Beeps in the playground: Digital reflections

For Safer Internet Day 2026, the spotlight is not only on online safety but on how we talk about digital life – at home, in schools, and across communities. In this piece, Billy Anderson, Head of Services, Participation and Policy, takes us on a personal journey from the era of beeping digital watches to today’s AI-driven world. His reflections set the stage for a wider conversation about how we can better understand, navigate, and shape the digital world together.

I always remember getting my first digital watch in primary school. For weeks, everyone crowded around a boy in class who had one that could beep out the James Bond theme tune. It felt futuristic. An absolute must have. After collecting enough crisp packet tokens and nagging my mum relentlessly, mine finally arrived. I wore that watch with so much pride, amazed that pressing a button could make it play (sort of) a tune in staccato beeps.

At the time, TV consisted of just three channels, often showing sci fi programmes where characters spoke into wrist mounted devices to communicate. The idea that you could ever video call someone felt beyond futuristic. Videos were the size of flat bricks, massive cassette tapes. Around the same age, I remember recording something off the TV (the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon) and being able to watch it again and again… even pausing, fast-forwarding, or rewinding it.

It’s nostalgia, no doubt, but those memories have stuck with me as I’ve grown up watching wave after wave of digital advancement. Back then, it wasn’t even called “digital”, just “technology” or “electronics.” Over the 45 years since, it’s been fascinating to witness the beginnings, engage deeply with the middle, and now try to keep pace with the present. As a father of three at 52, I’m fully aware of how digital technology has shaped the way my family experiences life.

Across my three children, the differences in how each interacts with digital technology over the last 24 years are huge. My eldest daughter grew up in the Nokia generation, witnessed the birth of the iPhone, loved her videos, and listened to CDs. My middle daughter started secondary school with an iPhone 5 (I think), watched DVDs, and listened to music burned onto CDs from downloaded tracks. My youngest daughter, still in primary school, doesn’t have a smartphone but has a laptop. She has no idea what DVDs or CDs are and has always listened to music through apps.

We all spend a lot of time in front of screens. My wife, my children, and me. If I ranked us by screentime from least to most, it would probably go: my wife, me, my eldest, my middle child, then my youngest (although the last two are debatable). And this is in a household where both my wife and I have worked in public, people focused services for most of our adult lives moving from handwritten case notes and filing cabinets to laptops and Office 365. We are where we are. Technology has moved from sci fi, to quirky reality, to walking alongside us, to being fully integrated into our lifestyle. It feels almost impossible to escape, no matter how much you might want to (and my wife definitely does!), because it’s so deeply woven into society.

I don’t feel strongly positive or negative about digital technology, but I am always suspicious and savvy. I don’t think it’s enough to say, “I know nothing about computers or phones… I wouldn’t even know how to switch one on!” and then laugh off the discomfort of feeling left behind while reminiscing about cassette tapes, CDs, and digital watches. If I’m suspicious of something, I need to understand it before I can form an opinion or have meaningful conversations with my children about it. AI has brought about even more suspicion. I find it really difficult to sort out what is and isn’t real (‘real’ being a term that is consistently shifting now!) but the fact remains that I strive to understand it.

I watch and learn from my children, talk to them about their experiences, and try to understand what’s impacting their lives positively and negatively. Where there’s potential for harm, I can only discuss it in a way that makes sense if I understand it myself. If digital technology is so thoroughly interwoven into society and human life, then it’s a part of our wellbeing too. It can damage us, support us, make us feel safe or alone, happy or loved, seen or worthless. We can’t support ourselves, or our children, if we don’t treat digital wellbeing as equal to every other part of our wellbeing. We need to bring our conversations within ourselves, our families, our colleagues, and our devices out into the open so we can understand where we’re at, how we feel, what we think, and what we want to control. If we don’t do this now, then digital technology already has a head start… because it probably knows us far better than we know ourselves.

I loved my little digital watch. I never could have imagined how it would evolve into something I’m now typing on, able to share my thoughts with anyone on the planet at the touch of a button. We’ve come a long way from beeps in the playground to global connectivity.

Let’s use our humanity to hit pause – and talk about all things digital.