That would also spur the market to produce actually nice pure communication devices. Flip phones could stop being for people with AARP cards again and would give better options to adults who don't want the smart phone all the time.
When I was an early teen I had access to the internet but my activities weren't entirely unsupervised (and I doubt yours were either). Since it was a new technology there was a lot of discussion around how best to talk to children and make sure they felt safe reporting threats or harms to parents.
A smart phone is too disconnected of a device when compared to the desktops we all grew up on. No one is talking about fully banning <18s from the internet (at least no one serious) - it's a discussion about making sure that the way folks <18 use the internet is reasonably safe and that parents can make sure their children aren't being exposed to undue harm. That's quite difficult to do with a fully enabled smart phone.
That would also spur the market to produce actually nice pure communication devices. Flip phones could stop being for people with AARP cards again and would give better options to adults who don't want the smart phone all the time.
And have schools stop giving kids laptops or tablets. I wonder how much of the Chromebooks for school incitive was to develop a new market for Google
It's wild seeing these opinions on hackernews of all places. Do we want future generations to know nothing about computing?
I would not be here if I didn't get my start in my early teen years.
When I was an early teen I had access to the internet but my activities weren't entirely unsupervised (and I doubt yours were either). Since it was a new technology there was a lot of discussion around how best to talk to children and make sure they felt safe reporting threats or harms to parents.
A smart phone is too disconnected of a device when compared to the desktops we all grew up on. No one is talking about fully banning <18s from the internet (at least no one serious) - it's a discussion about making sure that the way folks <18 use the internet is reasonably safe and that parents can make sure their children aren't being exposed to undue harm. That's quite difficult to do with a fully enabled smart phone.
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