Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
That’s still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
He may not have been bullied, but he may have missed out on bonding and closeness that his peers enjoyed. There was a study that showed life is way better for kids if they don’t have a phone, but only if their peers also don’t have phones
This fact alone makes me conflicted about this. I don’t want my kids to walk around having phones from an early age, but I know first hand that being excluded as a kid is not a enjoyable experience. And kids are vicious creatures to each other too.
All I never had was a Gameboy I didn’t get an actual phone until I was in high school.
It had polyphonic ringtones and an IR blaster, it was the business.
Maybe he just didn’t tell you.
lol people calling 15-year-olds “little lads” makes me feel like a baby
(i’m 13 :/)
Not just pressure to get a fancy phone but that most of the socializing happens on social media now. Even if they sit in the same class, it’s a snapchat message.
If they don’t have access to it, they’re social outcasts by default.
It’s fucking crazy…
I think if the kids want to bully, they’d just find a lonely and defenseless target and invent an excuse. If you are a potential target, having an expensive phone wouldn’t save you anyway.
You’d be surprised! I was bullied throughout school for my shoes (fake Elllese). But one day I came in wearing a Fila jumper for non-school uniform day and everyone was my best fucking friend. Kids are evil.
Or you could say “and then act surprised”.
Or you could say “and were shocked at the results”! It’s nice of you to highlight how people communicate differently even with a shared language, the world would be so boring if everyone was the same.
cum!
Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can’t imagine how it’s like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
“No one is bored, everything is boring”
Love that.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent’s garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today’s youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can’t imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
Right? Before that it was tv. Before that it was rock and roll. I was actually told to go outside more because I was READING TOO MUCH. Idk why everyone feels like their way of entertainment is better than everyone else’s. It’s so weird that we can’t let people enjoy themselves unless they do it our way.
Some play those exact same games ported or on emulators. it’s the circle of life 😆
DOSBOX & SNESEMU 4 life.
So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can’t do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to “vandalism” i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn’t given us any money since 2014.
My neighborhood has the same problem. There’s absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They’re on the playground, they’re biking on the sidewalks, they’re playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they’re f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
You forgot about angry mothers. They are scarier. That’s why youtube isn’t banned in russia yet.
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
I think hoops and sticks were big for a while
“we’re children! we’re children! we’re children!”
“Pay no attention to Wimp Lo, we purposely trained him wrong… as a joke.”
I think many worked. On the farm, in mines, in factories. Farmers would intentionally have many children just for extra labor. School hours and breaks are, in part, the way they are to let children work on the farm.
We do have new playgrounds, but the problem is that they’re very sanitized and only really suitable for preschoolers. Tweens usually just wander around without any exact place to go.
Even back when I was 9 and playground near my home was replaced with plastic shit for toddlers I knew it was plastic shit for toddlers. On the other side there was stuff for training though. Still nothing for 10-30 or not physically fit.
but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
You just hang out and do fun and stupid shit, it’s nice to have special place for it but a construction site and under the bridge is good enough. Problem is modern parents are extremely anxious.
I was with you until the “construction site and under the bridge” bit. It definitely takes a bit of imagination, but I’m not sure not wanting your kids to play on a site which requires the use of hard hats classifies as being “anxious”
Alternative would be garages roofs, which can be more dangerous.
Under the bridge is where the junkies hang out and you’re a shit patent if you want your kids messing around construction sites lmao
what fun and stupid shit?
Like play games (like war or something), roam around, make fires, have “gangs”, play other pretend stuff (basically role playing but without any real rules ) - ask your parents and grandparents what they were up to when they were kids.
make fires?!?
Yes, more a country side thing, you go to a secluded spot and make a fire.
And aerosol cans, don’t forget the aerosol cans
- This is a privilege a lot of city kids don’t have
- No to fires lmao wtf
- They only did that stuff because there was literally nothing else to do. Not because it was more fun.
like war
Let’s don’t.
That sounds like an American problem. We in many countries in Europe don’t have that problem, but our kids still waste their time on smartphones.
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I’d said, he’ll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Also you are not getting bullied because you don’t have cigarettes or smartphones, but because you lack self confidence and because you are perceived as social weak (your friends and random bystanders would not come to your help).
