Is the genie out of the bottle ?

[Observer II]

Just been watching a discussion on BBC breakfast, involving parents of kids that have died due to the influences of social media.  The last time I shared a family meal, I noticed how quiet all the kids were, reason, their heads were totally inside their smart phones.   So who's to blame ?   Who's buying these smart phones in the first place and for children as young as 8yo ?  It's the parents - so parents should ban kids from social media imo;  otherwise it's like allowing them to swim in a sea full of sharks, then blaming the sharks for eating them.   We don't allow kids to drive a car until they're 17yo, and even that is now under review; so why not a legal age restriction on access ?   We now live in a world where kids are no longer allowed to be kids, with increased sexualisation and lifestyle confusion, to the detriment of their innocence and mental health.  So take the smart phones off them.     

[Evil Sid]

being something of a luddite my solution would be a bog standard mobile phone.

able to send texts, take pictures and make phone calls.

parents can only do so much to safeguard their kids ditto internet services, even age verification checks can be worked around by any kid able to subtract numbers in their head or with a pencil and paper.

mobile phones are seen as a must have by parents for their kids so that they can check where they are, like that works, so tracking software is available provided you know how to use it and the kids haven't disabled it.

too much reliance on mobiles today, banking, purchases of just about everything can be done with a mobile phone and is encouraged by banks and businesses. even the train and plane operators are going that way with e-tickets doing away with the need for a paper one.

as a kid in my day the standard must have was a pushbike with more than a sturmey archer three gear system that was not made out of drainpipes welded together. my first bike was a butchers cast off, no gears big basket on the front and heavy enough to anchor a battleship.

these days it is a mobile phone that cost about the same as the average African villages food bill for a year.

[ninearches]

The internet can be great & it can also be a very bad place where all the ills of the world & all the weirdos who live in it can hide behind a keyboard & persecute victims with impunity.

[Confused52]

The people who designed the Internet designed it for people like themselves and not for kids. It is possible to make phones only see a fraction of the internet, such as through a permanently connected VPN (possibly run by broadcasters who have a lot to lose by getting it wrong),  which is made safe by someone they trust. Parents need to do that and remove harmful content that way. What I do not approve of is trying to limit the open internet or getting non-specialist content providers to censor content. It turns rapidly into censorship or results in poor performance as the bad guys only have to overwhelm the monitors at providers. The answer lies with Parents, nothing else works, I have been asked to look at this many times over the years and that was my conclusion every time.

[Bill]

People give all sorts of reasons why they think it’s acceptable for a child to be given a mobile device, but you’ll never hear anyone admit to the truth, in that its primarily to keep the kids quiet. Most young families live flats or small houses and parents can’t watch tv or read a book when there’s a room full of noisy kids all bouncing about so the simple solution is to give them all their own mobile devices, sorted! Back in the day when we were getting on our parents nerves, we were told to go out and play but these days you’ll never hear anything like that. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen my grandkids go out to play with friends, ever.

My grandkids all have mobile devices, the youngest was only five when his parents got him one as a Christmas present. Now that they’ve all got their own, the house a completely different place. It’s a seventy-mile round trip to visit them and we used to do that maybe once every couple of weeks but these days it’s just Christmas and birthdays. It’s so embarrassing to see the kids actually being forced to look up from their screens to say hello, and repeated again when we leave. I don’t like what I see in all of this but can’t really say anything because I can walk away at the end of the day, but the parents can’t. The only positive in all of this is both parents are sufficiently tech savvy to ensure that the kids devices have the proper safeguards in place.

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

people these days are too reliant on their mobiles.

just witness the frantic wandering about and mad gestures if they lose the signal.

the mass panic when they can't access whatever website or social media site because that site has a problem.

the real fear on their faces when the battery shows less than forty percent charge.

deprive somebody of their phone for even an hour and they suffer severe anxiety attacks worrying about what they are missing out on or what their mate sitting across the table is doing.

if they don't see it on their phone it didn't happen even when it is happening to them.

for me a mobile phone is a convenience handy for emergencies and when people need to get in touch with me, the rest of the time it sits either gathering dust on a shelf or sitting idly in a pocket. i will answer mine except when i am driving( i put it in a pocket that is hard to access to help resist the temptation) most of the time it is calls from somebody wanting something. (usually relatives) along the lines of "are you busy. can you......" taxi, lend me, print something.

[Bill]

I hardly ever look at the thing and don’t routinely carry it about with me, but it does come in handy as a sat nav or for telling me if anything’s wrong with the car. I can make calls from the car by just speaking, which is quite impressive, and if the car ever gets nicked I can even locate it on the phone. A few weeks back, I got into the car and saw a red battery symbol on the dashboard. Oddly enough it started no problem, and it wasn’t until later that I realized the car was telling me that it was my mobile that was flat. Doh 

Back with the kids though, there’s no way they’re going to give up their devices without a major tantrum and the parents won’t be wanting that, so it won’t happen. If we really want to solve this problem then it needs to be done through a whole raft of legal measures and in that way it doesn’t alienate the parents any further that what they already are. 

It's a difficult one and getting the genie back in the bottle just about sums up this situation.

 

Bill 😊

[Observer II]

So we'll have generations of parents complaining about little Jonny or Sahara being exploited on the internet, the reality being that it is self inflicted. Alas these days nothing is self inflicted, it's always someone else's fault - so zero sympathy from me.   I won't be around to see it, but I guess we'll sleep walk into crisis, where AI takes over completly, and we become surplus to requirements.  Such is the process of evolution.