I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
The goal is to change the norm, Fernyhough said, so that when children come to the end of primary school, the class “bands together and says, ‘Let’s all delay until at least 14.’
Yeah right that’s going to happen: p
They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them
Older people forget that the norm of childhood has changed. And assume that children should do the same things they did instead of learning how to moderate what they do
“Why don’t kids play outside nowadays” Look out the window. What outside? How do they play there? They could go to a park, but how do they get there? They could play in the city, but would that be safe? They could go bush, but how? They could play around the neighbourhood, and then what, make a bike jump by digging a bit and gathering some dirt from a drain and get reported and then have the council put up signs saying that the area may be under surveillance despite there not really being anywhere to put cameras?
Exactly! Much easier just making something as “evil” than actually solving the issues around.
Children shouldn’t be using their cells that much, but this is not solved by restricting access to it. It is solved by making communities and spaces child-safe and interesting for them.
Yeah that last one about the kids making the bike ramp happened a fair few (~7?) years ago and all the signs are still there
We used to use the “no ball games” sign as a target. Eventually it fell off the wall.
Usually some busy body police support community officer person, or some other individual in a yellow fluorescent jacket and no actual authority would turn up and yell at us, but we just wait until they went away.
Sounds sort of like those virginity contracts.
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn’t teach you what a file system even is.
Is it that important? All technology gets better to the point of it just working, and when it rarely doesn’t, you contact someone who does. My grandfather could build cars from parts alone. My father could do most maintenance repairs and knew enough to understand what the mechanic was telling him. I know what video games and entertainment have told me about cars, but have no clue about it in real life. It hasn’t mattered. Cars are so reliable, I can just have AAA if I get in a bind.
There are computer science students these days who don’t know what a file system is. Ponder that one for a moment
I had to take a typing class in college. They can teach basics. It doesn’t take long to go over file systems.
No it doesn’t. But I do university IT and recently did a file restore for a comp sci student. Sent him the file path. Student replied “the link doesn’t work what do I do with it?”
Honestly I am so grateful gen z can’t computer because my whole life I was worried they would replace me. Not a chance…
It is. But in your defence at this point it only matters when something goes wrong. And that’s getting pretty rare.
I think it’s why there’s such a clear divide between people who “just use Linux” and those who don’t. Modern computers hide almost all information that would let you figure stuff out on your own and Linux makes you figure stuff out like once a month.
But all that means is that your choices are more and more limited. And it’s how Microsoft is able to sneak such predatory practices into their OS. You can’t go anywhere else
I don’t really agree with that conclusion. Linux is as old as windows and it had ample time to gain market share. Most people don’t want to tinker. I’ve posted recently about trying Linux for the first time in over a decade and how much worse the Ubuntu experience was than a decade ago. Meanwhile windows has gotten far easier to install and get going.
Really. Because it is all bloatware, all the settings menu’s are all over the place, things get jammed in your face ( Use this new thing we made so we can own you even more ) and other nonsense.
A fresh install of Linux takes me far under 30 minutes. Most of them work out of the box.
I just installed windows 11 in 15 mins on a 5 year old laptop for donation. The one with Linux had an unusable trackpad with no sensitivity setting, and some sort of flat pack installer system that I gave up on mostly because of the trackpad not allowing me to scroll more than a page and a half at a time. U until was easier 15 years ago.
So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can’t do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to “vandalism” i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn’t given us any money since 2014.
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
I think many worked. On the farm, in mines, in factories. Farmers would intentionally have many children just for extra labor. School hours and breaks are, in part, the way they are to let children work on the farm.
I think hoops and sticks were big for a while
“we’re children! we’re children! we’re children!”
“Pay no attention to Wimp Lo, we purposely trained him wrong… as a joke.”
That sounds like an American problem. We in many countries in Europe don’t have that problem, but our kids still waste their time on smartphones.
