Portrait 13 of 15
James & Julien
Preserving the Human in a Digital Age
he/him · 9 & 12 · Ngunnawal Country (Canberra), ACT
Digital wellbeing · Children
A nine-year-old who notices when he’s lost twenty minutes to a screen - and thinks that’s worth paying attention to.
Brothers James and Julien use technology, enjoy it, and think carefully about what it does to them. James notices when he’s been watching videos and suddenly realises he doesn’t remember the last twenty minutes. Julien draws a clear line: technology for connection and creativity, not as a substitute for presence. Their portrait - the youngest in the collection - makes the case that digital wellbeing policy is not about restriction. It is about the design choices that make passive consumption the easiest default, and who is responsible for changing them.
Through James & Julien’s eyes
James (he/him), 9 & Julien (he/him), 12 | Ngunnawal Country (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory)
When James and Julien are asked what worries them about the future, they return to a movie scene they cannot shake: people gliding through in automated chairs, entertained into numbness while machines handle everything else. The future they fear is unsettling because it already feels familiar. They recognise traces of it in the quiet disengagement they see around them, where attention thins and presence fades.
James recognises the pull in his own body. “I’ll be watching videos and suddenly realise I don’t even remember the last twenty minutes. That's when I know I need to stop.” Julien notices it too. “People say watching Netflix is relaxing, but it’s kind of like the worst version of the future we just imagined.” What alarms them is the subtlety of the shift, how human presence drains away through small, forgettable choices. Minute by minute. Click by click. They see what many adults overlook: disconnection often arrives disguised as comfort.
What makes their perspective compelling is the deliberate way they push against that drift in the daily rhythm of their home. Their father taught them early that human connection is something you practice. He “always asks how we’re feeling. He doesn’t just ask if something’s wrong. He wants to know what we’re thinking about, what’s on our minds,” James says. "I think everyone should have a dad like ours. Someone who actually wants to know how you feel, not just if you did your homework." The brothers now extend that habit to each other. “We always ask each other, ‘Are you okay?’” This emotional steadiness anchors them. It shows in how comfortably they fully inhabit who they are, instead of shrinking themselves to fit the flattened ideals they see online.
That grounding also sharpens their awareness of what happens when digital spaces begin shaping identity. “If you use it too much, you’re going to lose your own sense of yourself.” Their counterweight is creativity. James names himself without hesitation: “I’m crazy. I express myself a lot.” Julien gestures to his clothes: “Fashion shows how I feel.”
The brothers do not reject technology. Both still use digital devices and believe online digital spaces can strengthen relationships when approached with intention. Julien uses platforms to “stay connected with my friends,” and to widen his view of the world. “Social media gives you world awareness,” he says. For them, the boundary appears when technology stops supporting life and starts substituting for it.
Their vision for the future reflects that balance. “We want social media to stay here, but not for people to be addicted. People should still go outside, do sports, go to the shops, do something fun with other people.” Julien captures the principle: “Use technology at the right time, for the right things.” He draws a clear boundary around automation: robots for surgery, not for school. “That’s for people.” James puts it simply: “Humans are irreplaceable.”
The policy trajectory of digital life
James and Julien’s story describes a digital environment built to minimise friction and maximise continuous engagement. Platform design prioritises speed, convenience, and automated content delivery, exposing children to digital systems well before they develop the judgement, self-regulation, and creative intent needed to use them well. Passive consumption becomes the default interaction. Practices that support sustained attention, imaginative play, and relational presence receive less reinforcement. These patterns begin early and shape habits before intentional use can take hold. Digital tools occupy a growing share of everyday life while the capacities required for intentional and reflective use struggle to develop, weakening people’s ability to focus, relate, and express themselves.
The potential of future generations policy to intervene
A future generations policy approach reorients digital governance from regulating individual behaviour to shaping the environments in which development unfolds. Policy can align platform incentives, regulatory standards, and public investment with developmental timelines, strengthening prevention and capability formation in early life. Digital design can support rather than displace offline play, creativity, and social connection. Environments structured around creativity, connection, and intentional engagement help cognitive and emotional capacities strengthen alongside digital literacy. This approach protects the foundations of human development and ensures future generations grow up with digital systems that expand agency and support relational life.
Policy landscape
Today's policy landscape: The digital world in Australia
Australia is highly connected, and digital life now shapes learning, social life, rest, and identity. Yet policy attention still focuses largely on responding to harms after they appear instead of shaping the conditions that support healthy digital engagement from the outset. The policy challenge lies in balancing protection, agency, and design responsibility in ways that sustain digital wellbeing across lifetimes.
