I think main issue is that http://www is commercial and it will not create authentic personalities out of it.
It is driving dopamine in wrong direction.
Today we have great personalities on internet because they are created when internet was not commercial.
Mine perspective is build on music, innovative and authentic personality was never created with exposure to "top pop charts" music.
I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
41–50 of 305 posts
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid". It's a trade-off - is peer ostracisation worth the benefits from lack of tech? Most people, myself included, would say "No". > Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse. It is not a moderate social constraint , it's a comple…
I'm curious about this peer group in which failure to have a cellphone results in "complete and utter exclusion". My nieces and nephews are in this age range (10-13 yrs), and none of them have cell phones, and none of them suffer total exclusion from their peer groups. As far as I can tell, they're all socially active and popular. Apparently it's different where you live, but I would take that as a bad sign on severa…
> I'm curious about this peer group in which failure to have a cellphone results in "complete and utter exclusion".
Well the article in question has the kids blocked from google search.
Such a radical block will almost certainly block everything else that their friends are using.
So, sure, they may not need their own phone, but at ages 10-13, blocking the child from all popular tech makes them more or less unable to join conversations with their peers who are not blocked.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#43I don't have kids yet but it is something that has been discussed about my nieces and nephews. As you say, you don't want your kids to become social pariahs but you also don't want to give them smart phones, in this day and age it looks like the two are intrinsically linked, which is disappointing. I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites l…
> I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say. I don't think so. Don't underestimate the intelligence of kids. If your kid actually understands the way dopamine works (on a sufficient level), they will cultivate their own way of attention-management.…
Why do you think children will be more successful at outwitting nefarious companies' behavioural scientists than adults are? It is widely acknowledged that companies are successfully applying methods of grabbing and retaining our attention in order to sell us things, so I'm a bit cynical that children, already not renowned for impulse control, will be any better than adults in ignoring that.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#44As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone when all of their peers do. Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah. I do wish that more parents (and society in general) would be more sensi…
It's a fine line and you have to go with some of it safely . However, there are items that are 100% toxic and as parents we need to decide what those are. Things like rap/hip-hop music as an example, or TikTok. There are some things that just can't be consumed safely by impressionable minds. When they're older they can get into them if they so wish, but my hope is that their brains by that point would at least be mat…
This is sarcasm, right? A music genre is categorically toxic? What? They will see TikToks anyway, at latest on the devices of their peers. The only sane course of action is to teach them how to deal with it, not to ignore the consequences of every control-freak-parent we've seen in the last 40 years and cosplay a fantasy-world where those things simply don't exist.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#45As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone when all of their peers do. Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah. I do wish that more parents (and society in general) would be more sensi…
Honestly, in this age where we all have the same culture, experiences, etc - is following along with the crowd a good thing? Is the crowd the best of us, or the worst of us? Are we are herd animal?
Its so easy to go along with whatever is making the headlines. Isn't it better to be that kid who is at least thinking independently, and having the childhood that humans were designed to have.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#46My oldest just got her first smartphone at 11. But it comes with rules. Screentime is limited. The phone does not go up to her room, it stays downstairs. She's allowed to take it out with her only when that makes sense for keeping in touch. No mobile internet (yet). We have open and frank talks about the dangerous sides of the internet and social media. And at 11, she can understand those warnings.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say. I don't think so. Don't underestimate the intelligence of kids. If your kid actually understands the way dopamine works (on a sufficient level), they will cultivate their own way of attention-management.…
Why do you think children will be more successful at outwitting nefarious companies' behavioural scientists than adults are? It is widely acknowledged that companies are successfully applying methods of grabbing and retaining our attention in order to sell us things, so I'm a bit cynical that children, already not renowned for impulse control, will be any better than adults in ignoring that.
The earlier they make their experiences, the earlier they can develop a mature response to abusive stimuli - if taught about the nature of those stimuli. I'm not advocating for giving developing brains blind access to predatory products. I'm advocating to teach them a healthy-as-possible relation with them.
And the reasons adults suck at this is just that: because we were never taught to deal with it, because our schools curriculae are in complete disconnect of the world we've built within the last 40 years. The mechanisms of attention are by no means rocket science, and kids are not braindead. Those who are generally able to understand and then recognize the dangers will have the ability to do so from young age, and the ones who don't have that skillset early on will never develop it anyway.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#48During the Facebook hearing, they said that its internal data shows that Facebook is most harmful for 14 year old girls. I believe that if you can somehow shield your daughter of that age from social media, she will be fine. I had a no display rule for our toddler but during my absence, her mother introduced her to the iPad, and now she watches YouTube on it whenever I’m not around. I know that the American Pediatric…
We took away Youtube Kids access after a few days. It's filled with so much very low quality "spam" content. E.g. random indians with thick accents singing to random recordings of them playing with toys and 5k iterations of that for every single kids song imaginable. And that's even excluding the potential of them finding content along the lines of "Elsa Gate". Youtube-dl is your friend. Download (or pirate) quality…
I found that she likes watching Blippi and that there are specially produced Blippi episodes on Amazon Kids, but I couldn’t find those videos anywhere to download nor could I subscribe to Amazon Kids! (It’s not available in my country!)
There is a Blippi stage musical on YouTube she watched already more than five or six times. I also see that it actually helps her language acquisition.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid". It's a trade-off - is peer ostracisation worth the benefits from lack of tech? Most people, myself included, would say "No". > Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse. It is not a moderate social constraint , it's a comple…
I'm curious about this peer group in which failure to have a cellphone results in "complete and utter exclusion". My nieces and nephews are in this age range (10-13 yrs), and none of them have cell phones, and none of them suffer total exclusion from their peer groups. As far as I can tell, they're all socially active and popular. Apparently it's different where you live, but I would take that as a bad sign on severa…
Even teachers use Whatsapp to communicate with pupils nowadays.
Here in Finland, from 13 and up, it's pretty much total social exclusion and severely reduced ability to participate in school work if you don't have a smartphone. Teenagers without phones is pretty much uneard of, apart from in some religious circles.
The thing about those teenagers is that they rarely meet outside school. Covid made damn sure parents are somewhat paranoid about social contacts, and having people over is still pretty rare. The result is teenagers communicating pretty much all the time, but it's all done over social media.
Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
#50As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone when all of their peers do. Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah. I do wish that more parents (and society in general) would be more sensi…
As someone also with two young kids, my hope is to instill the idea that they can and should use the internet for their own expression and communication, but that they need to do it with tools which puts them in control, and not the other way around.
There are "indie web" alternatives to the big social networks which everyone can use. Social networks without the algorithms that make you doom scrolling, messaging apps that do not track you or read your messages for ads, photo apps that do not have likes and do not gamify karma-whoring, and so on.
To make it even better, these apps are not exclusive to smartphone platforms, so they won't need a smartphone just to participate.
At least here in Germany, even my non-techy friends that are totally addicted to Instagram and Facebook don't publish anything with their kids. I am hoping that by the time their kids have grown a bit, these tools will be more popularized and accessible so that their kids don't fall into the same trap as their parents, and perhaps even the parents take the opportunity to do the switch themselves.