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Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
(yorkshirebylines.co.uk)
"Wait the internet is affecting our youth?"
"Always has"
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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I grew up on the internet with no real parenting and I turned out fine.
wonders why I think about dying at least once every 5 minutes every day
More importantly I grew up without the internet, and no real parenting, and ended up with lifelong major depression. And I manage suicidality on a daily basis.
We blame social media the way we blamed video games, and CCCGs the way we blamed violent movies and Gangsta Rap the way we blamed Rock-＆-Roll and Dungeons ＆ Dragons. What we're not willing to look at is how we force both parents to work, so they aren't around to parent and when they are they're too exhausted from working.
In fact, no-one is okay. We have intergenerational mental illness and our healthcare grossly underserves mental health interests, which figures into why our suicide rates are creeping higher every year while Japan's (where suicide is more culturally accepted) is lowering. It figures into why the Christian nationalist movement and transnational white power movement are lousy with new members.
It doesn't help much that the old myth of upward mobility has been thoroughly debunked, that we're anticipating a global population correction in the next century and our leaders are all inheritance aristocrats who act childishly on the House and Senate floor (or in Parliament). The society that demands we do better and give 100% can't help but do everything half-assed.
So no, we can disregard this given we can't be bothered to give our kids school lunches or even a daily wellness check-in.
We blame social media the way we blamed video games, and CCCGs the way we blamed violent movies and Gangsta Rap the way we blamed Rock-＆-Roll and Dungeons ＆ Dragons.
Look, there's a lot to be critical of about parenting and the demands of current day society, but when I was a kid, being bullied 24/7 even while away from the bullies, having algorithms target my particular individual insecurities and being covertly groomed by strangers even while being actively supervised by responsible adults were not possibilities. It's not just a moral panic to blame social media, it actually created more risks for children than anything else on that list, and this is one responsible parents actually would be doing good by keeping their kids away from it.
Responsible parents
And I submit we don't allow such things, at least not often, not without above-average household income.
In the meantime, it took into the 1990s before we realized it is not enough just to let parents do their thing. Family dysfunction, child abuse, child sexual abuse ran rampant not just within homes, but in schools and churches. The Satanic panic was part of our recognition that these are things that actually happen.
So, I submit that the first step is not to block kids from the internet (at which point you have to decide when you're going to decide when they should be allowed to make mistakes about dangerous things, knowing they're going to get into trouble and cause harm) but to provide for a society in which parents can be enabled to parent. Because they are not, and haven't been before I was born.
Besides which, when a kid is stuck in a dangerous home, the internet is one of the resources they can go to in order to get informed about the danger they are in, and maybe how to escape it. Of course, SESTA/FOSTA killed some of those information sources, and KOSA is going to kill even more of them, since it's not about hiding porn from kids but LGBT+ information, even when it's educational.
I can agree. I don't think most regulation purported to be protecting children actually does anything to help, or that they are drafted in good faith at all. There's fearmongering and overreach involved, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as sex workers, take the brunt of the impact most of the time. But these new risks are there.
Even if parents were enabled to parent more, and a lot needs to change to get there, there still would be a need to educate about these new risks and aid them to protect their kids. The average parent is not nearly aware enough of what they ought to be watching out for, or how to handle it.
And as hesitant as I am about how it would be implemented, there must be some reasonable degree which we should expect online platforms to take measures too. We can demand brick and mortar businesses to take measures for child safety, why would it be impossible online? Though unfortunately the politicians we have are not nearly internet savvy and measured enough to formulate these reasonable standards...
To be fair: The internet you grew up on was quite different to the internet we have today.
But nonetheless: I think every generation (at least in modern times) has its own thing nobody else has experienced before, so most likely they will turn out okay...
I think the simple fact that depression and anxiety are rising drastically amongst youth is enough of an indicator to say that they are not turning out OK
I wonder if it has anything to do with needing to be a millionaire to support a family and the earning potential being locked away under skyrocketing costs of education.
When people have no hope for a future and start realizing that their ability to succeed is being placed behind wealth tests, they give up. When an entire generation gives up you see it in the population decline. Most people don't want to start a family knowing they can't afford it, so they just refuse to. They'd rather just sit around and do as little as possible since doing as much as possible will not reward them.
This situation has been in the making since at least the 1970-80's but people have been preaching about self correcting markets and nonsense like trickle down economics to cover for the inevitable collapse due to an entire generation+ realizing they're totally fucked with no hope of it getting better outside of a full political overhaul that won't happen.
This is going to sound like a tangent, but I think car centricity holds a lot of blame for many societal issues.
150 years ago you would just walk wherever you needed to go 99% of the time. Now we drive 99% of the time. Most people don't have a strong community/village physically in the real world. This lack of interpersonal interaction leads to lack of empathy to some degree among society.
Lack of empathy makes it all about me and not society. That at least marginally contributes to income inequality among other issues.
We can improve society on a national, state and local level by advocating for pedestrian improvements. I would argue walkability of cities is one of the greatest issues of the 21st century, and historians will hopefully classify this century as one in which we realized our past errors and took steps to correct them.
The internet, as experienced by most humans today, primarily consists of ads, sponsored content, propaganda and spin. I don't really see how it's contributing to our development in a constructive manner.
I see a bigger "risk" if you want to call it like that, in AI chats, because they make you really lazy in double checking or overall searching and solving issues by yourself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it does reduce frustration, especially with technical issues you can solve quickly that way, but the risk of getting overall unskilled in problem solving, is growing bigger. Results are masked behind another layer, creating another instance to trust, on top of already existing ones. Paird with growing AI generated content. Which can be harmful as I'm sure no AI model will be able to stop getting confused by fake content. The wishful thinking, we just filter out AI fake content, is a pipedream.
We've already observed an overall trend of young generations moving backwards in their technical understanding of hard and software, simply because there's no real need to to understand it anymore. A lot of stuff has become one click easy, one pre build purchase, one pre defined way to use something. We removed friction in setups and UIs, no longer requiring to develop a bigger understanding on how something works. The result is a lack of insight on how to solve an out of the box issue.
I'm sure older people would say the same about me, being able to Google something, instead of reading byte code and reading a 1000 pages manual. So maybe everything is fine at the end, because humans adapt just fine.
The internet however, has been there long enough that we can say there's no issue. If anything parents should focus more on providing a necessary early development and not buy them a tablet on birth-day.
Everyone said the same thing about the Internet search engines and people using libraries less to look up research. Almost all the examples you listed below that is specific to technical computer knowledge and honestly isn't even relevant to 95+% of the population. The vast majority of people couldn't care less about knowing what's going on under the hood of computers, and they don't need to. Do you know how to effect repairs on your car engine? I don't, and I don't need to, as I don't care and it's not my specialty. We have mechanics and car engineers for that. It's not like computer engineers, devs, etc. will suddenly stop going to school to learn the nitty-gritty (although, purist devs will lament how so many modern devs don't know how to write low-level code, but again, most devs don't need to).
Those kids you're so worried about will grow up, obtain specialized training in whatever area they desire, and there they'll learn what's going on under the hood of whatever subject it is they're learning. Same as it ever was.
The AI proliferation of fake content is definitely already a problem. It has been for several years, just look at all the social division caused by automated bot trolls in relation to online discourse, as well as automated fake news websites. There are solutions to these problems, it just takes the government and citizens to actively work towards combating it. Taiwan is a recent example of how this can be accomplished with their recent elections coming under intense pressure by these fraudulent systems.
AI has its problems, but I hardly think it's going to cause us all to suddenly become braindead mouth breathers anymore than we already have been.
Edit: I will add that I'm somewhat concerned what AI chatbots that become so human-like will do to socialization. But that's a whole other topic
Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it
And that’s the thing to expand on my other comment. Kids are who are restricted from access to devices and the internet are at a complete disadvantage to those that aren’t. But it does need to be monitored by parents.
I’ve heard of both sides from my own kids. There are kids who have been totally restricted who have secret accounts on social media and kids who had no restrictions who had social media accounts that were completely public when they were nine.
It does absolutely not need to be monitored by parents. How is a child who's being abused going to be able to get help or information offline if their parents are monitoring and filtering their internet? We need a legal right to unfiltered internet. Which is not to say we shouldn't, as equals, educate children about the risks of the Internet.
Is dependency on a cellular device for a dopamine addiction disruptive?
Y'all are getting dopamine from your screens?
I get cocaine off mine
Ahh that makes sense then. Fun fact, cocaine acts as an reuptake inhibitor of seratonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. So while it does more than just that, that particular function is similar to how SSRI and SNRIs work. Hell if it wasn't for the side effects I'd probably use Cocaine as an antidepressant.
Cocaine usually depresses me. Until I do more cocaine.
That's the other problem, afaik there's not really a good level for a therapeutic dose of the chemical as it is. Kinda like the good effects are strongly attached to the bad ones.
Well, the process to make cocaine is…revolting. Gasoline, acid, etc. There’s no therapeutic amount of poison. Now, the coca leaf, on the other hand, sure. I’m surprised I made it out of my cocaine 20-teens. I wish it were 2080 so I could call them my cocaine 80s, but no such luck. I did all that damage to myself for nothin’
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