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
My neighborhood has the same problem. There’s absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They’re on the playground, they’re biking on the sidewalks, they’re playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they’re f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
You forgot about angry mothers. They are scarier. That’s why youtube isn’t banned in russia yet.
We do have new playgrounds, but the problem is that they’re very sanitized and only really suitable for preschoolers. Tweens usually just wander around without any exact place to go.
Even back when I was 9 and playground near my home was replaced with plastic shit for toddlers I knew it was plastic shit for toddlers. On the other side there was stuff for training though. Still nothing for 10-30 or not physically fit.
but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
You just hang out and do fun and stupid shit, it’s nice to have special place for it but a construction site and under the bridge is good enough. Problem is modern parents are extremely anxious.
what fun and stupid shit?
Like play games (like war or something), roam around, make fires, have “gangs”, play other pretend stuff (basically role playing but without any real rules ) - ask your parents and grandparents what they were up to when they were kids.
- This is a privilege a lot of city kids don’t have
- No to fires lmao wtf
- They only did that stuff because there was literally nothing else to do. Not because it was more fun.
make fires?!?
Yes, more a country side thing, you go to a secluded spot and make a fire.
And aerosol cans, don’t forget the aerosol cans
I was with you until the “construction site and under the bridge” bit. It definitely takes a bit of imagination, but I’m not sure not wanting your kids to play on a site which requires the use of hard hats classifies as being “anxious”
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
why would a kid havy £500
Who says you need a contract. You can just get and activate a prepaid SIM.
Who says you even need cellular service? It’s just a different type of radio signal, VoIP has existed for years. If you even need a phone number. Every app under the sun has a calling feature now, but most people don’t use phone for calling anymore. Wifi is everywhere so cell signal is not as critical these days.
As a child, I was just not given home wi-fi password, and the cell plan effectively had no internet (to be fair, parents were on the same call-and-sms only plans as well). I definitely did not want internet bad enough to wander around in search of public wi-fi.
True! I used Skype on a PSP to talk to friends before I had a cell phone. They could more easily use a phone only with wifi.
Wow I had no idea Skype was on PSP.
There even was a camera for PSP specifically.
A law saying phone companies can’t open a contract for a kid without a parent present?
In most US states kids under 18 can’t be held to a contract so nobody would give one to them anyway.
Even then, they can go to a dollar store and buy a sim card for super cheap.
I think that’s what doublejay1999 is talking about. Look out for the hidden /s.
:-o
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine “to fill the void” and “to not feel left out” is the correct solution at least for me.
a dumb phone and some other machine “to fill the void”
So a dumb phone and a stationary computer or laptop for internet access…exactly what most millennials grew up with.
Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can’t imagine how it’s like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Right? Before that it was tv. Before that it was rock and roll. I was actually told to go outside more because I was READING TOO MUCH. Idk why everyone feels like their way of entertainment is better than everyone else’s. It’s so weird that we can’t let people enjoy themselves unless they do it our way.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent’s garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today’s youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can’t imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
Some play those exact same games ported or on emulators. it’s the circle of life 😆
DOSBOX & SNESEMU 4 life.
“No one is bored, everything is boring”
Love that.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones, as concerns grow about online safety and the impact of social media on mental health.
Daisy’s got kids of a similar age and we were both feeling really horrified and worried and just didn’t want them to have smartphones at 11, which seems to be the norm now.”
Fernyhough and Greenwell hoped the movement would embolden parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 14, with no social media access until 16.
Smartphones expose children to a “world that they are not ready for” because they can access pornography and content on self-harm and suicide, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health, Fernyhough said.
Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, called earlier this week for a complete ban on social media access for under-16s, and said more people will have mental health issues unless tech companies take action to restrict access to harmful content.
“They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them.”
The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it’s scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don’t see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When’s the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
Wow, this sounds really dystopian. You monitor the porn that your daughters are watching? Then you’re an absolute nut job and maybe you should be the one who should have their technology access regulated.
