Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 16
Posts 1 - 10

Ban mobile phones in schools to protect pupils' mental health

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 26.9.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, childhood, school, smartphone, threat
Summary | According to Shannon Turner, schools should ban smartphones to protect their pupils. Screens and social media can have a negative impact on children's health, which is why some schools have already put in place new rules (e.g. give children 6 hours of digital-free time).
Image Description | Photograph of two pupils in a classroom; one of them is showing her friend a smartphone and the other is giggling.
Image Tags | female(s), school, smartphone

Are smartphones really making our children sad?

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, childhood, smartphone, threat, youth
Summary | Children's relationship with screens has become a contested topic; not everyone agrees with what should or shouldn't be done. Last week, the Atlantic published an excerpt of Jean Twenge's book (the Atlantic article was titled "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?"), which initiated very diverse reactions. Jean Twenge, who is an American pychologist, said that social media have a negative effect on young people. Twenger then answered some of her critics in this Guardian article.
Image Description | Photograph of a group of teenagers all staring at their phone or tablet.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone, tablet

Technology can save lives, not just improve them

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 11.7.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | smartphone
Summary | Much has been said about the negative effects of new technologies. However, technology can save people's life. For instance, Bristol Braille Technology is an enterprise that created a braille electronic reader for blind people. Chatterbox is another tool that was created by a refugee in order to offer language tutoring. Within the "health" category, someone created a wireless sensor that makes physiotherapy exercises more fun, and someone created a tool to improve cancer diagnosis.
Image Description | Photographs of two men using a braille electronic reader, a man and a woman talking, and three women staring at a smartphone.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone

Is it wrong to let my child play on my smartphone?

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 10.8.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, childhood, smartphone, technology-free
Summary | The author of the article sometimes feels guilty when she lets her 2-year old son play on a smartphone. When young children are glued to a screen, they are so captivated by what they're watching. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children younger than 2 should have no exposure to screens; it can hinder their language and social development/skills. The author of the article also claims that her kids already show characteristics of "addicted" behavior. For instance, they scream and are irascible if someone takes their screen away. She also says that what is dangerous is not so much when kids are on screens, but rather when parents are.
Image Description | Photograph of a kid using a smartphone next to an adult.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone

Young people don't have tribes any more. We have smartphones instead

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 18.3.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | addiction, smartphone, threat
Summary | Every generation had its rebellion (e.g. skinheads, punk, new romantics). What about the millennials? How do they deal with boredom? We have smartphones, and we can do anything with them. The difference between us and the older generations is that we are not "tribal" anymore. We are more "individual".
Image Description | Photograph in black and white of one punk and two other people.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

'It was so simple and easy': the nursing home improving care with tech

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 26.7.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, smartphone
Summary | A nursing home in London developed an app to faciliate administrative work. Many social organisations still use more traditional ways of recording data; for instance, they take notes by hand about their residents. But this can be time consuming. The London-based nursing home called Nightingale worked with a team to create a smartphone app that would facilitate workers and nurses' work. Thanks to the app, care workers can now enter patient information digitally. The app uses algorithms and language recognition.
Image Description | Photograph of a nurse using a tablet.
Image Tags | female(s), tablet

How a Canadian app is helping refugees find food, clean water and medical care

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 16.11.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | smartphone, threat
Summary | A new app called Services Advisor was created by Canadian nonprofit PeaceGeeks. The goal of the app is to give refugees basic information about food, shelter, or medical care. The app is available in English and Arabic. A lot of refugees are tech-saavy people and already owned a smartphone before they had to leave their country.
Image Description | Photograph of a group of refugees, and screenshot of the app displaying different categories
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Tech may rule, but the human backlash is coming

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 24.11.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | smartphone, technology-free, threat
Summary | Movies have a special relationship with new media: they hate it. Romcoms prefer showing people who fall in love while meeting face-to-face rather than on dating apps, sci-fi movies show apocalyptic scenes representing the future, and movies such as "Her" or "Ex Machina" show how artificial intelligence can lead to downfall. Why is the movie industry tech-sceptic? Maybe because the internet is ruining the movie business.
Image Description | Screenshot of a movie scene with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

'They're collaborating all the time': the schools making the most of mobile

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 13.1.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | childhood, digitized education, school, smartphone, youth
Summary | Some schools are embracing the technological advancements influencing our everyday lives by incorporating them into their classes. Some classes have even become entirely paper-free! Not all, however, the learning tools are chosen so as to to help maximize students' learning. Students are already familiar and comfortable with most of the technology and it makes no sense to ban smartphones from classrooms if they can enhance learning.
Image Description | Two girls looking at a smartphone together.
Image Tags | female(s), school, smartphone

The five lessons I learned from breaking my smartphone

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 24.1.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | brain, research/study, smartphone, technology-free
Summary | After dropping her smartphone in the sink, the author lives without one for six weeks and discovers that she sleeps better without a smartphone, enjoys being unavailable, few things need to be tended to urgently, that she spends less money, and her memory suffers from having a smartphone. Studies have also confirmed that it is detrimental to one's sleep pattern to sleep next to a smartphone because notifications release dopamin in the brain similarly to a nicotine or recreational drug addiction. She values the time she now has to just not be available for messages from work because we tend to respond to any and all messages as if they were urgent when really they are not. The author reports to spend less money because she can no longer do online shopping on the go without a smartphone. She has also realized how dependent on Google she has become. Neurological studies confirm that our brains are adapting to the constant accessibility of all information by remembering how to find it and googling again if necessary rather than remembering the little snippets of information.
Image Description | Getty image of a woman's hands holding a smartphone.
Image Tags | female(s), hand(s), smartphone

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