SCHOOL/ Lyotard, storytelling, and construction: how to defeat the temptation of cell phones

The intrusiveness of cell phones in students' lives has increased, usage has changed, but the problem remains. Is the school taking any countermeasures?

The term nomophobia was coined in 2008 as part of a survey by the British research organisation YouGov on behalf of the telephone sector of Post Office Ltd. The person who coined it mixed a fragment of English ( no-mo [bile] “without a mobile phone” ) with a piece of Greek ( phobia “fear”), much to the chagrin of those who study the etymology of the word, who interpret nomos as “law”, perhaps unaware that the term nomofobia, understood as “fear of the law”, is not recorded in Italian dictionaries.

It's been discussed for quite a few years now, but assessing a problem or understanding the progression of a disease takes time, and we need useful human cases to compile statistics. We're slowly getting there, and the problem is emerging especially among younger generations, as discussed during the annual conference of the Dialogical Schools Network held in Syracuse on May 18, 2025.

And it was to that very conference that I was invited to offer my perspective on the issue, which is that of a middle school teacher.

Some numbers

Let's start with some data (source: wearesocial.com): at the end of June 2024, 70% of the world's population is classified as mobile users, and 57% of them use a smartphone to connect to the internet; in 2022, 58.4% of the population used social media platforms (this figure is expected to increase by at least 10% annually), and the average daily time spent online is approximately 7 hours.

It's certainly alarming to think that a child might spend much of those seven hours scrolling videos or chatting on social media instead of experiencing real life; seven hours, excluding sleep, is almost a third of the day, a time frame that should probably be increased in the absence of morning school classes.

This very alarmism is pushing some countries, in more or less authoritarian ways, to restrict internet access for minors. For example, on June 16, 2025, an Italian ministerial circular prohibiting secondary school students from using cell phones during school hours was issued: Minister Valditara stated that "this action now appears urgent in light of the negative effects, amply demonstrated by scientific research, that excessive or inappropriate smartphone use can have on the health and well-being of adolescents and on their academic performance."

The twilight of old social networks

What a fifteen-year-old's true relationship with the virtual world is, however, not so easy to define: the era of social media in the old-fashioned sense is long gone, even if fifty-year-olds like me continue to use them in the same way.

I witnessed the birth of Facebook, Instagram, and everything else, and out of curiosity, I joined various platforms over the years, both to browse the profiles of friends, acquaintances, and public figures, and to take advantage of their undoubted media reach to publicize my activities or publications.

Then one day, as happens to all very distracted fathers, I noticed that my son had grown up and that he too had been gripped by the mania of his cell phone and the virtual world: as a father, this time a little less distracted, I monitored his profiles (the ones I think are public at least) and was surprised to discover that nothing was published.

And there's nothing on his peers' profiles either: intrigued, I asked him what it meant, and the answer was simple. They're not interested in photos, only stories; at most, a few images can be posted on a second, private profile that's rarely visited and typically has a small number of followers.

Social media has become a simple matter of chasing someone else's daily experiences or exchanging useless or vulgar information on Snapchat; the world of YouTube videos, however, is a different matter: depending on taste, some will favor specialized channels such as those dedicated to downhill cycling, gamers who play for viewers, or reviewers of the latest tech; conversely, fans of shorts will dive into videos that provide largely useless but sometimes well-told information in a matter of seconds.

Pirandello and Lyotard

From this brief and superficial account, we can glean the fact that more or less everyone wallows in the melting pot of social media, albeit with very different methods and purposes. In any case, any video, story, or reel tells something, or narrates events or experiences that will be viewed once, not once, or a hundred thousand times, resulting in a total massification of an ephemeral product that is lost in a system that itself is not destined to last, not even as a historical memory.

Pirandello aside, it is precisely the relationship created between a narrator and one hundred thousand viewers that undermines the new social system: we are content to watch and, at best, listen passively, thus avoiding the effort of dialogue (impossible, after all, with those numbers).

This is what frightens the education system in general, which must not only question what is happening, but also evaluate its effects (not necessarily dramatic, mind you) and find solutions to a problem that was partly foreseen almost fifty years ago.

There is a text from 1979 that I consider both prophetic and fundamental for contemporary philosophy: The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard: with great foresight, the philosopher questioned issues that are very relevant today, such as large corporations' access to infinite databases, a new fruition of knowledge, produced only to be sold, or the shift of power from the political class to the managerial and technocratic one.

For the purposes of our discussion, however, what is of interest is Lyotard's reasoning on the crisis of narratives. Science uses denotative language for its communications, but scientists themselves tend to deviate from that path during their presentations and narrate it in a connotative manner and through the use of linguistic games.