She is under 12! Start thinking before you shout.
And btw it’s not monitor porn but porn filter
dystopia is when you limit your child’s exposure to pornography. wtf
Yup, I’m disappointed, but most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
Ahh yes, we should let our 4 and 7 year old kids have unfettered 24-hour access to porn, gore, and combat footage or we are treating them as literal subhuman animals.
Never change Lemmy.
How old is she?
After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
I think it may get to the point where tracking who owns what is a lost cause and societies with larger commons are going to pull ahead while our “individualism” centered societies will fall into an endless wave of scams and grifting.
The prophecy wasn’t on terminator, it was on metal gear solid 2, the truth will be unrecognizable from the fakes.
Yup Kojima 1000 years ahead of his time.
quite concerning that misinformation is not taken seriously enough and is allowed to poison minds like a plague with no opposition
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we caught valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
Lol, I would’ve been bullied in school if I didn’t have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
This, tbh. You don’t get bullied for something, you get bullied because bullies want to bully.
In my experience it’s usually the ones that stick out and aren’t seen as “cool”. Not even nerds, just people that are different in one way or another.
So everyone
No? Not everyone got bullied when I went to school, and I’m sure it’s not very different nowadays.
My point is that everyone is “different in one way or another”, so we’re all fair game. That might be getting bullied in front of everyone for being a stereotypical nerd, or it may be another clique talking about you behind your back for dressing preppy and hanging out with the “cool kids”.
I think it depends the most on whether the child has a group of friends or not.
I didn’t have a phone until I was 16 despite most of my peers getting one around 12/13. I didn’t get bullied for not having a phone, in fact no one really made any comments on it other than an occasional “wow, I couldn’t live without my phone!”
Granted, this was over ten years ago, and was probably the first generation of teenagers where cell phones were near-ubiquitous. I don’t know if kids nowadays would get bullied just for not having a phone, but it would severely limit their social interactions. Riding your bike and knocking at your friends’ doors randomly, or going to the mall and expecting you’ll find some people you know there, these are from a bygone era.
I had a phone, but it was an old one, so people made fun of that.
*Poison for any young person.
Bjo doubt. I’ve only had girls at that age so didn’t want to generalise.
Yeah k, as a CF person who works with a lot of kids (PJD), Instagram, Fuckwitbook (Facebook) and Snapchat is very toxic for kids and even adults.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it’s a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be “cool” online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Honestly I think this is the way to go. You can only avoid it for so long. Rather than trying to stop them it’s probably more effective teaching them control and how to navigate this flood of potentially dangerous influences.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
On Android, I’m using Google Family Link. Pretty much locks down and takes control of the entire phone and let’s you manage it all remotely, it’s akin to attaching a Windows computer to a centrally managed Active Directory domain.
Screen Time on iOS is proper road kill. It’s not clear, it’s slow to update and it does not obey screen time restrictions.
It’s not that they basically don’t work, they pretty much don’t work full stop. Most of my experience with them was in ios 12 but even in 16 they’re still crap
And Apple know, of course they do. But there isn’t any profit in letting anyone use your phone less.
And what was the result? Did that work?
Depends what you mean by “it worked”. Of course the kids play too much games and watch too much YouTube. But at least I have kids that are happy and I really have fun with.
It’s also easier to tell them what I want when I really need them to do something. What I want to avoid is to have kids that don’t have respect towards their parents.
I guess it’s also my attitude. I really like to come back from work and have fun with my kids and see them happy. I know many parents who rather try to get their kids to sleep as soon as possible to have time for themselves.
Humanity never changes, adults still think we know better what’s good for young people than they themselves do. When I was a child and teenager, I hoped that this attitude would die out over the generations, seems that that isn’t happening.
I think part of the issue is that there’s a lot more predatory shit on the internet nowadays. I say this as a person who has had unfettered access to the internet since my tweens. Social media and The Algorithms have changed the internet, and not necessarily for the better.