Research shows that digital environments influence cognition, attention, and socio-emotional development. Online spaces can strengthen learning and connection, yet heavy passive use is linked to weaker memory, reduced attention, and diminished emotional regulation. Digital health has therefore become more than an individual concern. It now influences collective cognitive capability, social cohesion, and democratic participation.
Australian policy addresses multiple dimensions of the digital environment, including privacy, online safety, content regulation, algorithmic transparency, and access. The Online Safety Act 2021 provides important guardrails. Legislation alone, however, cannot cultivate the literacy, cultural norms, or community practices required for healthy digital participation. Regulatory standards can define baseline protections, but broader systems must also support the development of resilient digital habits and capabilities.
Market incentives complicate this task. Business models built around attention capture convert human focus into economic value, making design choices a matter of governance rather than simple product preference. Research on digital transformation shows how these technologies reshape influence and decision-making, reinforcing the need for policy approaches grounded in human agency and ethical foresight beyond purely commercial incentives.
Younger generations already navigate these tensions daily. Many value flexibility, creativity, and purpose in digital spaces, yet face environments engineered for constant engagement. Evidence suggests that habitual passive consumption can weaken creativity, while purposeful creation and meaningful participation strengthen capability. Platform design therefore sits at the centre of public interest governance, as design choices shape how digital environments influence behaviour and development.
Debates around age-based restrictions illustrate the complexity of policy responses. Rising screen time has displaced sport, outdoor activity, and community connection, contributing to isolation. At the same time, impacts depend less on access alone and more on design, context, and patterns of use. Policy responses range from age thresholds to broader measures addressing platform standards, digital education, and shared civic digital infrastructure.
Young people themselves often recognise risks such as cyberbullying, privacy breaches, and identity theft more clearly than adults assume. At the same time, evidence suggests that strict prohibition can deepen isolation rather than reduce harm. These dynamics strengthen the case for participatory approaches that build digital capability and agency, enabling young people to navigate digital environments with greater awareness instead of relying solely on exclusion.
The value of a future generations approach
Digital policy decisions shape the environments in which attention, learning, and social interaction develop across the life course. When governance focuses mainly on acute harms or age thresholds, it overlooks how platform incentives, market structures, and regulatory timing shape everyday patterns of use. Policy then reacts once harms become visible while leaving the design conditions that influence behaviour largely unchanged.
A future generations policy approach examines whether digital governance aligns with human developmental and social timeframes. It shifts attention from responding to downstream effects toward shaping the environments that influence behaviour in the first place. This perspective evaluates how platform incentives, design standards, and public safeguards affect people’s ability to sustain attention, creativity, and connection across different stages of life. It clarifies whether policy settings strengthen these capacities or allow them to weaken across generations.
International experience demonstrates alternative approaches that combine protection with capability-building. In India, rapid and uneven digital expansion among children and young people has prompted policy and education responses that emphasise media literacy, contextual guidance, and age-appropriate use. These measures recognise that digital risk emerges through the interaction of access, social context, and developmental stage. The European Union has focused on upstream regulation, placing constraints on manipulative design practices and establishing clearer obligations for platforms used by children.
Future Generations Policy Analysis
A Future Generations Policy Lens on the Online Safety Amendment Act 2014
Case Study: Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024
The Act 2024 introduces obligations for “age-restricted social media platforms” to take reasonable steps to prevent users under 16 from holding accounts, with significant penalties for non-compliance. The legislation does not mandate a specific verification method, allowing platforms to rely on approaches such as facial age estimation, activity-based analysis, or declared user information.
Human rights concerns were raised by the Australian Human Rights Commission both before and after the legislation was introduced. The Commission warned that the measure could affect several rights recognised in international human rights agreements, including children’s rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and participation in cultural life. Questions were also raised about the policy’s effectiveness, given the likelihood that some young people may circumvent restrictions through technological workarounds.
Privacy implications were also highlighted as age-assurance systems may require users, including adults, to provide sensitive personal information to private platforms in order to verify eligibility. In response, the eSafety Commissioner released a Statement of Commitment to Children’s Rights, outlining commitments to monitor, guide, and evaluate the implementation of the ban alongside broader digital safety initiatives.
The legislation shifts formal responsibility toward platforms by introducing access controls. However, it primarily functions as a gate at the point of account creation. It does not alter the wider incentive structures that reward attention capture or address the broader conditions shaping children’s digital environments, including platform design practices and uneven support across families and schools.
