That’s Men: Smartphones are Radio Luxembourg by another name

Listening to a radio item about the capacity of smartphones to give teenagers a secret and sometimes dangerous life away from the control of the family, it struck me that this alliance of teens and technology goes back to the 1960s.

The technology took the form of the transistor radio. Until then, the family radio was plugged into the mains and stayed in the same place for decades. It was usually quite imposing, and not something you would ever think of carrying from one room to another.

Then the transistor radio arrived. It ran on batteries and it was light enough to carry around. When you went to bed you could hide it under your pillow and listen to Radio Luxembourg on a wavering signal in the dark.

And that was it, right there: your parents were no longer in charge of what you listened to. In our house, listening to the Top Ten once a week in the evening on the family radio was a treasured experience for us children. Our parents treasured a different experience: the family rosary. We normally managed to finagle them into getting the prayers said before the Top Ten came on, but when we didn’t, the rosary took precedence.

So having a radio that you could bring to bed with you and that you could use to listen to the only radio station a teenager would want to listen to in the evenings changed everything.

Many parents, including my own, were fairly easygoing about all this but I recall a sense, probably communicated to us by the Christian Brothers, that the transistor radio threatened the established order. It allowed us to listen to unapproved stuff whenever we wanted to, and that was a bad thing.

I’ve mentioned before in this column that when we were sent off on a retreat for three days from school, a rather strange cleric used to burst into our bedrooms at night. He claimed he was trying to catch anybody listening to a transistor radio.

You might wonder if he was looking for something completely different but it is entirely possible that he really was looking for people surreptitiously playing radios. Transistor radios created a sense of unease among the people in charge: the younger generation had got its hands on something that could lead to God knows where. Where that was, only God knew, but the suspicion was that it might well be a bad place.

Of course there were lots of other signs that the age of control of the younger generations by the older was on the wane.

The Rolling Stones and the Dubliners had taken the place of Bing Crosby and Bridie Gallagher. US Marine-style haircuts were replaced by long hair, à la the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The parish halls were abandoned for the ballrooms.

Myself and a girl walked out of a film show about the foreign missions, arranged by the nuns in Naas, and had ice cream in Hanrahan’s café instead, and lived to tell the tale: you wouldn’t have got away with that sort of anarchy in the 1950s.

All this was public. But the transistor radio brought you into your own private world of music that was not the officially approved music of Ireland. It did so without you having to get permission from anybody. And here we are now with the smartphone. This also brings teenagers into worlds their parents do not share. I am not one of those people who believes that all teenagers are up to no good and I assume that this world usually involves no more than talk and music. I am perfectly well aware, though, that it can involve other things too.

And as our parents had to do, the parents of these teenagers must come to terms with the fact that the children who used to see them as the source of all knowledge have now turned to a new influence that they cannot entirely control.

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com