A smartphone does not merely provide information; it continuously selects information, one video leads to another and one post leads to another, influencing young person.
A young person can spend six hours in school and still spend another six hours being educated by something nobody has appointed as a teacher. It fits inside a pocket, it does not take attendance, it does not give examinations, and it does not ask permission from parents, yet it can influence what a young person watches, desires, laughs at, fears, admires, and eventually considers normal. It is the smartphone.
We have become accustomed to asking what young people are doing with technology. Perhaps the more urgent question is what technology is doing to the environment in which young people are growing up. This distinction matters.
For generations, the important environments of childhood were relatively visible: home, school, playground, church, neighbourhood and community. Parents could see where children went. Teachers could observe their behaviour. Elders could intervene in conversations. Friends met one another physically. Today, another environment has quietly emerged. It follows a young person into the bedroom, classroom, dining table, and even the playground. And unlike a physical environment, it is difficult to see. The classroom that never closes.
A smartphone does not merely provide information. It continuously selects information. One video leads to another. One post leads to another. A joke becomes a trend. A trend becomes a habit. A habit gradually becomes part of everyday life. The young person may believe that he or she is simply choosing what to watch. But much of what appears on the screen has already been selected, organised and personalised. This is why we need to begin thinking about digital media differently.
There is a perspective in communication studies called media ecology. It asks us to look at media not simply as tools that we use, but as environments that shape how we communicate, pay attention, relate to others, and understand the world. The idea is simple but important.
An environment can influence us even when we are not consciously thinking about it. We notice the tree in our yard. We may not notice the air around it. Likewise, we notice the video on our phone. We may not notice the digital environment that continuously decides what comes next.
Who is shaping our young people? This question becomes particularly important in Nagaland. A young person today is growing up between several worlds. There is the family, there is school, there is church, and there is community. And increasingly, there is a personalised digital world that accompanies the young person almost everywhere. These worlds do not always teach the same things.
A parent may tell a child to be patient. The phone may reward instant gratification. A teacher may ask for sustained attention. The screen may offer a new stimulus every few seconds. A community may teach that relationships require presence. Social media may suggest that relationships can be maintained through likes, reactions, and short messages. None of this means that technology is inherently harmful. Far from it.
Digital media has given young people extraordinary opportunities to learn, create, communicate, and express themselves. A young person in Nagaland can now learn skills from someone thousands of kilometers away, showcase local music and culture to a global audience, or create something that would previously have required expensive equipment and institutions. The question, therefore, is not whether young people should use technology. They already do. The question is whether we understand the environment in which they are using it. The playground is changing; perhaps the most obvious evidence is found not in the classroom but outside it.
Many of us remember evenings when children simply disappeared outdoors. They played football, volleyball, basketball, hide-and-seek, or whatever game could be invented with whatever was available. Parents also spent more time talking to neighbours. Young people gathered together. Physical presence was part of ordinary social life.
Today the screen competes with all of this. A child can sit indoors for hours while moving through games, videos, and conversations without physically moving anywhere. And adults are hardly outside this transformation. Parents themselves may be sitting beside their children while looking at their own screens. A family can therefore be physically together while inhabiting completely different communication environments. That should make us pause. The problem is not the phone. Blaming the smartphone is easy. Understanding the environment is harder.
If we simply tell young people, “Use your phone less,” we may miss the deeper issue. We need to teach them to recognise what is happening around their attention. Why did they stop scrolling at one particular video? Why did that particular post make them angry? Why does one kind of content keep appearing? Why is it so difficult to put the phone down? Why does silence sometimes feel uncomfortable? These are not merely questions about discipline. They are questions about how a communication environment works.
Young people need more than digital skills. They need digital awareness. They need to understand that the screen is not a neutral window through which the world simply appears. Something is shaping what becomes visible. And what repeatedly becomes visible can eventually begin to shape what feels important. What should Nagaland do?
Perhaps our schools, churches, and families need to begin talking about digital life differently. Not simply: “How much screen time are you having?” But: “What is your screen teaching you?” Not simply: “Why are you always on your phone?" But: “What kind of world are you entering every time you open it?” These are deeper questions. And they are increasingly necessary. We cannot ask young people to return to a world that no longer exists. Nor should we romanticise the past. The digital environment is now part of their world—and ours.
Our responsibility is to help them see the environment they are living in. Because perhaps the greatest challenge is not that young people are spending too much time online. Perhaps it is that they are spending so much time in a digital environment without being taught how that environment shapes them.
The classroom has not disappeared. The playground has not disappeared. The family has not disappeared. The church has not disappeared. But there is now another classroom among them. It has no walls. It has no timetable. And it fits inside every young person's pocket. Perhaps it is time we started paying attention to what is being taught there.
Mughalu T. Kinimi
D.Th. III Year (Communication), Clark Theological College, Aolijen