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The kids with phones are alright

heatherburns.tech

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Re: The kids with phones are alright

#451

Post by Timwi »

marysol5 wrote: post #419
simonask wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We managed without smartphones before smartphones were a requirement for participating in society. That is, if you’re a millennial or older. We can’t just pretend that it’s possible to live an adult life without one in 2026. In 2008, certainly, but that’s not the world these kids grew up in. But we’re talking about kids, which is a whole different matter.

Meh, I've been a drunken idiot who's lost his phone on multiple occasions. I've still managed to exist in society and do everything I need to do with all the more "analogue" systems we have. Having to ring a friend from a phone box because I'd lost my phone the night before we were meant to meetup was fun

Strange thing to be publicly proud of.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#453

Post by Timwi »

stickfigure wrote: post #114
ilidur wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Settings -> time management -> short feed limits -> 0 minutes

Is this mobile app only? I don't see "time management" on the website.

I tried on both phone and desktop and couldn't find that alleged setting either.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#454

Post by Timwi »

mcv wrote: post #206
makeitdouble wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make a phone call Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning. > AI slop Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.

My kids call. Only they tend to call through Discord or Whatsapp instead of just using the actual phone, for some reason. But they call, and they pick up when I call them. They also call their friends for gaming.

I'm in my 40s and I also prefer to call people on Discord, Telegram, Signal or (if no other option available) WhatsApp. The phone dialer is just inconvenient, while the above-mentioned chat apps have all the contacts listed and easy to access. There's also a slight worry about being charged for every phone call and every SMS and having to worry about your phone plan and texting plan separately from your data plan; maybe that's not a thing anymore but it used to be really worrying, so it gives me more peace of mind to only have to worry about the data plan and nothing else.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#455

Post by marcus_holmes »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #390
marcus_holmes wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every generation thinks the tech that the next generation grows up with is harmful. After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...

Hmm, the argument is interesting, because it sounds convincing until you start examining it in greater detail. Allow me to point out how it is missing a mark. 1. Novels and phones are not the same tech. This is not 'generational quibble'; I am simply stating a fact. Just from pure historical perspective, written words were, correctly mind you, called out in that they will likely result in people not being able to com…

The point is not to say that "these two things are equivalent", or even "these two things are equally harmful".

The point is that older folks view new technologies as harmful, for a few reasons:

1. Any change is harmful as we get older. We grew up in one version of our society, and if society changes we view those changes as harmful because we become less comfortable in our own society.

2. Douglas Adams' quote [0]:

    Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

    Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

    Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
3. The mental models and priorities that the new technologies require are not the same as the old tech requires. E.g. reading a book requires the ability to keep attention on one thing for hours, while scolling a phone feed requires a completely different version of attention. Kids have been trained on the latter, and we older folks view their inability to do the former as damage, because in our upbringing, this would be damage. But it's adaptation to the changing environment rather than damage - the kids are growing up in a different environment than the one we grew up in, and they are adapted to that, while we are not.

It's the same mechanism at work for novels as for phones - the resistance to new technology looks exactly the same. We now look back at that resistance to novels as strange because we grew up with novels and consider them a normal (even outdated) part of our society. Future generations will look back at our resistance to phones as strange because to them phones will be a normal (even outdated) part of their society.

[0] the whole essay is talking about the same thing: https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

edit: formatting. So much formatting

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#456

Post by Telaneo »

Timwi wrote: post #449
api wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was on balance good until the algorithmic timeline.

I was on LiveJournal a long time ago and I distinctly remember seeing Facebook, when I first tried it after everyone couldn't stop talking about it, as an unviable alternative precisely because it didn't show exactly what you subscribed to without filtering or manipulation. So either the algorithmic timeline was always there, or it was introduced early on before Facebook got big.

I remember when it was just chronological, but it's been a long, long while since then. It might have been as far back as 2010 or earlier that change happened, but it was already 'big' by the time the change happened. I vaguely remember there being outrage because it was yet another change, along the same lines as all the design changed people also complained about, but complaining alone didn't prevent Facebook from keeping the changes.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#457

Post by roundabout-host »

marysol5 wrote: post #439
roundabout-host wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So force parents to give them devices running an even more nonfree, even more crippled OS. At least on a smartphone you can run GNU/Linux.

Huh? That's not defined in any legislation. Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....

GNU/Linux, not just Linux.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#458

Post by shant_extry »

gherkinnn wrote: post #156
NoPicklez wrote: post #96

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…

Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know it. You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required. Earlier this year (0): > “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack…

In spirit I agree with you 100%. As someone who (minus a MySpace account that lasted about 2 weeks, over 20 years ago, and a LinkedIn which only exists for job applications) never had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (you name it, I haven't had it). So I've been watching what's happened to people from the outside. I know there are positives to social media but the challenge is how to keep them while removing the bad elements.

I actually love your example of selling an otherwise good product with a poisonous ingredient and I think the most middle-of-the-road weapon against the negatives of social media is to remove those ingredients. For example, no infinite scroll, no algorithmic ordering, forced slow loading if you've been on it for more than a certain number of minutes, etc. (I'm just spitballing). In other words, undo/ban all technological features (or "ingredients") of the things that the social media companies have done that are deliberately meant to pull on weaknesses in human psychology. They know they're doing it. They hire experts to do it.

You've already got the receipt for this. That memo isn't a company that stumbled into harm and feels bad about it. It's one picking a launch window based on when the people who'd object are busy.

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