2 week vacation without cheating with sick days.
Now what would they have done before the advent of the smartphone? Turn the clock back and have them do that.
Last week I met friends at a board game cafe / bar (I live on the west coast now) and there were tons of college students enjoying coffees and beers and pizza. There was still alcohol, but it wasn’t the point of the evening. When I was their age, we got loaded to forget / escape our boredom.
What I’m saying is that there’s a positive outcome that can be reached through community investment.
So what are High School students supposed to do? They often don't have the money to go spend to hang out someplace, and even if they did, can they actually get there? Maybe with an hour of transit time each way or with a friend's parent who can drive them.
The complaint of "I don't have anything to do without my phone" is probably coming from a younger group than College Students in general.
Now we've traded it in for solipsistic, depressed, pill hooked anti-social teens because of an obsession with health at the cost of everything else. The pandemic of course did its part to accelerate that trend. Hitchens anticipated it a generation ago.
Your body will recover from some stupidities in your teens and young adulthood, having your mind glued to your phone instead of having a real life for your formative years, not so sure.
Or at an arcade? Or a rec center? Or at church?
Or some other thing outside of their house that doesn't exist anymore in any real way?
The death of the third space outside of school/work and home has been awful for society tbh.
In response the mayor promised new investment into sports, recreation, libraries and book sharing... In other words, there's more going on here than just the "phone ban", but a broader attempt to reconnect and rehumanise the village life.
My concern is that even with the social and financial will to restore a more convivial lifestyle, those young people won't be able to engage. Having been raised by screens they are already so psychologically altered (damaged?) as to be lost.
The assumption that life can "go back" may be misguided, and that makes this an experiment worth watching.