Hijacking the Digital Backlash in Education

political, economic, and cultural dimensions of digitalization at the intersection of education and media and cultural production studies. About the ConversationThe conversation was conducted over email between April and July 2025.The answers were then compiled into one document and shared with all interlocutors for final editing. What Do We Mean by Digital Backlash in Education?Ingrid Forsler (IF): Over the past decades, countries worldwide have embraced digitalization as a cornerstone of educational reform and, in prolongation, of social and economic progress.However, concerns are increasingly being raised about the potential negative impacts of excessive screen time on the cognitive abilities and wellbeing of children and young people.Most of this criticism targets the presence of private digital devices in educational settings, particularly mobile phones that have been banned from the classroom in several countries (Selwyn and Aagaard 2021;Grigic Magnusson et al. 2023;Reed and Dunn 2024;Strup and Lieberoth 2023;Wikstrm et al. 2022), but also digital tools and systems developed for educational purposes.In some national contexts, for example in Sweden, the framing of school digitalization as a 'blind experiment' with no proven benefits for learning has already led to significant policy shifts in education and childcare with the aim to reduce the use of digital technologies (Forsler et al. 2024).This shift in the previously uncontested project of school digitalization can be understood as part of a broader digital backlash 'where norms about digital habits, consumption, and behavior are being called into question' (Albris et al. 2024:13).While the term backlash might evoke an image of a 'quick and sudden pushback', Helles and Lomborg (2024: 27) suggest that we are in fact dealing with a much slower, gradual transformation process of the public discourse.This change can be related not least to the growing awareness of large-scale data misuse and digital surveillance revealed in the mid-2010s.These revelations marked the beginning of a broader erosion of public trust in the major technology companies that ultimately led to a questioning of the role that social media platforms and digital devices play in people's everyday lives.Such questioning is particularly pronounced in societies with high levels of digital penetration and Internet usage, including the US, Europe, Australia, and the Nordic countries (Helles and Lomborg (2024); Syvertsen and Enli 2020: 1273).Up until recently, however, initiatives to limit the use of digital technology have mainly taken place among individuals, underpinned by ideologies of self-regulation and personal responsibility (Bagger 2024; Moe and Madsen 2021), and not within organizations or institutions (with the exception of some workplace initiatives) (see e.g., Fast 2021; Guyard and Kaun 2018).The ongoing digital backlash in educational systems worldwide thus marks a historical shift, not only in the digitalization of education, but also in the politics and practices of digital disconnection.Just as