On Mother's Day, South Australia's Premier let loose with a radical plan to ban social media for kids under the age of 14. Not restrict, or get parents permission, just straight up banning them from logging on before their 14th birthday. The SA Premier claims this is necessary because of a "growing body of evidence demonstrating a clear link between social media use and adverse impacts on development". According to the Premier's post on X (oh the irony), they're getting "former Chief Justice of the High Court Robert French AC" to examine "the legal, regulatory and technological pathways for the State Government to impose a ban, while also giving due consideration to the constitutional framework". Basically, it's a brain fart that sounds good to part of the electorate but nobody knows how to actually implement it.
The Oxford Internet Institute has published a new study looking at "over two million individuals' psychological wellbeing from 2006-2021 across 168 countries, in relation to internet use" and found that "across 33,792 different statistical models and subsets of data, 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing were positive and statistically significant". The researchers did however find "4.9% of associations linking internet use and community well-being were negative, with most of those observed among young women aged 15-24yrs", which they find consistent with "previous reports of increased cyberbullying and more negative associations between social media use and depressive symptoms among young women". Basically, we are better off with the internet than without it and the internet is broadly, a good thing - unless you're a young woman.
It's viewed as common knowledge that the emoji we take for granted today can trace its lineage back to a set of icons used on the Pioneer DP-211SW mobile phone, designed by a team at Japanese telco SoftBank in 1997. Not so according to Matt Sephton, who reckons emoji - defined as symbols that can be typed inline with text on a device that can send it as a message to another device - goes as far back as 1994 with the Sharp PI-4000, an early PDA that could connect to a phone to send data messages. If you don't consider being able to send those messages to another device a requirement to be an emoji, just typing a symbol inline with text, then the Sharp PA-8500 PDA from 1988 is even older, containing various emoji that are still in use today. Matt even went to the trouble of re-creating the 1988 emoji!
Collection of posters on communications (National Library of Australia)
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