Daughter Number Four, just turned nine, has a phone number. Before you start getting super-judgey, she doesn’t have a phone. What she has is a fancy watch. It’s controlled by an app on our phones, through which we control who is on her contact list. Rather creepily, the app tells us who she has phoned or messaged and for how long.
The main point of getting the watch wasn’t even to do any of those things: it was because she’s been bristling to leave the house on her own and visit friends who live nearby – and the app will tell us where she is. It is a technological fix for 21st-century paranoid parents; and, like a lot of technology, it fixes a problem that doesn’t really exist.
The chances of her getting kidnapped or involved in a street fight are vanishingly small: but not nonexistent. And that minuscule chance is enough to coax a parent into shelling out considerable sums so they can believe that their child is safer because they have a chunk of electronics on their arm.
[ How about telling kids how to use a mobile phone responsibly instead of a ban?Opens in new window ]
But the addition of a SIM card into this gives it a very modern significance we hadn’t reckoned upon. For the first time I had to contact her siblings and some other family members and tell them what her number is. (And brace themselves for the inevitable spoof phone call from her.) That number is now plumbed into their phones, and the chances are, unless they change the way these things work, the number will stay with Daughter Number Four for the rest of her life. It’s like we’ve given her an invisible, digital tattoo.
My daughter’s new phone number will stay with her for life. It’s like we’ve given her an invisible, digital tattoo
An unsettling conversation on the Dart leaves other passengers open-mouthed in amazement
Winter wedge issue: On Oliver Callan, icy weather is one of Ireland’s ever-growing urban-rural divides
I meet friends whose version of my life seems to be completely different to the one I recall
Or, to put it in more dystopian terms, we’ve offered her up to a worldwide system of communication. That system will know where she is, what she’s interested in, and most importantly, what she might feel like buying. Daughter Number Four will become the product, just like the rest of us are.
Yet when I sent on the number to Herself she got a bit weepy, in an our-little-girl-is-growing-up way. Because, like it or not, this can also be viewed as a stage in her development. She doesn’t realise it now, of course, but that number will play a significant role in all sorts of life events. She’ll give it to future friends and people she might fall in love with. When she eventually has a phone, others will call her on that number and she’ll learn about tragedies and triumphs, births and deaths: perhaps even the deaths of her parents.
She’ll collect the numbers of others, and others will retain her number: even after they no longer have any contact. Over years, as with my phone now, she’ll notice that her SIM card contains the contact details of a slowly growing number of dead people. One day other people looking through their contacts will realise the same thing about her.
It is an extraordinary web of contact and memory, all encoded in a tiny piece of plastic and silicon. But, like all modern miracles, it comes at a cost. The environmental impact of producing cards and phones is enormous, while increasingly, the networks the phones depend on intersect with financial empires controlled by megalomaniac billionaires far more interested in flexing their global muscles than the more traditional, grasping pursuit of money. The James Bond movies are starting to look like documentaries.
Some of her friends have the phone-watch too and, after intense lobbying, numbers have been exchanged. Now, like any proto-teenager, Daughter Number Four spends the time we allot her yakking away to them. It’s sweet and innocent and oblivious to the wider ramifications or the darkness that may lie in the future.
It’s that darkness I’d rather protect her from. But there isn’t a tech fix. All we can hope is that she’ll be kind and sensible and brave. It’s all any of us can do.