saturns

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the real actual Kato. Plausibly deniably DJ.

 
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pervocracy
@pervocracy

suffering from extremely mixed feelings about the push to get kids off social media, because it's 100% true that it's addictive and teaches dysfunctional behavior and is generally soul-eroding

but I don't see the corresponding passion for providing all-ages community spaces with no admission cost that are readily accessible via a public transportation network that goes deep into the burbs

so are they just supposed to stare at the wall or what


tati
@tati

This is being legislated is because social media provides kids with exposure to people and information that is not curated by their parents, and this lack of control makes them nervous because their whole worldview is reliant on keeping their children sheltered and misinformed. I see this as very much in the same vein as the banning of queer books, and books about race. The goal is to control the information kids have access to such that they cannot make up an informed view of the world and of themselves, and thus slow the bleed of potential ideologues.

This is unlikely to work though, partly because the internet is too big and partly because kids understand that actions taken on their behest, to "protect" them, are hollow at best and malicious at worse when there are much more deadly dangers to them than social media that those who claim to speak for them have no interest in resolving. Ultimately, it cannot be hidden from them that they are the maleficiaries of gerontocracy.


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

this is gonna sound like old man talk but legit like ... i used to just be able to go outside, play with the neighbor kids, try to break into a military installation, whatever

the way people talk about kids now it's like ... are they even allowed to do that anymore? like the malls all closed and the tv talks about letting your kids out unattended as tantamount to selling them to Epstein, and so I'm just like ... what the fuck, man, of course their all on tiktok

Yeah and the weird thing is my parents weren't the permissive type, they were very strict about some things, but "never leave the house" wasn't one of them. If anything it seemed like the other way around in my town in the 90s - indulgent parents gave their kids rides wherever they wanted, strict parents said you've got two good legs and I'm not your chauffeur.

my friends and I did break into military installations!

(admittedly we lived on an Army base so this applied to any time we went anywhere we weren't supposed to. most notably an old bunker that turned out to be full of bees.)

and yeah, I don't know anyone with teenage kids very well, my peers who have kids mostly have babies or grade-schoolers, but it does seem increasingly accepted that children should not be unsupervised for one moment and that would have made my childhood unbearable.

I don't know? I'm American but lived in the Marshall Islands from age 7-9 or so. I was free-range there but it was also a tiny island so you couldn't really get lost. And then when we got back to the US I didn't really go back on-leash, I was allowed to walk/bike around the neighborhood at 9 and I think I started taking public buses by myself at maybe 12? IIRC this was on the early side but not scandalous in the mid-90s. But things have changed a lot since then.

so the fear campaigns there were for the same reason -- the internet made kids realize things about themselves (while also exposing them to risk), and the risk was overblown because the people loudest about it were pushing for control instead.

it's hard to stuff the ballot box the long way around if your kids keep defecting before they reach the voting age.

i think another thing society hasn't contended with properly is the political disempowerment and objectification inflicted upon children. like the reason that that wouldn't fly and would be abusive if done to an adult is because the way in which a parent has complete authority and control over their children is limited to situations like brittney spears' conservatorship and we all do agree that that's abusive.

i think there are a lot of well-meaning liberals (and even moderates/gently conservative people) who are nervous about the effects that social media and electronics usage had and have on kids' thought patterns, and who wouldn't say that they think children should be legally considered their parents' property. but, those same people operate from the assumption that any legal decisionmaking on behalf of a child must be done by their parents and their parents alone, and drawing that to its logical conclusion gets you to some pretty uncomfortable conclusions about the autonomy that children are allowed to have. one of which being, the conclusion that restricting childrens' social media usage is 1) an available choice and 2) the right choice.

big agree that the disappearance of "third spaces" contributes to this though, plus the increased and ever-increasing lethality of the typical car on the roads to pedestrians. kids can't hang out "at the playground" or some such because doing so requires crossing a 6-lane highway that didn't exist when their parents were kids and they can't drive a car in order to do so, virtual spaces are the only free ones left that can allow them to socially cross those distances that their parents used to cross physically.

in reply to @tati's post:

This is a really important point and one that doesn't get acknowledged enough especially in the mainstream press. Utah is banning kids' access to social media for the same reason ultra-Orthodox Jews don't let their kids have smartphones. It is only "protecting" children in the sense that it is preventing them from meeting people like us.

along the same lines, i wonder if the fact that more kids are on social media is a symptom of the world just being worse and less navigable for them. like maybe we see the correlation between kids using social media and a youth mental health crisis because social media is where kids have to turn given no other options, and the mental health crisis precedes the social media use. idk but it makes me so sad for younger people - i'm not that old and things seemed so much better just ten years ago. in my hometown, as of a few years ago, kids aren't even allowed to enter stores along the main street without an adult until they're 18. it makes me so desperately sad for them.