Fairness dimensions
Life stage equity
Early exposure to attention-intensive environments normalises high-frequency engagement before self-regulation and judgment have had time to develop, passing forward weaker baseline capability for intentional use.
Distribution Across and Within Generations
Uneven access to stabilising supports (time, supervision, offline alternatives) compounds into unequal accumulation of focus and self-direction, leaving future institutions managing wider variance in readiness.
Future Opportunities and Path Dependency
Passive defaults crowd out creative rehearsal and play, normalising shallow interaction patterns that are harder to reverse later and narrowing the adaptive capacity future cohorts carry into study, work, and civic life.
Proportionate and Justified Trade-offs
Short-term reliance on restriction and harm response defers investment in capability-building conditions, shifting costs forward into greater remediation needs and lower agency in adulthood.
Precautionary Approach
Gradual erosion occurs below visible thresholds, delaying intervention until patterns are entrenched, leaving future governments with fewer low-cost options to restore attention and creative capability.
Our opportunity to shape Australia’s future
Digital policy shapes the environments in which attention, effort, and judgement develop. When platforms make passive engagement easier than deliberate use, habits that sustain focus, creativity, and self-direction weaken. Digital environments then demand greater effort from users simply to remain attentive and intentional. These pressures affect more than individual behaviour. They influence how people relate to one another and how they participate in shared information spaces.
A future generations policy approach reframes this challenge as a question of governance design. It asks whether platform incentives, regulatory standards, and public safeguards align with human developmental timelines. Policy can recalibrate design incentives and establish guardrails, but its impact depends on the social and developmental foundations people bring to digital environments. When these foundations are strengthened early and reinforced across life stages, regulation supports healthier patterns of engagement. When they remain fragile, policy struggles to influence behaviour beyond the surface.
The two speculative futures below, inspired by James and Julien’s story, explore how connection, resilience, and digital capability could diverge by 2040 under continued trajectories or redesigned policy frameworks.
Two possible futures
A future of disconnection and passive consumption
It is 2040, and people move through life competent and efficient yet faintly absent. Tasks are completed, feeds refreshed, days pass without being fully lived.
The erosion began in small increments. Families share rooms while each person watches something different. Conversation shrinks into logistics. Eye contact feels like an interruption. Emotional life is handled privately because speaking about it feels unfamiliar.
Schools have adapted to distraction rather than resisting it. Students learned to navigate interfaces more fluently than their own emotions. Teachers, stretched thin, monitored workflow instead of nurturing curiosity. Play was squeezed out first. Creativity followed. Children lost the rehearsal spaces where imagination and social problem-solving once took shape.
Workplaces deepened the drift. Efficiency overtook connection as companies automated roles and optimised for output. Collaboration became transactional. Beneath it all sat the design of digital products themselves, built to capture attention and make presence harder to sustain. The human residue was constant connectivity, fractured attention, and shrinking tolerance for slow thinking.
Public space reflected the shift. Shopping became self-service. Service work moved through automated systems designed to reduce cost at the expense of care. Public spaces felt like corridors between personalised digital worlds. Community survived as a label more than a practice. Corporate incentives steadily pushed systems toward frictionless, staff-light models that erased human touchpoints. Loneliness rose, yet continued to be treated as an individual problem.
Australia still functions, but largely on autopilot, shaped by thousands of design choices that made passive consumption effortless and presence harder to hold. Productivity remained, while rehearsal space receded: the everyday practice of play, imagination, and real connection that once built resilience.
A future of intentional living and human connection
It is 2040, and Australia no longer treats digital wellbeing as a private struggle that families manage alone. The everyday environment has changed. Passive consumption is no longer the easiest default.
Homes rebuilt small habits that protect attention. Phones are put away at meals because that is normal again. Online life is discussed without panic and without secrecy. Children learn early how platforms try to keep them engaged, in the same way they learn road rules: through practice, supervision, and gradual independence.
Schools treat attention and creativity as part of learning rather than extracurricular activity. Students rehearse how to handle online conflict, algorithms, and comparison the way they practise writing. Play is protected as a developmental practice rather than a reward once work is finished. Creative making is resourced instead of squeezed into the margins.
Platforms operate under design standards that reward intentional use: time cues, friction for endless scroll, and settings that support agency over compulsion. Public life shifted as well. Communities invested in alternatives such as youth clubs, sports programs, maker spaces, and public play infrastructure, making offline life as rich and accessible as the online world.
By 2040, technology remains everywhere, and so do humans. People move between online and offline worlds with greater choice. Creativity appears again as a daily practice. Presence is not a luxury. It has become a norm.
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