No, you are getting bullied because humans beings are morons who will jump to bully whoever is perceived as different. Do not blame the victim, for fuck sake.
I’m not blaming victims. Obviously it’s on parents of the bully.
Maybe it’s an useful trait that saved us from the other evil hominids? That and the uncanny valley.
Well good fucking job evolution, you managed to screw over autistic people who have empathy while psychopaths who know how to fake it get to abuse everyone
I mean, they wouldn’t even survive if we were still living under the survival of the fittest stuff, which our society doesn’t allow most of the time 🤔
You have completely misunderstood this and are trying to overlay some bizarre Andrew Tate-esque psychobabble to explain your misunderstanding.
What? I talk just from my own experience.
You have drawn an incorrect conclusion about the specifics of the social mechanics and cited it as “from your experience” after presenting it as fact.
You could simply have a poor grasp of social mechanics, or be misinformed, misunderstood the original premise but ultimately it doesn’t really matter.
You implied lack of conformity and participation is not a cause of bullying - it absolutely is, its probably the original cause of most bullying.
A lot of words to say that you disagree, without actually explaining why bullies are not targeting kids who are at social disadvantage.
Kids can be real shitheads sometimes
Nope. You can’t expect me to raise my own child How dare you!
Just like the UK bill wanting an ID for porn sites. And, in the EU, Youtube is wanting my ID for age verification to follow EU law. Isn’t a much less authoritarian solution just to use blocklists, or even mandate sites send an unencrypted flag with content that is “adult” and browsers or routers can choose to deal with that or not.
Like if you don’t want you child to use a smartphone - just don’t buy one for them.
Youtube never asked for my ID (I’m in the EU). Which country is this?
They say EU law, and it’s only if I want to watch age restricted videos. But Czech Republic
Something, something, something, and then BREXIT comes to mind. That worked out well.
Like… join a protest demanding a smartphone-free childhood for everybody?
In Sweden, it was mandatory for kindergartens to have “digital learning tools” up until a year ago. I wonder who came up with that brilliant idea.
What I mean is that it might not be so simple as not giving them access to it if other institutions persist in forcing it on them.
Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.
Nobody can multi task. I wish this stupid myth would die.
“I’m good at multitasking” is just another way of saying you can’t focus on one thing at a 🐿️ SQUIRREL!
SQUIRREL? WHERE?!
I’m not easily distrac… - oh, wow, a blue car!
Your statement is just another way of saying ‘Since I can’t do it, nobody can, and people who claim to are liars’.
You do know that skilled chess masters can run multiple games at once, right?
They don’t make a move in each game at the same time though, the moves are still made separately and sequentially. Almost like they are alternating between tasks…
Fair point. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Multi-tasking should rightly be called “context switching”. Your brain is alternating its focus between two things in extremely quick succession.
Can I tune my brain scheduler?
Yes, sadly it is running in Windows Task Scheduler.
Can’t upvote this enough, I have had ppl literally bragging to me about their ability to “multi-task” 🙄
Or you hate when ppl can walk, talk and eat at same time
Ew you talk with your mouth full
Ew you can’t multitask
I have ADHD and have the opposite problem most of the time - I can’t keep myself on one thing.
Its pretty funny how people will take a single low-population college paper over the evidence of their own experience.
I multitask daily, I have to it’s part of my job.
It depends on the definition I guess. I would consider driving a car to be multitasking. But doing three different office tasks on my laptop feels more like context switching as someone dubbed it here.
But I’m just some dude it’s not like I’ve read any papers on it but that’s what it feels like for me.
Well I guess anything can mean whatever you want with that statement.
Good luck understanding objective reality tho. But at lest you’ll never be wrong or be required to call your assumptions into question.
Must be nice.
What about the left brain right brain simultaneous use, like people drawing two pieces of art at once or like how I can walk and be on my phone while being completely aware of my surroundings.
Sometimes my brain is thinking in one space and my body is doing another. Like I hit auto pilot and stepped away from the cabin, yet the plane is still flying.
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
That would be TV
Where I live older people don’t know how turn on phone. They watch tv instead. Those who have some sanity left also go outside, sit on benches, talk with each other and keep your bike from being stolen.
