As a parent of three I’d suggest that it’s probably the best to teach them to use them as tools not entertainment.
As I quoted elsewhere, any extremist or reductionist position makes things worse for them.
As I quoted elsewhere, any extremist or reductionist position makes things worse for them.
In the 90s, if you were a nerd in high-school, you get a chance to re-invent yourself in college, and another at your first job. Heck, you can re-invent yourself between different groups of friends. Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.
Tons of kids grew up glued to their Nintendos. I played an _insane_ amount of Starcraft. Our generation did not have the same negative effects that the current generation is having with social media.
What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.
For what it's worth, none of this has been my experience at all. I'm not even really sure what the first sentence means exactly.
That’s a really interesting suggestion. It reminds me of haolez’s comment yesterday (abridged by me) [0]:
> I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on.
> The group became popular and the admin […] merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. […] What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point.
> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties).
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Both of you get at the same point - private and manageable (and moderatable) communities are probably a much better option to allow everyone freedom to interact without feeling insignificant (due to size), and with the right moderation, can be a place which allows healthy conflict, discovery and rule-bending, and the other things that we were able to get up to as kids without our parents knowing, while maybe being moderated by a third party who isn’t acting as an authority figure (people won’t get in trouble for reasonable rule-testing), maybe even some sort of private task-specific bot which looks only for egregious bullying, hate, and scheming?
I really like your suggestion and would love to see it fleshed out.
The one thing that I feel differentiates from current-day is that I would like to see automatic enrollment (or ability to enroll) for everyone from the target audience, e.g. not student-run and only one clique, but nothing wrong with it also allowing private sub-areas. There shouldn’t be a technological or social barrier to entry, it should be up to each person (child, in this example) to log in and participate. That would probably help a lot of the shy or socially awkward kids bridge the gap.
What do you mean by variety is the problem?
A lot of the lack of curiosity is because so many kids are taught to view curiosity as boring, rather than fostering that curiosity as just another form of play.
There are even things like minecraft plugins/servers where text is translated to a language of your choice, and everyone is encouraged to use only that language to collaborate which can be such an exponentially fast way to learn languages without ever feeling like it's a chore.
So don't be afraid to seek out things that blur the lines between education and play! Foster that creativity and curiosity.
Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if parents are seen zombie-scrolling through Instagram for hours, and then they tell their kids not to zombie-scroll because it's bad for you, well the kids will know their parents are totally full of shit.
It's impossible for parents who are themselves addicted to smartphones to tell their kids not to be addicted to smartphones. The parents need to cure their own addiction first.