Aspe (Alicante), March 22 (EFE).- Eight girls and boys between 14 and 18 years old will walk the Camino de Santiago for five days starting next March 28, away from devices and social networks, a challenge to unhook them from mobile phones and experience a (new) way of relating without technology involved.
This original idea by the psychologist from Aspe (Alicante) Gonzalo Soria, the coordinator, and in which the psychologist Orlando García and the educator Vanesa Elvira also participate, is aimed at a generation that almost considers the cell phone as an appendage of their body to the point of feeling anxiety when they run out of battery, lack coverage or run out of data (a disease called nomophobia).
“When you tell them that they are going to be without phones for a week, imagine, at first they feel out of place but after a few hours they forget and we see that they take advantage of the moment to talk, walk and continue talking,” Gonzalo Soria told EFE, who pointed out that “many of these young people use their cell phones for more than five hours a day, some even twice as long, and during the Camino they discover that they can interact with other kids without it being altered by any technological means.”
What starts in a few days between Sarria and Santiago will be the fifth edition of ‘Disconnect on the Camino’, an initiative that emerged in 2021 due to the harmful effects of mobile phone abuse which, among other effects, favors the isolation of adolescents to the point that there are more and more cases of those who limit their leisure after school to locking themselves in their room, unable to engage in face-to-face conversations.
“Mobile phones, watches, cards and money stay at home,” the psychologist stressed, “so that during the Camino the temptation to upload photos to statuses, post ‘stories’ or share videos” on Tik-Tok is avoided.
One of the young women who has participated in previous years, 17 years old, was hooked on her cell phone for nine hours and uploaded 15 to 20 stories a day, so shortly after leaving her contacts tried to write to her asking “has something happened to you?”
“It is complicated because we are talking about a generation that was born with a cell phone in the crib and learning to interact face to face, to meet others and laugh together” seems like a new experience that engages the participants, discovering that “there is life beyond the cell phone.”
During the stages in Galicia, the therapeutic team talks individually with the adolescents on a variety of issues, although some are linked to social networks, for example, the contradiction of having a thousand “virtual friends” without being able to meet a single one of them. In the afternoons, already at the hostel before or after dinner, group therapies are organized sitting in a circle around addictions.
Carla González García, 17, walked the Camino two years ago after Gonzalo, Vanesa and Orlando gave a talk at her school and explained to EFE that that week she realized that “she had not really been aware of how much time she used the phone”, in her case between 6 and 7 hours a day.
“You begin to see it and also relate to others in a real way, knowing who you are and without having that external stimulus from other people you don’t know,” the young woman continued, “because in the end what you see on social networks are not people who are in your life.”
During the Camino, “you worry more about being a pleasant person who you can talk to than about paying attention to how well I wear my hair or whether I look more or less pretty enough to hang it up,” he noted. EFE
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