Shanghai Street View: Offline Enforcement

I often use this space to spotlight news where Shanghai looks like a trendsetter, and that certainly looks like the case with a small but hopefully significant item involving the smartphones that have become an indispensable fixture of everyday life for many, myself included. This particular news has seen an entire department at a local university take the bold step of banning students from bringing their smartphones into class.

As a university teacher, I have to enthusiastically applaud the move by the School of Art, Design and Media at East China University of Science and Technology in Fengxian District. I also hope that many departments and perhaps entire universities will follow suit, and that the move could spark a broader debate about when, where and how it’s appropriate to use smartphones in a big city like Shanghai.
This debate has been going on for years in the west, though it’s taking on new dimensions in an era when things like watching movies, playing games and conducting video calls over a smartphone has become quite common. Outright bans like the one in Fengxian seem a bit drastic for most situations, though at least the move could be a good starting point for more discussion on the topic.

The ban at the Fengxian art school officially kicked off last month, and requires all students to hand in their smartphones at the start of each class and get them back at the end. The policy met with some initial resistance, and some students even refused to hand in their phones at first. But they eventually gave in, and at least one student said classroom discussion has improved since students must ask each other for ideas rather than search for them on the Internet.

I impose similar though less drastic restrictions on smartphone use in my classroom and expect that many of colleagues do the same. I’ve never actually taken away a student’s smartphone, but require all phones be turned off or put into mute mode during class. No one is allowed to answer their phone except for in emergencies, and even then they must step out into the hallway to do so.

Time For Re-Think

That policy seemed effective for a while, but it may be time for a re-think in an era when voice calls are rapidly being overtaken by texting and web surfing. I certainly wouldn’t object if my department or even the entire university enacted a ban similar to the one in Fenxian.

All that got me thinking to how we’ve arrived at this point, and the incredible transformation that’s occurred in China’s telecommunications over the last 20 years. When I first taught at a Beijing university in the 1980s, mobile phones were non-existent and most students and people in general didn’t really have easy access to even land-line phones. Back then, the main distraction in classes was simply fatigue when students stayed up too late the previous night playing chess or card games.

Mobile service made its debut here in the 1990s, but was still relatively limited when I began covering the industry as a reporter in 2002. A look at the China Mobile archives shows the company had a modest 120 million subscribers at the end of 2002, or less than one for every 10 Chinese. Fast forward to the present, when China Mobile has 823 million users and the entire nation has 1.3 billion, equal to China’s entire population.

The new policy at the Fengxian school looks encouraging, and should hopefully spark a broader debate about what kind of use of smartphones is appropriate in different situations. In my native US, many restaurants and public venues like theaters have banned talking on cellphones on their premises for years, and most trains also now specify one or more “quiet cars” where talking on a cellphone is banned.

I can certainly understand the banning of all smartphone use in classes, since students are supposed to be paying attention to the teacher and interacting with each other rather than surfing the web during that time. In public places such drastic action is obviously unnecessary, though bans on listening to music or videos without earphones, or prohibition on using speaker phones certainly seem reasonable.

At the end of the day much of the responsibility for appropriate behavior lies with the smartphone user, who should consider his surroundings when deciding whether to surf the web or conduct a conference call in public. But in the meantime, my kudos go out to the Fengxian university and others that may be considering similar moves, as Shanghai and other top cities lead the dialogue in forging a new etiquette for our smartphone-obsessed nation.