The Learner

  By Muhsin Ibrahim I am in my late 30s. However, I sometimes struggle to minimise my presence online. That is even though being online is part of my main job (thanks to digital ethnography) and my ‘side hustle’. Often, one or another thing on the internet will take your focus away, and before you know it, you waste quality time doing nothing important. According to reports, TikTok rolled out new screen-time limits for teens yesterday to help them reduce their addiction to the video-sharing platform. Under-18 users will get an alert when “they hit an hour of daily scrolling. To dismiss it, they’ll have to enter a passcode.” Unfortunately, this may not help much because kids know how to navigate these restrictions. For instance, they can fake their ages. TikTok is the new ‘evil’ in town, but social networking sites like Snapchat and Instagram have been doing no less damage over the years. Thus, rehabilitation centres in the US, Japan and other developed countries exist for add...