U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#261

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:36 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #121

cududa wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

By all accounts the experience varies enormously between troops. I’m sure someone who learned enough wilderness survival skills for it to be useful in their military career will pop up in the comments, and some more who suffered as you did.

In my troop, most of the kids had never been Cub Scouts. Everyone in my patrol earned Eagle, and we never did any of the prepackaged artsy-craftsy stuff.

We crafted meals and campfires and patrol flags and lashed together poles to make camp gateways with banners and flags hanging off of it.

We slept inside caves, rapelled down cliffsides, and did weekend-sized training trips for week-long outdoor travel destinations like Quetico/Boundary Waters for canoeing, and Philmont for hiking, and then still did the council-organized camporees.

My troop joined with several others in the council to organize our own summer camp, because they thought the one run by the council was too weak, with respect to earning merit badges. You might get two or three badges at Ransburg. In the LBL group-camp area, you might earn a dozen, while also learning stuff like bow-drill firecrafting that isn't even a requirement for any badge. If you weren't in the right troops, you didn't even know about it.

The quality of the adult leadership absolutely has an impact on the experience for the kids, and that varies greatly. The economic class of the parents is also a factor. Some of the more interesting activities cost more money. That's when fundraising and sponsorship comes in. Richer parents get to have more independent troops.

If I ever had any inkling of going into the military, it all might have been an adequate replacement for about four weeks worth of training. Which would have gone instead into unlearning independent initiative and doing things the military way, instead of the situationally adaptive way. Scouts has a lot of ceremony in it, which seems somewhat lame, cult-like, and pseudo-patriotic in retrospect. That might have helped in a military career more than knowing how to build campfires and small game snares.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#262

Post by ghaff » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

jfaat wrote: post #22

CharlesColeman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iPhone I doubt it. How many high school seniors would have owned one soon after its release? Too much of an early-adopter luxury item. I'd be curious to know when smartphones actually started became ubiquitous among older teenagers.

I graduated HS in 2007. I think I had 2 friends with iPhones, in an affluent town in Connecticut. My first smartphone was an iPhone 4 in 2010. It was still probably another year before smartphones were ubiquitous amongst my friend group.

The 3GS came out in 2009 and that's more or less the model that made it clear the iPhone mold of smartphone was the future. (I got a Treo in 2006 but that was still very much in the carrier walled garden on phones.) However, as others have said, feature phone texting was pretty widespread in the second half of the 2000s, IM was widespread, and social media was really starting to take off.

You can quibble about exact dates but it's pretty reasonable to take somewhere around 2008 as the year for online communications hitting some sort of collective inflection point.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#263

Post by asdff » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

low_common wrote: post #247

Zenst wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today. After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These…

I want my kids to either grow up in a huge city like NYC where I live or a rural area. I spent a year in a small town in rural NC and your kids can grow up wild. I think the suburbs are the stifling force here. They're too safe.

The suburbs are super restrictive for kids to interact. I had a friend who lived in a development that had like 1.5mi of winding roads and cul-de-sac before you hit his house. It took almost 5 minutes by car just to hit the exit of the development, which was a 45mph road without any nearby crosswalk and you'd definitely die on a bike. The place had no sidewalks either. If you don't have a license and the only means of travel is by car, what do you do? You get on facetime/videogames with your friends.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#264

Post by asdff » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

arcticfox wrote: post #93

RobLach wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 years from now teens will have a subscription to curated experiences for them to get together in-person for while their typical interpersonal interactions will happen over the Internet where it’s nice with a relatively null marginal cost.

> 50 years from now This sounds like 5 years from now to me, if not today in large part

I can see it now. We are already turning groceries into a subscription service, why stop there? $19.99 a month for a coffee a week, and the store is closed to starbucks nonsubscribers or they buy a day pass for $7. Oh but did you know new subscribers get spotify free for one month???

Huge companies have already captured the market and can afford buy out any alternatives or pay for favorable policy, only a matter of time until they matriculate our piecemeal purchases into guaranteed regular profit.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#265

Post by low_common » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #252

low_common wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want my kids to either grow up in a huge city like NYC where I live or a rural area. I spent a year in a small town in rural NC and your kids can grow up wild. I think the suburbs are the stifling force here. They're too safe.

I agree, it kills me to see a bus stop filled with idling cars of parents too scared to let their kids walk. Suburbs are incredibly stifling. Most of the recently built ones I've seen don't have sidewalks at all, it's very car-centric and closed off.

For sure. Here in NYC, I at least see kids walking home and hanging out with each other. If you can afford it, I'd say it's a great place to raise a kid.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#266

Post by kingaillas » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

strken wrote: post #149

cududa wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

When I did it about 15 years ago we got dumped in a fenced in bit of eucalypt forest with our pockets stuffed with "normal" items like knives/shoelaces/mueslibars/1.25L bottles of water/first aid kits and told to survive for 24 hours. Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours, we had quick access to leaders if we needed them, and we were all relatively trustworthy kids who'd trained f…

Wow, sounds like an Order of the Arrow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Arrow) Ordeal. My large-city suburban US troop did this (I moved away before I was eligible to do it)!

