Lord Addington (LD)

My Lords, there seem to be two issues here. One is social media and the other is the smartphone, and the two of them are accessed via each other. However, we should remember what a smartphone is: it is a platform for using technology. The reason I raise this is that—and this is in my declaration of interests—I am someone who believes in and uses assistive technology, and one of the easiest ways to get that is, increasingly, through your smartphone. As a dyslexic, I access literature, often with complicated local accents in it, via technology. Initially, it was an abridged book on tape. You can use it that way, so there is potential here. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about caveats, but there is the potential to benefit people, including in the education environment. It is one of the oddities that we refer to our phone as something which is a tool. It is a tool for much of the deaf community because they text. Texting is easy when somebody has not been in an environment where they have been taught to write properly, because that is what happens in the deaf community. They become addicted to text speak. Let us be a little more selective about this. I salute the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for starting this debate and starting it so well. But remember, do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make sure this is something you can use as a platform. There will be other ways, and there may be ways around this, but I just say that everything has a price, and this is one. Please remember it. You might be excluding groups that we will be talking about in this Bill and future ones, who use it as something to support learning. I felt I had to say that to throw it into the argument, because it is an important thing to bear in mind.