Dr Longstaff spoke to The Examiner’s HARRY MURTOUGH about many issues facing younger generations, including political influence and cyberbullying.

HM: In 2018 kids left school to protest climate change, while politicians disapproved. Do you think there is a generational disconnect between government and younger generations?

SL: Very much so, if you think about who should have the greatest say in any of these questions it’s those who’ll bear the greatest burden. 

There’s no doubt that if the predictions of scientists in relation to unmitigated climate change are true, then younger people will have to contend with a radically different world, which brings far greater burdens for them to bear so they’ve got a perfectly legitimate right to be concerned about this and to be involved in the discussions.

So what do you do? Do you sit back and say ‘oh well someone else will sort it out’, or do you take some kind of democratic responsibility even at a very young age to become involved and I think it’s one of those moments where hopefully those in charge stop and say – ‘what do they not see in our own conduct that makes them so lacking in trust of our leadership that they feel compelled to leave their classrooms and come out in protest’. 

HM: So younger people should shoulder more responsibilities in politics?

SL: People are aware of this notion of ‘click-activism’ where you feel that you’ve done what you need to do by clicking a like or posting a support comment. 

There is a sense in which people find that perhaps a little too easy to signal their interest or concerns just by that alone, but it’s not really adequate.

What really matters is when you actually put you body on the line, which isn’t to say you have to court arrest or things like that, but you’ve got to be physically present to show that you’ve committed yourself to a course of action in a way that others can recognise as being deeply serious, rather than merely symbolic.

Ultimately there’s something more dangerous even than a loss of trust which is the potential loss of legitimacy and when institutions lose legitimacy no one will deal with them at any cost. 

People can say ‘this is someone else’s problem’ or you can embrace it and in doing so hopefully send a strong enough signal to those in charge that they need to act to restore trust to build up their legitimacy.

That’s what leads to that harmonious peaceful interaction between people who maintain their differences but in that positively peaceful form. 

HM: The state government has pushed for serious cyberbullying to be criminalised, do you think it can be policed?

SL: One measure is to increase the penalties and hope they act as a deterrent, as the state government hopes to do. 

But then you've got to take account of the fact that the mechanisms for a evading detection will proceed with a kind of effectiveness that matches anything that governments can do.

A better thing is to run a process to which you start to create better understanding about the cowardly nature of this form of bullying, but also make it so that there's a kind of social reproof that it's not cool to bullying someone.

That could be incredibly powerful, it doesn't mean you don't have laws and surveillance – that's probably not as effective as social measures.

Another possibility of course is that people who design the basic technologies build into the design some kind of ethical framework for control. 

It's not to clamp down on free speech, but where you make it easier for someone to redirect the bullying into some kind of portal which identifies them and acts as a social restraint, we don't often think about those things.

Those who design and develop these technologies, and those who market them, should be in a position to anticipate this, to make it as hard as possible for it to be misused as a conscious part of their responsibility as the designer of these things.

And the more we use ways to track who designs things and market them, we go back to them and say 'well did you do a good enough job?'.

Talking about cyberbullying, imagine if someone commits suicide as a result of relentless bullying and you can track it back to the source of that, not just the person that propagated it but also those that facilitated it by inadequately designing their technology, who would want to bear that on their conscious?

I think these things will progressively drive the way we think about these issues. 

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