“We must also think about our relationship to work at home and the right to disconnect,” says a specialist

“Do we need to think about a right to individual disconnection or do we need to think about a collective duty to disconnect?” asks Jean Catan, secretary general of the National Digital Council, Tuesday on franceinfo.

“If we want to approach our relationship with screens as adults, then we must also think about our relationship to work at home and the relationship to the right to disconnect.” pleaded Tuesday April 30 on franceinfo Jean Catan, secretary general of the National Digital Council (CNNum) and teacher at Sciences Po in digital regulation. An expert report was submitted to Emmanuel Macron during the day, recommending in particular to ban the use of screens for children under 3 years old.

For the specialist, it appears necessary “to think about our societal organization in screen time”. “Do we need to think about an individual right to disconnect or do we need to think about a collective duty to disconnect?”he asked himself. “I think it’s very hard to have a discourse on screens that is positive today, praising hard workers who work and sleep four hours a night”he said. “We need to think about the community as a whole and we need to think about each framework in its own right”he said.

From daycare or with a childminder, “we need to find the remedies that will be most appropriate for each situation”, he advocated. For the secretary general of the National Digital Council, if there is no question of banning screens from learning, it is necessary to “creating educational communities that are strong and multi-stakeholder”.

Favor “certain interfaces”

According to him, “we already have several frameworks that allow us to apply many of the remedies that have been put forward” by the working committee. But “we have to push them a little further”, he said. These recommendations contained in the report include in particular a total ban on screens for children under 3 years old and, subsequently, extremely limited access up to 6 years old. Experts also recommend prohibiting the use of cell phones before the age of 11 and allowing smartphones only from the age of 13, and without access to social networks.

“We can act on the social networks themselves by favoring certain technical architectures, certain interfaces, certain services and that, the regulation on digital services allows us to do”, he assured. The European Regulation on Digital Services (DSA), which entered into force in the summer of 2023, aims to provide better protection for Internet users against illegal content distributed on major digital platforms.