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Comment by Shared404 | Hacker News Reader

This x1000.

I live in TX, and it is many people's greatest fear that their kids might start to think differently than their parents.

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Yikes, really?

And what do they fear the impact of this to be? (Honest question)

Cultural change. Loss of their political power. Less consolidation of capital.

^ this is a good summary.

E for more detail: Most individuals who feel this way fear at least one of these greatly, and may or may not fear the others. The people I am thinking of mostly fall in the "cultural change" category. See (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924352) for one example.

My fear is that culture of my people will be assimilated and co-opted. My culture is thousands of years old, and we've survived plagues, war, and murder.

I'd like to transmit this culture to my children as I feel it's valuable.

I wager though that if we grabbed a person from your culture from two thousand years ago they would find many differences comparing their experience of the culture with yours. It's inevitable that it will change and adapt over time. The only completely fixed culture is the one that has no participants any more.

Of course we've adapted and learned from our experience. But it's done by us and for us.

Unless invited, it's reasonable to reject others imposing their values on our culture.

> it's reasonable to reject others imposing their values on our culture.

I do agree with this sentiment for all cases with a caveat (for any given culture)

- Protection of individuals must be improved/maintained. Racism and queerphobia are two obvious examples that many of us would do well to move on from within our own cultures, and will lead to youth rejecting the culture that they are raised in (in my experience)

This doesn't need to be _forced_ on any given culture, but it will be the end result, as if a given culture refuses to drop baggage that youth find unacceptable it will eventually die.

This take is largely driven by my analysis of conservative's who claim to worship Christ, but I think is generalizable across cultures.

What happens if your culture is assimilated and co-opted?

Unfortunately, the surest way to kill a culture is to make it irrelevant. By that I mean, it has to be information that's incorporated the current cultural context, not just the context as it was when the custom arose.

Teaching children history and customs is great -- it informs how they live within society. But forcing them to only heed the customs of the culture back then makes them ill equipped to survive in today. That's many times more so in a multi-cultural society, as everyone's culture goes into the so-called melting pot.

I have respect for where I come from, but that knowledge alone is absolutely not enough to equip me for living in today's world. My parents (and many others) say it all the time "when I was X it was different ...". Yeah. It was.

Edit: to emphasize my sincerity. No disrespect intended and I hope non-taken.

It is many people's greatest fear that their kids might start to think...

This is terrible logic, as when does a corporation performing highly influential campaigns ever have the public interest at heart? In which case, the easiest way to show why this is a bad idea, is imagine if the roles were reversed (i.e. social media was instilling values you didn't agree with and thought were backwards). I don't have to agree with either side to think that allowing a corporation to have such influence over the formation of children is a terrible idea. Especially when said corporations have a long history of scandals (TikTok bowing to CCP, Facebook and Cambridge Analytics, Twitter...)

The only reason I can think of, for why we would be OK with this, is not a principled stance - rather, you just support the political views social media is instilling.

> rather, you just support the political views social media is instilling.

People being able to see ideas outside of what their parents and communities see, particularly with respect to human rights (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924352)?

I suppose I do agree with that.

To be clear - facebook? Trash. Twitter? Trash. Instagram? Trash.

But it is important for people to learn that things they've been told their whole life are not necessarily true, and social media is sometimes the only way for that to happen.

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