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it’s scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don’t see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When’s the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
Wow, this sounds really dystopian. You monitor the porn that your daughters are watching? Then you’re an absolute nut job and maybe you should be the one who should have their technology access regulated.
She is under 12! Start thinking before you shout.
And btw it’s not monitor porn but porn filter
dystopia is when you limit your child’s exposure to pornography. wtf
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Yup, I’m disappointed, but most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
Ahh yes, we should let our 4 and 7 year old kids have unfettered 24-hour access to porn, gore, and combat footage or we are treating them as literal subhuman animals.
Never change Lemmy.
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How old is she?
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we fought valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it’s a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be “cool” online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
On Android, I’m using Google Family Link. Pretty much locks down and takes control of the entire phone and let’s you manage it all remotely, it’s akin to attaching a Windows computer to a centrally managed Active Directory domain.
Screen Time on iOS is proper road kill. It’s not clear, it’s slow to update and it does not obey screen time restrictions.
Yes, I use family link, too. The only annoying thing are general age restrictions. I am the parent and I need Element.IO for my kids that is rated 18. It doesn’t let me install it, even when it’s our private chat server. Fuck those people who make decisions for parents.
It’s not that they basically don’t work, they pretty much don’t work full stop. Most of my experience with them was in ios 12 but even in 16 they’re still crap
And Apple know, of course they do. But there isn’t any profit in letting anyone use your phone less.
Honestly I think this is the way to go. You can only avoid it for so long. Rather than trying to stop them it’s probably more effective teaching them control and how to navigate this flood of potentially dangerous influences.
Yes, if you always need to tell your kid what to do, it’s all your job. Teach them to think like you think. It saves a lot of work and is less stressful.
And what was the result? Did that work?
Depends what you mean by “it worked”. Of course the kids play too much games and watch too much YouTube. But at least I have kids that are happy and I really have fun with.
It’s also easier to tell them what I want when I really need them to do something. What I want to avoid is to have kids that don’t have respect towards their parents.
I guess it’s also my attitude. I really like to come back from work and have fun with my kids and see them happy. I know many parents who rather try to get their kids to sleep as soon as possible to have time for themselves.
Lol, I would’ve been bullied in school if I didn’t have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
This, tbh. You don’t get bullied for something, you get bullied because bullies want to bully.
In my experience it’s usually the ones that stick out and aren’t seen as “cool”. Not even nerds, just people that are different in one way or another.
So everyone
No? Not everyone got bullied when I went to school, and I’m sure it’s not very different nowadays.
My point is that everyone is “different in one way or another”, so we’re all fair game. That might be getting bullied in front of everyone for being a stereotypical nerd, or it may be another clique talking about you behind your back for dressing preppy and hanging out with the “cool kids”.
I think it depends the most on whether the child has a group of friends or not.
Yeah, fair enough
I didn’t have a phone until I was 16 despite most of my peers getting one around 12/13. I didn’t get bullied for not having a phone, in fact no one really made any comments on it other than an occasional “wow, I couldn’t live without my phone!”
Granted, this was over ten years ago, and was probably the first generation of teenagers where cell phones were near-ubiquitous. I don’t know if kids nowadays would get bullied just for not having a phone, but it would severely limit their social interactions. Riding your bike and knocking at your friends’ doors randomly, or going to the mall and expecting you’ll find some people you know there, these are from a bygone era.
I had a phone, but it was an old one, so people made fun of that.
*Poison for any young person.
No doubt. I’ve only had girls at that age so didn’t want to generalise.
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I’m disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.”
—Orson Scott Card, Ender’s GameIt’s important to note that a big part of that book is repeated evidence that Ender is not a “normal” child. He is heavily implied to have murdered one of his bullies before he was ever pulled out of society and into training (where he explicitly kills another bully).
Nah that quote’s from the foreword, he’s talking about himself
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren’t an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren’t adults it’s a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
*when I use the term young adult I mean ~16. Apparently young adult can also mean 18-25 but I’ve never seen it used in that context before.
It’s more of an American thing I think. A 20-year-old child, I’ve literally seen that phrase used. Mental.
with modern science, we have learned that the prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully developed until around age 25. does that mean you’re a child at 24? no. but you are adolescent, and we should have some cognizance about that
If you cannot behave like an adult by the age of 24 there’s something more wrong with you than your prefrontal cortex.
