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Hello and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, Guardian US tech news editor.
I will be replacing TechScape for Alex Hern and would like to introduce myself and my ideas for this newsletter.
A little about me: I started working at The Guardian the day Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial. My first vacation at my new job coincided with the shocking firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI. The story I tell over and over at parties is how I was arrested and jailed while reporting a story about fatal testicular injections.
The new newsletter: TechScape connects you to the politics, culture and consequences of technology. We’ll break down the importance of the week’s biggest tech news, dig into strange niches, catch you up to date with the best of The Guardian’s reporting, and offer a helpful tip from time to time. My version of TechScape is a newsletter about technology and the people who create it. Technology, both as a product and as an industry, is the biggest driver of change in our era. It intersects with every aspect of our lives and changes our everyday actions. Think of TechScape as a guide to the future and the futuristic present.
Thanks for joining me.
This week on my iPhone
Average screen time per day: six hours and two minutes.
Most used application: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Master. This app, just downloaded last week, ignites my nostalgia for me years of trading cards for teenagersfor better or worse. A lot has changed in the game since then, so there’s a lot of digital territory to explore.
Elite Silicon Valley school tests temporary total ban on tech
Leaders in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe are debating whether students should have mobile phones in their hands during the school day. A growing number of people in power – from presidents to school superintendents – believe they shouldn’t.
California’s governor last week signed a bill requiring schools to reduce students’ screen time, and the Los Angeles school district, the second largest in the U.S., voted in favor to ban phones on public secondary school campuses from 2025. The UK is not making its decision by parties like the US: ministers announced plans to ban phones in schools across the country in February. Hungary now requires schools to collect students’ devices at the beginning of the school day. France is in the midst of a phone testing ban for students under 15 years old. The Netherlands banned phones in schools starting January 1, 2024.
The consensus is growing. It’s a popular stance among conservatives and progressives alike to take up arms against screen time. The current opinion is that phones are bad for everyone, especially children. One problem: it is a universally recognized truth that a person living in our time necessarily needs a smartphone. How to prepare students to balance the two competing needs (screen time and non-screen time) within them?
An elite school in the heart of Silicon Valley is asking students to reconsider their relationship with technology by putting away their devices. Castilleja, an all-girls private school where tuition costs $62,400 a year, has banned cell phones on its Palo Alto, California, campus since before high school principal Laura Zappas can remember. Smart watches too. The school houses 185 sixth, seventh and eighth grade students, ages 11 to 14.
Last school year, Zappas instituted a completely technology-free week, asking every Castilleja student to lock up their devices (smartphones, smartwatches, tablets and school-issued laptops) at the beginning of the day for a week in March. The girls took notes and completed all tasks on paper, recording data from scientific experiments in graphic journals. They wrote down what homework they needed to finish on paper planners personally distributed by Zappas. They complained of cramps from handwriting more lines in one day than in the entire rest of the school year.
“We’ve found that students with laptops can have a couple of screens open at the same time,” Zappas said. “They could be texting or they could be playing games instead of taking notes. Or their immediate impulse to start class was to go in and open their laptops right away instead of waiting for instructions from the teacher or what they were doing. “It was just this constant attraction to the laptop.”
The initiative, called simply “No Tech Week,” served as a reboot of digital-first teaching practices in the pandemic era, Zappas said: “Before Covid, I think we used a combination of paper and technology. And then I know that my own teaching changed drastically with Covid and I had to submit all assignments electronically. And after Covid, that became our routine.”
What would unplugging look like as a way for our students and our teachers to really think more deeply about our relationship with technology?
The administrator described Tech-Free Week as a pause for reconsideration: “What would it look like to unplug as a way for our students and our teachers to really think more deeply about our relationship with technology? How can we participate together as a community without screens?
The results were favorable: 42% of students reported better concentration in class and a reduction in distractions during schoolwork, according to a survey conducted by the school. Nearly three-quarters of the teachers asked that Zappas repeat the initiative. He is in talks with the upper school administration, for grades nine through 12, about holding a technology-free week for older students.
Zappas emphasized that advance notice and extensive preparation made a tech-free week possible. He notified the school’s teachers of the initiative four months in advance and presented it to parents six weeks in advance. She asked that both teachers and parents consider how they can model a healthy relationship. That a week without technology requires so much planning would indicate that devices may be inextricable from modern life, even for students as young as 11.
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We had a French teacher who gave them all the dictionaries and said they had never seen a French dictionary before.
“We had a French teacher who gave them all the dictionaries and said they had never seen a French dictionary before,” Zappas said. “And it took them quite a while to figure out, ‘Well, what’s actually the right word I want to use here?’ How do I find that?’”
Zappas advocates for achieving healthy balances with screen time rather than a complete ditching of devices. He finds the debate over Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, which advocates banning children from having smartphones until high school, quite heated.
I think it has to be about referencing things and not just banning them. Because we all have to be interacting with technology.
“I don’t think there’s just one way to think about it. I think it has to be about referencing things and not just banning them. Because we all have to be interacting with technology. “This is how we are going to prepare our students to live in the world we live in,” he said.
Zappas is not alone. At the local level – that is, among America’s elite private schools – prevailing opinion is shifting toward allowing access to the devices, though only in controlled educational environments, which present technology as what Zappas describes as “a school tool and a source of creation.”
We’d like to hear from American parents: what are the biggest challenges you and your children face?
Opt out
Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular segment where we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance.
Companies creating AI-powered technology are using his posts. We’ve compiled a list of how to opt out of AI training from all major social networks, even if you haven’t consciously done so. Companies are still collecting your personal information to train their artificial intelligence systems.
Most companies offer a way out, some more complicated than others, but there is one notable exception: Meta. If you are in the US, you can only order have the company delete your personal information that you included in your chats with Meta’s generative AI machine. There is no button that permanently turns off the AI data vacuum.
For the full list, see Johana Bhuiyan’s full column.
The Broadest TechScape
Elon Musk joined Donald Trump for the former president’s theatrical return to the site of his first assassination attempt. He also took over the @America account on Twitter/X to his own pac.
Meanwhile, Musk has spent tens of millions to fund conservative causes, including anti-immigrant and anti-transgender ads. It started much earlier than previously known.
Police in the United States are using facial recognition to identify and arrest suspects without revealing the technology’s role in their investigations. washington mail information.
Some California police departments are already using artificial intelligence tools to help write reports, and experts are concerned.
OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in funding at a staggering valuation of $157 billion. That’s all Uber is worth.
Speaking of Uber, a couple was blocked from suing the transportation company for an accident that seriously injured them. The reason? Your daughter accepted the terms and conditions of Uber Eats.
What’s old is new, and Instagram dumps are Gen Z’s Facebook album: dump, post, repeat.