{"id":14974,"date":"2025-12-12T09:17:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T09:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14974"},"modified":"2026-03-13T09:19:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T09:19:06","slug":"smartphone-ban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2025\/12\/12\/smartphone-ban\/","title":{"rendered":"smartphone ban"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Next year, secondary schools in Singapore are implementing stricter smartphone rules<\/a>: students (aged 12-16) must keep their phones in lockers or bags all day, and aren\u2019t to use them during lessons, recess or co-curricular activities (sports, etc). Schools can allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis if necessary. Obviously kids are still going to try and find ways around this, but the broader point I think is to adjust the cultural norm and expectation for school to be as smartphone-free as possible. (The conversations on the local subreddit<\/a> are pretty interesting\u2013 primary school teachers saying that it\u2019s impossible to enforce even at their level, people bemoaning kids\u2019 attention span getting worse thanks to short-form video content, and some wondering if this is meant to hide the increased visibility of bullying cases lately.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an interesting bit of news to me for multiple reasons, and gets me thinking back to my own school days. I got my first \u2018dumb\u2019 cell phone in 2004 when I was 13-14. I bought it secondhand from a friend for I think about S$30, and I used a prepaid card, mainly for texting. I would get slightly better phones over the years, I remember when I was about 17 I had a phone that you could download mp3s to, and I would happily listen to music while cycling around in the night breeze. I vaguely recall some really crappy low-res photos from one of my later phones, they must have been maybe 240px or something like that. It was a hassle to upload it to the computer and I never quite bothered to figure out how to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think back then lots of kids had phones too, and we\u2019d sometimes be texting under our desks, and if a teacher caught us they might confiscate it temporarily and then hand it back to us after class, or if it were a recurring problem they might confiscate it until the end of the school day, or if worse than that, might ask the kids\u2019 parents to contact the teacher about it\u2013 which was usually a strong enough deterrent for most kids to at least be more discreet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first iPhone was commercially launched in Singapore in August 2008, and for a few years it didn\u2019t really make sense for kids to have them. They were expensive, mobile internet service was patchy and unreliable, websites weren\u2019t mobile-optimized so they were tedious to read and navigate, and it would be a couple of more years before mobile-first social apps like Instagram would come around. I remember using an SMS-to-tweet service a couple of times for the novelty of it, but it didn\u2019t make much sense to bother with it. I got my own first smartphone (a Samsung Note 2, I think?) in 2013, at which point I started using Facebook and Twitter a lot more. I remember getting on my daily commute to work and writing on my notes app (Evernote at the time) about how everyone else seemed to be playing Candy Crush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much happened in the decade since. I\u2019m not even sure what I\u2019d want to focus on. Everything has gotten crazier. More people have kept coming online. The covid19 pandemic definitely accelerated things\u2013 there was a couple of years where even people who were never on their devices much, suddenly had pretty much no choice but to be. Everyone had to get familiar with doing zoom calls and seeing themselves on video screens. People had to scan QR codes to get into buildings, which felt like a prerequisite for the current ubiquity of QR menus in restaurants and \u201ccashless payments only\u201d vendors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think what\u2019s interesting to me about the ban is the timing, and making sense of how it probably couldn\u2019t have happened any sooner. For the ban to happen, there needs to be a widespread consensus that kids are on their phones all the time, and that it\u2019s disruptive. For that to happen, first of all phones had to become both accessible, commonplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another interesting thing is that this is an example of \u201cgoing backwards\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\/abandoned <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next year, secondary schools in Singapore are implementing stricter smartphone rules: students (aged 12-16) must keep their phones in lockers or bags all day, and aren\u2019t to use them during lessons, recess or co-curricular activities (sports, etc). Schools can allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis if necessary. Obviously kids are… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3Tw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14975,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974\/revisions\/14975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}