It’s horrible delivering upsetting news but I have had to. “There are no plugs in a tent? What do you mean?” cried my teenager. I sympathise actually. Camping now not only involves the deprivation of decent toilets but the lack of something we need as much as electricity: Wi-Fi.

Lack of Wi-Fi is virtually unthinkable for me, never mind her. And please don’t go on about board games and Famous Five adventures. What is the point of them if they are not thoroughly Facebooked, Snapchatted and Instagrammed? How will my brain cope without the added storage of being able to look everything up in seconds? How will a teenage girl manage without being able to complain to her mates that she is bored every 20 seconds? How?

Like every other parent, I moan about my kids spending too much too time on their phones. And, like every other parent, I act as if the phone magically materialised. What did I think was going to happen when I bought it? That my 14-year-old would use it for phone calls? Did I think it was still 2000, the year she was born?

This revolution has happened in her lifetime and it is one of the biggest of mine: the smartphone — the hand-held computer that gives us unprecedented access to the world, and the world unprecedented access to us. I can’t think of anything else that has changed so much, so fast, with so little resistance. Sure, there is the constant worry about children being bullied online, about grooming, about access to porn. All schools have to deal with this. What happens in Vegas no longer stays in Vegas.

Right to do stupid things

One foolish comment, one drunken sext, one naked picture can fly around the world. Online, everyone sits in anonymous judgement. With this, the right to do stupid things has been eroded. As has the right to exist outside a consumer space. Often parents who sit watching TV — the most passive activity you could think of — are resentful of their kids’ online activity. That’s partly normal. They swarm to apps that we don’t use and don’t understand. But it’s also partly wilful ignorance. The worries you hear are of children being groomed or taking too many selfies. This anxiety is misplaced. They are being groomed, not by sexual predators, but by retailers and huge global brands — often this is done via the medium of selfies. Buy buttons are being installed in Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

The holy grail for businesses such as Topshop is being able to sell straight from Instagram. The selfie generation is anxious about appearing in the same outfit twice because part of selfie culture is recording your own life asif you were a celebrity: “peacocking”. Actual celebrities never wear the same stuff twice, so the pressure on civilians to keep up appearances is intense.

Height of banality

This blurring between the presentation of self, the social network and global brand is, of course, explicitly championed by the strangely blank availability of someone such as Kim Kardashian who exists primarily via the selfie. Her studied artlessness is either some expert Warholian veneer or the end of civilisation as we know it. The captions accompanying her pictures are repetitive intonations of banality. “Bikini selfies are my fave.” “I love that we have these memories.” “I love doing photo shoots and having memories.” “I love that I have thousands of pics.”

This is a woman, who, lest we forget, became famous via a sex tape and a reality TV show, so owning her own image may be empowering. It is certainly lucrative. But do the young people who also do this understand who has access to their private images? Do any of us?

This is why I find a new campaign called iRights one of the most radical things I have seen for some time. It wants children under the age of 18 to be able to edit and delete their online past. This is the generation that has grown up online. They want the right to forget. It is campaigning for five key rights. 1) Theright to remove: Every child or young person should have the right to easily edit or delete content they have created. 2) The right to know: Children should know who is holding or profiting from their information and whether it is being traded. 3) The right to support and safety: Young people should be confident that they will be protected from illegal practices and supported if confronted by troubling scenarios online. 4)The right to digital literacy: Young people should be given the right to access both knowledge of the internet and critiques of it so as to be able to deal with changing social norms. 5) The right to conscious and informed choices: Kids need to learn how to find the creative parts of the internet, but also learn how and when to disengage.

These rights, it seems to me, are not just something we need for our kids but for ourselves. This revolution has happened and we can do two things. We can sit by and complain that our kids do not live in the real world as they continue to access it. Or we could understand that this is indeed the world and we all need to equip ourselves better for it.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd