Comment by ryandrake
4 days ago
> 2. The gorilla in the room is that most adults can barely handle online media.
I think this is the huge one. Kids can spot hypocrisy easily. You can't convince a kid to not get addicted to social media if you yourself are addicted. Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
I do it by 1. not using social media and 2. when I do use my phone, set a good example by visibly using it for a specific purpose, putting it down after I'm done doing the task. Rather than just sitting there like a zombie scrolling and "consuming content." I'm deliberately trying not to normalize sitting there scrolling your phone, oblivious to the world around you. You can't hide this entirely because every time you go out into the world, you see adults everywhere zoned out mesmerized by their phones.
> Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
Wait. Surely these aren't the same. My dad smoked and always told us he'd kick our ass if we started smoking. From as young as I can remember, I understood it was bad and that he was addicted, he had tried, and would continue to try to quit numerous times. He didn't often smoke in front of us when we were young. He passed away before my own kids were born. Emphphysema. At no stage in my life did I ever have any desire to smoke.
However, parents using their phone in front of their kids all the time. Well it's not obviously harming them, as far as the kids are concerned. There are also plenty of legitimate uses for technology. Kids can't discern between the two. Heck adults regularly can't.
Smoking by comparison is pretty freaking obviously a bad idea.
Just a thought: watching a parent leave to have a cigarette outside or something, from a child's perspective, isn't hugely damaging. The kid can't understand addiction nor lung cancer (and so on), so the kid's perception of "smoking = bad" is mostly only on how the kid themself feels.
With a phone, the kid can fell ignored, unheard, unengaged with the addicted parent for hours at a time, every single day.
Maybe kids will grow up thinking "hey, I don't wanna be a phone zombie like my daddy was," or something.
I begged my parents to quit smoking for a decade, and they finally did when I was 12.
I am so sensitive and triggered to smoke even as a middle aged man, it just smells so awful to me, even the hint on a smokers clothes makes me gag.
Now we have pot, which apparently I can smell across state lines?? And through my cars hepa filter? Devils weed indeed.
It's insane to me the bandwagon that's developed around cannabis after the bandwagon around tobacco turned out to have been so devastating. "Surely we're smarter this time," everyone thinks.
My wife reminds me of this. And as you both pointed out, it's not just social media, but the algorithmically fueled addiction to endless content. A relative told me their teenagers have to use Chromebooks in middle school, and all quizzes and tests and homework are done on the computer. Not only that, but if they finish a quiz or test in the classroom, they're allowed to sit there and watch YouTube right there in the classroom until the period is over! When I was in middle school, that free time was precious to me because I used it to make a dent in my homework so I'd have less to do after school. It boggles my mind that school administrators would have no clue that kids should have not unfettered access to stuff like YouTube in school. As a guy who has to work on computers most of the time, I'm very grateful my childhood had plenty of analog time, and life in the great outdoors on a daily basis!
When my oldest was going into middle school the district started providing devices for the kids to use in class. There was breathless hype about how this would usher in a new age of technological competence and improved pedagogy. I asked the district IT folks in attendance what types of controls they had in place to prevent misuse -- watching YouTube, open browsing of the web, etc. They had literally nothing in place.
You can guess how that went.
I love Vernor Vinge's works, but the worst prediction of his ever, just 180 degrees totally in the wrong direction, was _Rainbow's End_'s treatment of technology in education. His take (and this was as late as 2006!) was that unfettered access to technology would turn elementary students into a cohort of genius autodidacts. Fast forward to 2025 (coincidently the date the book is set in) and unfettered access to technology has turned children into feed-consuming zombies.