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.
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
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 first place.
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.
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
Desperate reaching. People who carry phones are bad people, I mean FFS, get real
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
So it's a flat no
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
The method of ingestion for short form video content is what I dislike, it encourages endless consumption. Each video is immediately followed by another video. It’s very hard to critically consume that style of content when you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing. I believe this leads to uncritically believing whatever you’re watching.
The format itself incentivizes sensationalism and puffery, I feel like I’m ingesting questionable information every time I’ve watched short form videos. That’s the main reason I reject short form video content outright, it just feels .. ‘wrong’ somehow.
Yeah but I don't control the people posting.
> you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing
Mine doesn't go to a new video until I tell it to, which is the same for shorts and non-shorts.
Notice how Shorts recently removed the dislike button?
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
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.
Sure. That's why I have mine mainlining China White. How will they learn to deal with addictive substances unless they're waist-deep in it?
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
On paper yes, biologically not really
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
16 year olds can currently have them with a meal in a restaurant or pub. Until a few years ago it was 14.
> It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I gave my kids some alcoholic drinks for just that reason.
I definitely think it is a result of learning more responsible habits from adults, with supervision of what and how much they are allowed to drink. There is a huge difference between having a glass of wine (and maybe starting with diluted wine as mine did) with a family meal and spirits with mixers with friends who themselves do not have good habits.
I think this applies to a lot of other things too: kids need to learn good habits and behaviour from adults in general. I sometimes wonder whether the worst effect on kids of phones is that they get less attention from distracted adults.
On the other hand, I totally agree with your last point! I find it quite plausible that maybe parents having phones directly detracts from the quality of the parenting that a child receives; if we're saying these devices/apps are literally addictive, it stands to reason that a parent might get hooked to the detriment of their child, and with a modern perspective of addiction, it's not due to a character flaw as much as just a fundamental bug in our biology and psychology as humans. It would honestly make more sense to me to restrict the use of smartphones/social media for parents than children, but of course that has zero chance of happening (and there are are surely a myriad of downsides for this approach as well), so in general I'm just skeptical of this sort of thing being enforced from the top-down despite being pretty extreme in my left-wing views (and therefore not particularly adverse to government regulation in cases where I think it makes sense).
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
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”.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
eMail, cash, debit cards still get me by <shrug>
Would you care to elaborate how you don't think a phone is not “practically necessary”?
I have never personally met someone like you. I've never known someone who personally met someone like you either. Theoretically, nothing is a necessity. That's why I wrote “practically”. Practically nobody lives like you do.
Can you rephrase sans the cascading negatives. To restate, I have a full life in a G20 country, I don't own or use a smart phone.
> I have never personally met someone like you.
There are many people on the planet.
> Practically nobody lives like you do.
There are many people like me .. you don't met them via your smart phone.
But I've had plenty of moments in my life without a phone, be it the battery is dead, or I've lost/broke it. And I've survived fine.
I've had to re-engineer some parts of life, but yet I remain...