Public Welfare Action for Youth’s Healthy Use of the Internet

The core implementation plan of the public welfare action for healthy Internet use among teenagers has never relied on unilateral "banning the Internet" and "collecting mobile phones" to achieve one-size-fits-all management, but should follow the path of "flexible guidance + scenario-based intervention" in which families, platforms, schools, and society collaborate. This is the most practical conclusion we reached after we visited 12 provinces and cities and followed up on the implementation of public welfare projects in 37 primary and secondary schools.

Last month, I followed the project team to a middle school in a county below Lishui, Zhejiang for research. I happened to encounter a teacher from the Political and Education Department advising a father and son who were having a conflict: Xiaoyu, who was in the second grade of junior high school, secretly brought the old man's old mobile phone to school. He hid under the quilt and browsed game guides and watched funny short videos until two or three in the morning. He fell asleep in class for half a month and dropped 32 places in the midterm score. His father was so angry that he smashed his cell phone to pieces on the spot. Xiaoyu ran away from home and hid in a classmate's house for three days. In the end, the police helped to retrieve it.

This incident was a wake-up call for our entire charity group.

Regarding the current intervention ideas for teenagers using the Internet, there are two completely different directions in academic circles and practice circles: one group advocates "technological pre-regulation". To put it bluntly, it relies on three layers of hard restrictions: the youth mode of the platform, the school's signal shielding, and the family's equipment control. Ports for healthy content and excessive entertainment are directly blocked. The newly revised "Regulations on the Internet Protection of Minors" last year also clearly mentioned the relevant responsibilities of the platform. Most of the supporters of this group are parents of young children. They feel that "children have poor self-control and cannot control themselves. Block them first."”； The other group is the proponent of "digital literacy cultivation", mostly education scholars and front-line teachers. They feel that blocking alone is useless. If you block the mobile phone, they can still go to hacked Internet cafes. If you ban short videos and mini-games, the essence is to teach children to distinguish between good and bad information, allocate time spent online rationally, and turn the Internet from an "entertainment tool" into a "learning helper."

To be honest, both ideas have their own reasons, but there are bugs in practice: if the technical regulation faction encounters a child who can unlock the youth mode with his grandparents’ ID cards, it is basically equivalent to preventing loneliness.； Those who cultivate literacy have an even bigger headache. Many schools don’t even have a serious information teacher, and one class per week is often taken up by the main subject, so systematic cultivation is out of the question.

We later tried a compromise plan at Xiaoyu's school, recruiting local short video platform operation volunteers and setting up a three-week "Internet Creative Check-in Camp". No slogans were shouted or lectures were given, and the children were allowed to use the equipment provided by the school to film their own hobbies: those who liked raising succulents took pictures of their succulent care skills, and those who loved playing basketball took pictures of their own shooting training. Even the little girl who usually likes to watch short food videos followed her grandma to film several episodes of the production process of local snacks. Volunteers took two classes a week to revise scripts and teach the children basic editing methods. Finally, they selected 12 high-quality content to post in the youth area of ​​the platform, and won a small youth cultural and creative award from the local Culture and Tourism Bureau.

Don't tell me, the effect is much better than we expected. Xiaoyu, who had run away from home before, made a series of videos of himself playing with model airplanes. One video talked about how to adjust the propellers of model airplanes, which received more than 100,000 views in the special area. Now he only spends one hour every day after school cutting videos and checking information, and spends the rest of the time in the school's model airplane club to save parts. His last monthly test score has returned to the top twenty. His dad no longer smashes his cell phone and will accompany him every week to take photos of model airplanes.

Of course, there are many voices of doubt. During the parent-teacher meeting, several parents stood up and asked: "Aren't you doing this to encourage children to go online more? ”We did not refute, and directly released the case of Xiaoyu's transformation, and settled the account for parents: If you don't let him spend 1 hour at home doing his favorite content openly, he can hide in bed and secretly watch 3 hours of nutritious short videos. Which one is more cost-effective?

Interestingly, the solutions for children of different ages are completely different. When we conducted a pilot project in a primary school in Shanghai, children in grades one and two were indeed more suitable for rigid time limits. After all, children in this age group have not yet developed self-control, and they would not understand if you told them about digital literacy. ； But when you reach junior high school and above, the harder the restrictions, the easier it is to trigger rebellion. On the contrary, giving some space and positive guidance is much more effective.

Many of the public welfare actions for healthy Internet use on the market are actually just a formality: pulling up a banner, sending out a leaflet, or finding an expert to give a one-hour lecture. Even if the task is completed, the children will turn around and forget after listening, which is of no use at all. Others are even more outrageous. They directly equate healthy Internet use with "quitting Internet addiction" and run special training camps with military management, which will instead leave a psychological shadow on children.

When we edited Xiaoyu’s model airplane video into a public service announcement last month, he came over to me and said, “I used to think that my phone was just for taking photos of other people, but now I know that it can also be used to take photos of myself. ”

In fact, there are no children who are born to be addicted to the Internet. It's just that no one has pointed them to a more interesting way to use the Internet.