The smartphone has created a new period between childhood and adolescence

The telephone community is important for 10-11 year olds. Illustration photo: Kyle Mahaney / Flickr

If you are 10 or 11 years old and still don't have a smartphone, you risk being left out of a new and important community. This is an unknown world for most parents.

– Smarttelefonen blir en inngangsbillett til en periode der barna skaper nye steder å være sammen, med større grad av selvstendighet, sier Lea Louise Videt, forsker ved Nordlandsforskning. 

– For the children, this is experienced as a significant transition towards their own communities and increased self-determination. 

Videt is behind the article "Between 'child' and 'young' in a digital upbringing in Northern Norway", which was recently published in the Nordic journal for youth research. 

She has been doing anthropological fieldwork for several months and interviewed 10 and 11 year old children in a northern Norwegian fifth grade.  

Everyone there had a smartphone, except for one. 

Central to all activities

Videt quickly discovered that smartphones were important. After school, students met through a variety of social media or games, such as Google Duo, Pokemon Go, Roblox, and Fortnite. 

– When the children got phones with internet access, apps and mobile data, they used it to stay in touch with their friends when they were at home or took it with them when they met during their free time, where they often played Pokemon Go, says the researcher. 

– The phone provided access to new ways of being together and new types of play, both when the children were together physically, or together in online games and chat groups. 

Videt observed that the telephone was central to a number of activities. At the leisure club, socializing was centered around the telephones. 

“The first thing the children did when they came in the door was take out their phone. After that, it was included in pretty much every activity during the evening,” she says.

The children played app games with each other, they showed each other different things on their phones, they sent messages to friends who weren't there or they Googled things they were talking about.

“Since they weren't allowed to use their phones at school, they had the opportunity to be together in a different way when they met during their free time. They usually had their phones in their hands the whole time and only put them down for a few minutes at a time,” says Videt.

Both inclusive and exclusionary 

Even though the school banned cell phones, they still influenced everyday school life. 

“Play during recess was also influenced by mobile phone use. For example, some of the girls practiced dances from Tik-Tok,” says Videt. 

But not all children were allowed to use Tik-Tok or Snapchat, which are apps with a 13-year age limit. Which apps were made available helped to shape the friend groups. If you weren't allowed to use Tik-Tok, it was difficult to join in the dance game during recess. 

“The smartphone provides access to new spaces and is an arena for both inclusion and increased self-determination. But it is also a new arena for exclusion,” says Videt. 

Disinterested parents

The children's use of the various apps was largely determined by their parents. Nevertheless, the children felt that their parents were not very involved, apart from setting boundaries. This new, all-consuming form of socializing is therefore a sphere about which the parents know little. 

– The children don't think the adults understand what they are doing. “The adults don't understand anything about what we do,” several of the children told me, Videt says. 

She points out that the children's teacher also had no idea who had a phone and what they were using it for in their free time, even though it affected the social dynamics in the class. 

“The children I spoke to in my fieldwork were surprised that I showed interest in what they were actually doing on their phones,” says Videt. “They were happy to talk to me about it.”

Need open-minded conversations

Lea Louise Videt sees a clear tendency for adults to focus on the negative effects of children's mobile phone use and overlook the positive ones. 

– It's a kind of moral panic, where the story of social media is exclusively about bullying, sexual assault and violent content, says Videt.

– It is of course essential to protect children from harmful content, but a clear focus on risk obscures the complexity that exists in children and young people's digital culture. I believe that we as adults should initiate more open-minded conversations with children and young people about what they do online.