This is not about behaviour, it’s about brain functions. Humans brains under the age of 25 function in a different way, because they are not fully developed, no matter what behaviour people learnt to show.
I was 24 years old. I was the same person I am now that I’m over 50.
You literally are not.
I have ADHD, I don’t think mine will ever fully develop.
Uncool boomers be like: “It’s the damn phones”, when they’ve created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They’ve created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, “It’s dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I’m talking to you?”
It seriously is part ‘those damn phones’.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Eh, I have to agree begrudgingly. I remember having this discussion with someone I know about mental health post smartphones. We came across a few studies tracking mental health of adolescents for the past few decades. To compensate for lack of data (due to lack of mental health awareness, yadayadayada), they tried to inductively predict this missing data using various factors. The interesting part however was the increase in mental health issues in the early 2010s. Now of course, while their data might be quite error prone, I think it makes sense logically.
- More exposure to fked up world events (like Gaza, Ukraine, lack of climate action and so on) leads to one being depressed of course.
- In my experience, faceless trolls are much worse than in person bullies.
So yeah, I do agree with you. The situation is not black and white. Unfortunately, the uncool boomers (sorry for the lame term,-I use it to not generalize all boomers) do not see it that way. Banning smartphones in schools is one of the stupidest things to do. Uncool boomers purely blame smartphones, and almost always engage dialog in bad faith. It’s mudslinging basically.
Now, if I present a nuanced opinion here, it won’t be considered at all. Essentially similar to the “leftist long paragraph” meme. Therefore, to combat this, mudslinging back is most effective. At least it drives home some idea (in this case, the idea of walkable city design). Is this bad faith? Yea, unfortunately. But does it make sense to try to have a good faith dialog with someone who doesn’t want to have one?
Sorry no, there have been several studies about the negative mental health impacts of always on social media life in teens but you just like muddying the waters so you pretend it’s anyone’s game and give a backhand at the end of your drivel.
Pretty sophisticated but still just forum sliding bullshit.
Edit: ITT people butthurt about being called out on their toxic social media habits
Sorry no, there have been several studies about the negative mental health impacts of always on social media life in teens but you just like muddying the waters so you pretend it’s anyone’s game and give a backhand at the end of your drivel.
I haven’t come across these, but I don’t deny their existence. I just wrote down what I’ve come across myself. I already agreed with you on this point.
Pretty sophisticated but still just forum sliding bullshit.
I’m sorry that you feel that way. But as you demonstrated just now, you are not interested in engaging in good faith. You are still stuck on the “social media bad” train, when I already agreed with you on that. This is exactly what I mean by mudslinging. People just want to repeat certain phrases again and again, progressively louder and louder while vomiting ad hominems left and right.
It isn’t “forum sliding” if the topic is indeed that complex. But as I stated before, you are not ready to move on from “social media bad”. Hence, how can one engage in good faith in such a scenario?
- More exposure to fked up world events (like Gaza, Ukraine, lack of climate action and so on) leads to one being depressed of course.
What should I do if I live somewhere where fucked up event happens now? Or what kid in Belgorod/Odessa should do?
- In my experience, faceless trolls are much worse than in person bullies.
People have different experiences. Mine is opposite. It happens.
What should I do if I live somewhere where fucked up event happens now? Or what kid in Belgorod/Odessa should do?
Suffer. Studies like these are American/European centric in the first place. Their sample size never includes other countries (not because the researchers are evil lmao, but because they want to isolate this “phone factor”). A kid in Odessa is most likely suffering from the war today rather than suffering from the effects of Instagram.
Lol it has nothing to do with cars. I grew up in the 90s without a phone and my city wasn’t much different then than now. I was constantly outside playing and so were all the other kids
I grew up in the 90s and my entire childhood neighborhood is concrete now. The overgrown wash where we built forts is gone. The desert surrounding the area? Gone. It’s just roads, shitty apartment buildings, and cement for miles. Maybe it didn’t change for you but my kids could never grow up the same way that I did there. Most of the more wild areas are gone. Banished to the outskirts of town now. Hell, we don’t even really have sidewalks and hardly anything is walkable due to traffic. It has everything to do with cars in plenty of places. There is literally nowhere for kids to be kids within walking distance of me now either.
