I don't think American society has been served well by our tradition of trying to confine children to a pretend kid's world and excluding them from the actual world their going to have to contend with. Our drinking culture is awful, our children are routinely barred from "adult" spaces which keeps them away from adult culture and socialization, we treat nudity and sex like some kind of crime to the point where we're afraid to even talk about it. This culture of forbidding inevitably leads to confused, repressed, misinformed kids and we've seen the backlash across multiple generations. We see an alternative, across those same many generations, working in other Western societies, yet we seem stubbornly incapable of learning any lessons from these extremely apt comparisons. We have the data, yet we keep treating kids like "others".
This is more like trying to keep cigarettes away from little kids. Phones are little pocket dopamine hit machines that feed short attention span slop.
They could be something else, but there is no business model that can compete with addiction.
I agree that kids need more real world experience. Mindlessly scrolling TikTok and playing repetitive games with compulsion loops designed by psychologists to maximize addiction isn’t real world experience.
Or sugar. Or TV. Or video games. Modern technology may be more insidious but it's not the first threat of this type. Adults have been ranting and raving about kids relationships with media and technology and drugs and food and sex for a very, very long time.
It’s getting worse not better. We are creating an entire society that is wall to wall addiction that starts at birth.
I think a big problem with it is that people don’t realize how addictive this stuff can be or how manipulative and insidious it is. They’re not prepared for it and they get blindsided when it takes over their lives or their kids lives. Infinite scroll alone is incredibly addictive. Add other tactics and our stupid ape dopamine system is no match.
It might get better once we culturally assimilate this knowledge and realize that this stuff is more psychologically manipulative than we think it ought to be. We need to look at apps that use addiction patterns the way we look at drugs.
We think: It’s just a screen! It’s not like opioids or meth or something. How can a screen take over someone’s life?
The average TikTok user spends three hours on the app per day. Average. That means half spend more. That’s insane. Not to single out TikTok. It’s just one example.
Every generation says it's getting worse. They might all be right. I'm certainly not denying a problem. I'm arguing that that solution, to keep trying to create a walled-off fantasy world for kids to keep them safe, has been proven worse than ineffective over a very long period of time.
Drugs are actually a great comparison. We keep pretending that we've "banned" drugs. Yet despite the endless fortunes spent, civil liberties curbed and countless lives ruined by incarceration, drugs remain universally available, increasingly potent and very, very cheap. At a certain point we have to accept that a failed approach has failed and dig deep for the courage to try something different.
It is hard to say. I use to be a pack a day smoker but I think I would even be shocked by the level of smoking if I was transported back to 1985 at this point.
We seem to romanticize the past as if before smartphones kids would spent their time reading Aristotle and doing calisthenics.
No one had a smartphone when I was a kid and instead I spent hours a day playing Nintendo or watching trash TV.
On the other hand, it wasn't that long ago that people could go to the grocery store and push a shopping cart without looking at their phone the whole time.
I think these are just the problems of a society of abundance.