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#267

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #157

chillingeffect wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, so if I, say buy a cooking knife and get "caught" carrying it home from the store, "A court will decide if you’ve got a good reason to carry a knife if you’re charged with carrying it illegally." Or if I take a chef's knife to a friend's house to cook dinner with them, the same court will intervene? Presumably following an arrest? That second link is just so creepy to me (pacifist American). I can see how it use…

Back to reality, there's no problem with all reasonable purposes to carry a knife, like after purchase or for cooking. There's no problem carrying a Swiss Army knife. The police aren't looking for knives like this, and if they do find one for some reason, they are very unlikely to arrest you. If you've gone to a bar after your dinner party, and you're carrying the "cooking" knife somewhere accessible (like your pocke…

The non-locking 3-inch blade of a Swiss Army knife is not good as a weapon. If you ever need to use a Swiss Army knife for self-defense, flip out one of the half-length, center-mount tools--like the corkscrew, Phillips-head screwdriver, or preferably the awl--and hold the body of the knife in your palm, with the tool extending between middle and ring fingers. Then punch with it, until you get an opportunity to escape.

If you try to cut someone with the knife blade, you'll likely end up breaking it off or closing it on your own fingers. A knife weapon absolutely needs to have a fixed or locking blade.

And that's why a police officer will never have a problem with a non-locking pocketknife. A cop might. A pig definitely will. As long as the latter exist, you might as well carry a tool-knife with a "legitimate purpose" that can also be used as a weapon-knife if necessary, because following the spirit of the law won't help you it a letter-of-the-law bastard gets it in his head to screw you over.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#268

Post by asdff » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

CharlesColeman wrote: post #12

jacobush wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB+iPhone?

> iPhone I doubt it. How many high school seniors would have owned one soon after its release? Too much of an early-adopter luxury item. I'd be curious to know when smartphones actually started became ubiquitous among older teenagers.

I graduated HS in 2014. By the time the 4s came out they were pretty ubiquitous. Carrier subsidy existed to make one or two year old iPhones pretty cheap (I vaguely remember iPhone 4 being 'free' from verizon for a while). I didn't get one until after many of my peers (iPhone 5 era), but I had an iPod touch and a phone with a full keyboard which was a common combo among the people I knew who were later adopters of smartphones.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#269

Post by illegalsmile » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

winningcontinue wrote: post #142

hardwaregeek wrote: post #116

Idk if this is specific to my generation, but us young people suck at hanging out. People never confirm whether or not they're going to an event. They flake all the time, often without warning. If they're not flaking, they're perpetually late, often absurdly (nothing like getting to a place and getting a text about just leaving). It drives me nuts. But it's so ubiquitous, it's hard to take a stand against it. It's li…

I don't know if it's teenagers today, but that's always been the case for me and I'm in my mid 30s. Going outside close knit circle of people you know real well for a while, when you create an event people are perpetually going to leave their answer to the last minute or say maybe.

Perhaps that's the results of a fast-moving culture where, for most people, evening events and activities are prevalent and only a click away with the idea that the grass is always greener being prevalent. You don't want to commit to anything days, let alone weeks, in advance because maybe there will be something better to do. Maybe something you wanted to do with your friends a week ago no longer interests you or your couch is too comfortable to leave for the evening.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#270

Post by manfredo » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

Multicomp wrote: post #82

Zak wrote: post #14

Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be. As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and gradu…

Before 9/11, kids could get away with more. Not so these days (so I'm told) Anecdote: my dad was stopped in an early 70s Mazda that was barely running and had a rusty floorboard hole so big you could stick your foot in it and flintstone down the road if you were a moron. He and a buddy loaded up 3-6 rifles and threw them in the back seat to go on down the road to shoot some skeets and/or whatever poor Cardinals were…

I don't think it was 9/11. My siblings and I all spent our teen years after 9/11 but before the proliferation of smartphones (I didn't get mine until I was a senior in college). We all hung out with friends, often after dark. We went to public school and lot of our friends weren't high income so hanging out in person was the main method of entertainment. Maybe our experience was not representative of the norm. In retrospect our parents were strong believers in the antifragility of children, and consistently sought to give us as much freedom and responsibilities as we could safely bear. I remember doing things like changing oil, fixing lawn mower blades, learning how to use a chainsaw in my early teens. They took me to a shotgun class (because my dad got invited to a bird hunting trip) even though I had zero interest in guns at the time. I also took an hour bus ride to school through the worst part of town. My parents could have sheltered their kids from experiences like these but chose not to. Maybe they weren't regular parents, but I sincerely hope the claim that kids are so sheltered and isolated these days is rooted more in stereotype than fact.