Just as a for-instance, if you go to YouTube on a freshly installed browser without logging in, the front page is kind of wild. Then the algorithm will pull you down a rabbit hole and kids who haven’t been taught that they’re being manipulated are going to start taking everything as fact from people like Tate.
We didn’t have things trying to get in our heads to this extent; while I do wish the kids had their freedom, I also recognise that the internet has become hell. I can understand why parents would try to shield their kids from that.
Generally they do. Of course they are responsible for all the dumb shit in the world, but also most of the good and interesting.
Young people don’t get dumber as they age. They get smarter, wiser, better able to cope with adversity. Setting sore back and knees aside adults are doing alright when it comes to raising the young.
American Republicans seem pretty dumb to me, they probably were smarter as open minded children
The cult-y parts of republicans shure are, because dumbing down a message so it cannot be refuted is how cults keep members.
Republicans arent inherantly dumb.
You sound young.
Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Or you could say “and then act surprised”.
Or you could say “and were shocked at the results”! It’s nice of you to highlight how people communicate differently even with a shared language, the world would be so boring if everyone was the same.
cum!
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
I think if the kids want to bully, they’d just find a lonely and defenseless target and invent an excuse. If you are a potential target, having an expensive phone wouldn’t save you anyway.
You’d be surprised! I was bullied throughout school for my shoes (fake Elllese). But one day I came in wearing a Fila jumper for non-school uniform day and everyone was my best fucking friend. Kids are evil.
Not just pressure to get a fancy phone but that most of the socializing happens on social media now. Even if they sit in the same class, it’s a snapchat message.
If they don’t have access to it, they’re social outcasts by default.
It’s fucking crazy…
That’s still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
Maybe he just didn’t tell you.
He may not have been bullied, but he may have missed out on bonding and closeness that his peers enjoyed. There was a study that showed life is way better for kids if they don’t have a phone, but only if their peers also don’t have phones
This fact alone makes me conflicted about this. I don’t want my kids to walk around having phones from an early age, but I know first hand that being excluded as a kid is not a enjoyable experience. And kids are vicious creatures to each other too.
All I never had was a Gameboy I didn’t get an actual phone until I was in high school.
It had polyphonic ringtones and an IR blaster, it was the business.
lol people calling 15-year-olds “little lads” makes me feel like a baby
(i’m 13 :/)
Prob a good way to get your kids bullied lolz
They can get bullied for not having phones, they can get bullied through phones and social media. They can get bullied for not having stupid ass Fortnite skins. Anything is an excuse for shitty kids who want to bully,
I don’t give a shit, don’t get them anything. Make them wear raggedy clothes and not use deodorant, I’m sure they will be fine
Pretty sure that clothes are more important than fortnite skins
I’m pretty sure I never said they weren’t.
I’m disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.”
—Orson Scott Card, Ender’s GameIt’s important to note that a big part of that book is repeated evidence that Ender is not a “normal” child. He is heavily implied to have murdered one of his bullies before he was ever pulled out of society and into training (where he explicitly kills another bully).
Nah that quote’s from the foreword, he’s talking about himself
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren’t an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren’t adults it’s a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
It’s more of an American thing I think. A 20-year-old child, I’ve literally seen that phrase used. Mental.
with modern science, we have learned that the prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully developed until around age 25. does that mean you’re a child at 24? no. but you are adolescent, and we should have some cognizance about that
I have ADHD, I don’t think mine will ever fully develop.
If you cannot behave like an adult by the age of 24 there’s something more wrong with you than your prefrontal cortex.
This is not about behaviour, it’s about brain functions. Humans brains under the age of 25 function in a different way, because they are not fully developed, no matter what behaviour people learnt to show.
I was 24 years old. I was the same person I am now that I’m over 50.
You literally are not.
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
I don’t really see phones as a problem, it’s the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it’s too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.
