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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.
Parents weren't GPS tracking their children in the 1990s.
It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
in no small part "thanks" to social media, no? like yeah in the us and anglosphere it's no small part car centricity, but like the blog post points out, this is a trend that's visible even places that don't have school shootings and car centricity, so it kind of has to be social media. (actually proving it is hard but, like, at this point, i don't see how it can even be disputed by any reasonable person, only pedants…
But I’m not certain if it is possible to put that cat back in the bag.
It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
in no small part "thanks" to social media, no? like yeah in the us and anglosphere it's no small part car centricity, but like the blog post points out, this is a trend that's visible even places that don't have school shootings and car centricity, so it kind of has to be social media. (actually proving it is hard but, like, at this point, i don't see how it can even be disputed by any reasonable person, only pedants…
It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
One thing that comes to mind is that during my lifetime, and it’s difficult to pin down a specific time frame, the stigma surrounding mental illness faded pretty dramatically it seems. Now I don’t know if that change inflected dramatically in the early 2010’s—I would think that that process would be more gradual, but perhaps not? Is it possible that an existing problem has simply become dramatically more visible to us?
Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly.
Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck.
Life expectancy has gone down, markedly.
Debt is up.
New wars.
Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.
I deny a drinking age is necessary. From what it sounds like, the kids should be out there drinking more!
It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
Most urban spaces these days are incredibly depressing. No points of interest within walking distance. Lots of large and difficult to cross roads. Combined with the very real danger of cycling in many places. As well as the loss of small businesses that used to be interspersed in residential areas.
Teens are not allowed in malls and a lot of other (effectively) public places now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, GPS tracking may actually make parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to free roam.
If your parents know where you are with 3m accuracy it isn’t really free roaming. In other words, being watched or tracked will definitely affect a kids behavior.
It's still free roaming because the kid is 100% in charge of where they will go. That's the part that matters, not that someone can tell where they are.
Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future.
We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.
Since my youth climate change has been A wildly depressing concept to grapple with. Environment destruction period. I mean being depressed is one thing, living in a world that's literally cooking at the same time just takes it up a whole other level. I guess in the past, no matter how bad things got for you on a personal level, you could kind of count on the world being there if you got through it, now it's sort of 5…