The power of storytelling

This fact speaks volumes about the power of storytelling and what a shift in narrative paradigm entails: scientific knowledge tout court is not based on orality and does not consider narrative knowledge, a legacy of a backward past, to be legitimate.

Grand narratives, especially in our current technocratic society, are in crisis, and the very concept of storytelling, even in everyday life, is losing its validity: mothers no longer tell fairy tales to their children but replace their role with videos because they, in turn, are busy scrolling through stories on social media.

A child who calms down when handed a tablet is enough to interrupt a communication relationship, even a non-verbal one, such as that established through gaze or facial expression, which is also an integral part of a narrative.

Stories have lost their power, and with them has gone that aura that Walter Benjamin spoke of in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: the infinite reproduction of a story removes what is reproduced not only from the traditional realm of narration, but entrusts the poetry of the story to a mechanical medium.

I'm not in a position to assess whether this constitutes medical harm. Mine isn't a matter of prevention: it's a subjective and personal analysis of a phenomenon I consider problematic from a communication perspective. But like all social phenomena, it will evolve, peaking and declining, causing future generations to retrace their steps, making observation, contact with things, and verbal communication a necessity again, or even a new religion.

The problem is urgent, and it must be addressed by parents and educators. A mother or teacher must know how to tell stories, and they must do so much better today than in the past: knowledge and information are now accessible to everyone in unlimited quantities. What distinguishes a good teacher is no longer their knowledge of facts, but their ability to narrate facts and teach children how to formulate questions; the answers, generated, needless to say, by artificial intelligence, will certainly be more targeted and precise than those based on irrelevant questions.

Homer

During the Syracuse conference, I proposed two simple teaching recipes to try to distance young people from the grip of device addiction.

The first consists in reclaiming narratives, and to do so requires a great deal of effort in our civilization: the pleasure a tale inspires is the same today as it was in Homer's time, yet recent generations have been gradually deprived of it. And I'm not talking about the great myths, but about any event, even the most banal, that in the mouth of a good storyteller can become an epic feat and inspire wonder.

In over twenty years of teaching I have noticed in all levels of school and at all ages a growing interest in my lessons when I connect a historical event to a personal case.

During a lecture—no matter the topic—the inclusion of an anecdote or episode from the life of a family member or friend seems to spark a special light in many young people's eyes. A mere mention of my grandfather's story, a gunner on the destroyer "Pantera" in the Red Sea during World War II, quickly makes the exploits of Rommel, Eisenhower, and Montgomery fade into the background.

Storytelling involves language, and language always communicates spiritual content; through the language we use, things are revealed through sounds, colors, expressions, and names—all elements that affect the spirit and the imagination.

Thus, a narrative carries within it a revelation with what it expresses or could express. I can translate a language but not a language; I can go from French to English but I cannot translate a painting into music, because a sound is not a color even if it can evoke one. The effort to move from an image to a story is fundamental, for example, for children: a teacher's "reading" of picture books keeps children glued to a story that is improvised but inspires amazement, wonder, and imagination.

The charm of a real event

The second recipe is decidedly more banal but no less effective. Let's start with an example: from the windows of my classroom, the view changed radically one morning a few months ago with the demolition of an old gymnasium that for over half a century hosted the school's physical education classes and was frequented by nearly every generation in the town.

Since it is no longer there, it has been possible to see beyond, to have a much more distant horizon that within a year will be erased again by the reconstruction of the new building.

The morning the bulldozers entered the construction site, I interrupted class and had the students go to the windows (no offense to the Minister of Education for interrupting a public service): the event needed to be observed live, and like elderly retirees, we spent at least twenty minutes contemplating the collapse. That was a moment of genuine amazement for the students, due to an exceptional, unique, and nonetheless interesting event.

About a month later I repeated the observation: nothing apparently so striking now in that busy construction site but the amazement , appropriately conveyed, emerged on that occasion too.

A construction site on a video reel has no hope of gaining views unless it documents a collapse or a major accident. However, real life can still offer kids a sense of wonder that a screen simply can't, and above all, questions or suggestions generated by careful observation of details and situations (the operation of a crane, the cement needed for a floor slab, workplace safety, the craftsmanship of architects, the swaying of a load).

Knowing how to ask questions about things is fundamental: to find the name of "that thing attached to the wire that hangs from the crane for carrying cement" (bucket, ed. ) on the internet took a few minutes with very original intermediate results.

Concern, yes, but not alarmism: nomophobia is a product of our times, a dangerous addiction that was unknown until recently, but it can certainly be addressed and overcome, and I hope that young people are the first to understand this.

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