Few years ago when I played with kids outside in minecraft on phones.
This is the wrong take but it’s a part of it for sure.
Is it the boomers this time? I remember millennials thinking that about zoomers and now they’ve grown up, zoomers have been saying it about Gen Alpha calling them iPad babys
People say many things. It doesn’t change the fact that the ruling class is largely boomers. Hence, addressing the most influential voting class doesn’t seem so absurd to me.
25% of population gets 100% of representation
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Loll post this meme as a post!!!
Not all doomers did it. But those who didn’t were communists.
Children in countryside are behaving pretty much exactly the same when it comes to whining about smartphones.
You do realize that everything around you is mostly built by previous generations when you are not a “boomer”, cause your generation doesn’t do much yet other than differentiate between “cool” and “uncool”? And that’s true for every generation.
Criticizing the ruling class is extremely important to a functioning society. Baby Boomers are largely the ones in power around the world. The largest voting bases of all conservative movements are baby boomers. I wouldn’t mind if the generations that follow criticize us for stuff. That’s just how stuff works.
Not really, criticizing was commonplace and accepted in medieval societies, changes were made by disobedience and rebellions. (I have that fixation on Dutch 80-years war the last few days, hope to get rid of it.)
EDIT: Point is - it doesn’t matter what you say when that doesn’t serve to exchange ideas without interruption and control, and all the talk in the Web in that spirit is controllable and interruptible. Also this can’t be true, there simply were no baby boom in many parts of the world in those years.
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine “to fill the void” and “to not feel left out” is the correct solution at least for me.
a dumb phone and some other machine “to fill the void”
So a dumb phone and a stationary computer or laptop for internet access…exactly what most millennials grew up with.
After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
quite concerning that misinformation is not taken seriously enough and is allowed to poison minds like a plague with no opposition
The prophecy wasn’t on terminator, it was on metal gear solid 2, the truth will be unrecognizable from the fakes.
Yup Kojima 1000 years ahead of his time.
I think it may get to the point where tracking who owns what is a lost cause and societies with larger commons are going to pull ahead while our “individualism” centered societies will fall into an endless wave of scams and grifting.
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
Who says you need a contract. You can just get and activate a prepaid SIM.
Who says you even need cellular service? It’s just a different type of radio signal, VoIP has existed for years. If you even need a phone number. Every app under the sun has a calling feature now, but most people don’t use phone for calling anymore. Wifi is everywhere so cell signal is not as critical these days.
True! I used Skype on a PSP to talk to friends before I had a cell phone. They could more easily use a phone only with wifi.
Wow I had no idea Skype was on PSP.
There even was a camera for PSP specifically.
As a child, I was just not given home wi-fi password, and the cell plan effectively had no internet (to be fair, parents were on the same call-and-sms only plans as well). I definitely did not want internet bad enough to wander around in search of public wi-fi.
why would a kid havy £500
School lunches
A law saying phone companies can’t open a contract for a kid without a parent present?
In most US states kids under 18 can’t be held to a contract so nobody would give one to them anyway.
I think that’s what doublejay1999 is talking about. Look out for the hidden /s.
:-o
Even then, they can go to a dollar store and buy a sim card for super cheap.
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn’t teach you what a file system even is.
Is it that important? All technology gets better to the point of it just working, and when it rarely doesn’t, you contact someone who does. My grandfather could build cars from parts alone. My father could do most maintenance repairs and knew enough to understand what the mechanic was telling him. I know what video games and entertainment have told me about cars, but have no clue about it in real life. It hasn’t mattered. Cars are so reliable, I can just have AAA if I get in a bind.
It is. But in your defence at this point it only matters when something goes wrong. And that’s getting pretty rare.
I think it’s why there’s such a clear divide between people who “just use Linux” and those who don’t. Modern computers hide almost all information that would let you figure stuff out on your own and Linux makes you figure stuff out like once a month.
But all that means is that your choices are more and more limited. And it’s how Microsoft is able to sneak such predatory practices into their OS. You can’t go anywhere else
I don’t really agree with that conclusion. Linux is as old as windows and it had ample time to gain market share. Most people don’t want to tinker. I’ve posted recently about trying Linux for the first time in over a decade and how much worse the Ubuntu experience was than a decade ago. Meanwhile windows has gotten far easier to install and get going.
