I went to look around a nursery the other day, one that is attached to a school. We walked past kids that couldn’t have been older than 6-7 dancing (possibly filming) to a TikTok vid, on a brand-new looking iPhone.
I’m usually against governments getting involved in the internet, since they have such a piss-poor understanding of tech, but it would be good to see some kind of regulation that bans people of a certain age from operating a smartphone without a limited set of operations (i.e. to contact parents, to get school alerts, etc), alongside school bans for the use of social media on school grounds. My wife is a teacher, and cyber bullying is rampant, whether it’s the police getting called in over someone (underage) sending nudes and having them posted online once they break up, or fights being planned via iMessage or WhatsApp, and sometimes even people creating fake Tinder/Grindr profiles of their teachers (or to try to match with them).
Obviously, there are parents that’ll just say “fuck it, it keeps them quiet” or ones that’ll let them use a smartphone due to peer pressure, but a lot of it can be cut down before it becomes a problem.
In many ways, I’m quite glad I grew up with AIM and MSN Messenger. This kind of online power would have been crazy to me as a kid, and I don’t envy kids that have to deal with this landscape.
I went to look around a nursery the other day, one that is attached to a school. We walked past kids that couldn’t have been older than 6-7 dancing (possibly filming) to a TikTok vid, on a brand-new looking iPhone.
I’m usually against governments getting involved in the internet, since they have such a piss-poor understanding of tech, but it would be good to see some kind of regulation that bans people of a certain age from operating a smartphone without a limited set of operations (i.e. to contact parents, to get school alerts, etc), alongside school bans for the use of social media on school grounds. My wife is a teacher, and cyber bullying is rampant, whether it’s the police getting called in over someone (underage) sending nudes and having them posted online once they break up, or fights being planned via iMessage or WhatsApp, and sometimes even people creating fake Tinder/Grindr profiles of their teachers (or to try to match with them).
Obviously, there are parents that’ll just say “fuck it, it keeps them quiet” or ones that’ll let them use a smartphone due to peer pressure, but a lot of it can be cut down before it becomes a problem.
In many ways, I’m quite glad I grew up with AIM and MSN Messenger. This kind of online power would have been crazy to me as a kid, and I don’t envy kids that have to deal with this landscape.