Comment by pr0zac

I don't disagree with you regarding the negative cultural shift caused by social media nor your concerns about stuff like kids wanting to be TikTok famous. Where I do disagree though is your suggestion that kids now are exclusively content consumers at a level higher than in the past and the idea that tech like smart phones and tablets have caused that to happen. If anything it feels like kids have access to way more ways to be creative and create new things than ever thanks to those devices.

When I was about 10 years old I wanted to make a movie (it was going to be a basketball version of The Sandlot) but my parents didn't own a camcorder and couldn't afford to buy me one so I was out of luck and never got to experiment creatively in that way. Last time I saw my brother's family his 9 year old was super excited to show me the musical she and her friends had recorded using her Amazon Fire tablet. My cousin's 12 year old has a bunch of (actually rather impressive) stop motion shorts on Youtube that he created and edited on the family's iPad.

In high school it was super time consuming and slow learning to program reading books and writing simple command line programs I could only run after being super careful installing a Linux distro from a CD in a magazine on my family's one PC cause the C book I bought was unix focused. Now my significant other's 16 year old niece is learning to program on an iPad with Swift Playgrounds, she was literally doing it sitting on the beach last time we went on vacation together. My sister's 11 year old meanwhile loves showing off the frankly ridiculous number of levels he built in Roblox just using an iPad.

Like yeah, theres definitely a lot of kids (and adults) that do not create and only consume content, and I've definitely seen all of the kids I mentioned doing the dead-eyed-stare-at-glowing-screen thing, but I don't think thats new, most kids and people in general have always been like that. And yes most devices are mostly used for consumption, but suggesting those devices limit the ability of kids to be creative just seems incorrect when I see them providing so many creative outlets that I never had access to because they didn't exist previously.