Really. Because it is all bloatware, all the settings menu’s are all over the place, things get jammed in your face ( Use this new thing we made so we can own you even more ) and other nonsense.
A fresh install of Linux takes me far under 30 minutes. Most of them work out of the box.
I just installed windows 11 in 15 mins on a 5 year old laptop for donation. The one with Linux had an unusable trackpad with no sensitivity setting, and some sort of flat pack installer system that I gave up on mostly because of the trackpad not allowing me to scroll more than a page and a half at a time. U until was easier 15 years ago.
Good for you. You can use whatever you want. Linux works for me.
Have you tried a fresh install on the laptop with Linux. May help at times
There are computer science students these days who don’t know what a file system is. Ponder that one for a moment
I had to take a typing class in college. They can teach basics. It doesn’t take long to go over file systems.
No it doesn’t. But I do university IT and recently did a file restore for a comp sci student. Sent him the file path. Student replied “the link doesn’t work what do I do with it?”
Honestly I am so grateful gen z can’t computer because my whole life I was worried they would replace me. Not a chance…
The goal is to change the norm, Fernyhough said, so that when children come to the end of primary school, the class “bands together and says, ‘Let’s all delay until at least 14.’
Yeah right that’s going to happen: p
They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them
Older people forget that the norm of childhood has changed. And assume that children should do the same things they did instead of learning how to moderate what they do
“Why don’t kids play outside nowadays” Look out the window. What outside? How do they play there? They could go to a park, but how do they get there? They could play in the city, but would that be safe? They could go bush, but how? They could play around the neighbourhood, and then what, make a tiny bike ramp by digging and gathering a bit of dirt from a drain and then get reported and then have the council send letters to everyone living in the area to ask if they’d seen the kids and if so please say who they are and then put up signs saying that the area (ie the big drain they got the dirt from and the bit about it) may be under surveillance despite there not really being anywhere to put cameras? (that last one is a true story from where I live btw)
Exactly! Much easier just making something as “evil” than actually solving the issues around.
Children shouldn’t be using their cells that much, but this is not solved by restricting access to it. It is solved by making communities and spaces child-safe and interesting for them.
Yeah that last one about the kids making the bike ramp happened a fair few (~7?) years ago and all the signs are still there
We used to use the “no ball games” sign as a target. Eventually it fell off the wall.
Usually some busy body police support community officer person, or some other individual in a yellow fluorescent jacket and no actual authority would turn up and yell at us, but we just wait until they went away.
Sounds sort of like those virginity contracts.
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don’t want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren’t is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
So then parents should just not get their kid a smartphone and stop trying to police everyone else’s kids. It really is that simple
Fair.
Perhaps we can imagine a society where nobody had thought of banning handguns for children. But you can just not buy your own kid a handgun if it’s so important to you.
Yeah I remember that story about those kids killing an entire school with their smartphone.
That’s definitely not a flash equivalency at all.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
I think the difference here is in scope of the problem. Video games do make the extremely rare case of murderous psychopathy worse, but it affects very few children. Smartphones affect almost everyone and the problems they are causing can be seen in quality of learning data.
My point stands that smart phones and guns comparisons are a false equivalency and should never be made.
I’m curious what you mean by the quality of learning data. People are getting smarter* on average than ever before. Young folk are more inclusive that ever before. As far as mental health goes, the general acceptance of mental health has caused an increase, and I’m not convinced social media has as much of an impact as that.
Access to mental healthcare has been hugely improved in the last two decades, and we no longer assume people are inherently bad or problematic when they have treatable mental conditions.
Either way, there’s just not enough data and understanding to make sweeping statements, and it reminds me of when rock and roll was evil, dungeons and dragons was turning kids into devil worshippers, tv made kids stupid, and video games made kids violent.
*smarter isn’t a great term here. Information and data is becoming widely available, increases knowledge and capability for every generation. IQ score are continuously going up and needing to be readjusted to keep 100 at average, but IQ is hardly a realistic measurement of… pretty much anything more than problem solving skills.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
