Comment by closeparen
5 hours ago
Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.
You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok.
Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.
The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.
Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:
> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
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Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.
I'd say the main difference is that you couldn't take a device with good media capabilities, good and cheap-ish networking and lasting battery everywhere. Laptops, netbooks, tablets were a tad too bulky, lasted only a few hours unplugged and mainly wifi, and mobile internet was not all that great.
I don't know for kids specifically but average user time: 2012 1:30 2016 2:08 2019-now ~2:30
If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
If only we knew what could possible have happened right in that time period to really throw a wrench in the works of the education system...
Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.
If you click on the article that has actual data, the trend started in 2013 and has been mostly the same since then.
And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer!
we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain.