Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
All popular systems with negative impacts will always have a claim to virtue.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then? What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media. Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impa…
Kids shouldn't have smartphones until much later, like late teenage years. A flip phone for kids who are out of the house regularly with some contacts is fine. No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone? If I didn't have work and to chauffeur people around, id toss mine too.
You don't need to convince me, my point was that they can have them but with limited capabilities, like only being able to SMS and call.
Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to. Same for AI.
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
Do people really want to restrict 16 year olds with alcohol? 16 is nearly adult, they need to learn responsibility
I appreciate giving another perspective, but alcohol is not a good analogue of phone. There's no need to “learn” how to use alcohol --- one can do without it. Yet, practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
> practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
no. it isn’t.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
The severity depends on where you are, even within a country, but in many places you can't authentically "function as an adult in the world" without a phone, unless you want to roleplay an adult from the previous century. In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone. The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the…
This is obviously an overstatement. Sure, a phone is convenient, but we managed to function just fine without smartphones. I assure you, it's possible to do all those things without a phone.
Without knowing where GP is posting from, you can't make that claim. We can want and wish it were true, but there exist places where it's no longer possible to do things without a phone because the service requires signing in online, or the form is only available via the website, there is no paper version anymore. Parts of the world are moving on from bits of paper, no matter how much you don't want that to be true. Parts of the world also aren't, we simply don't know where GP is so you can't make that claim.
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls. A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
Give them a bottle of scotch and pack of cigarettes as well.
yeah i’m not sure where people are coming from when they imply the best way to fight off an extremely addictive thing is to use it.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?