4 ms·

I once said that "Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it"

by alankay 10y ago

internaut 10y ago
> Kay: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. > Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us. The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves. It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today. I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope! I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.
- gkya 10y ago
  The introduction to technology, well, essentially I'm talking about internet, is so early on a kids life that we can't just say "we should control ourselves". You can't put your kid in a room full of crisps, sweets, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and expect it to come out ten, fifteen years later as a healthy individual that is not an addict to none of them. This is what we essentially do with the internet. > I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope! You're an adult, I am too. We can realize: this is stealing my life. But a kid can't. And stolen days don't return. This is why I'm commenting: we'd rather raise better individuals than letting them do wtf they want and hoping they'll fix themselves later.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I agree. it is pretty sobering. Just yesterday before this thread even started (I work as part-time cleaner) I was polishing a window. Through it I saw some children in a sitting room, one of who was literally standing centimeters away from a giant flat screen television. Glued to it. I thought: "Fuck, they don't have a chance". Their attention spans will be torn to pieces like balls of wool by tiny kittens. Now multiply that effect with the Net + VR and you have an extraordinary psychological effect best compared to a drug. I didn't have a television in my childhood. I read countless books, and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't have done any of the things I could reasonably consider inventive or innovative. They might not be world changing things, but they were mine and my life was better for doing so. I was speaking to a friend who has children a few months ago. He was in the process of uploading photos of his family to Facebook. I asked him whether he considered what he was doing to be a moral act, since he is for practical purposes feeding his children's biometrics into a system that they personally have not, and could not, opt in to. He was poleaxed by the thought. He was about to say something along the lines of 'well everybody's doing this' but I could visibly see the thought struck him that "wow, that's actually a really bad line of reasoning I was about to make". Instead he agreed with me, uncomfortably, but he got it. I don't know how you get millions of people to have that kind of realization. I do think parental responsibility has a huge role though. My parents got rid of the television in the 80s. It was the right thing to do.
    - Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
      The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff". We have to be extremely careful that our arguments have more substance than that. That requires a lot of introspection, to be honest. See, my grandparents worried that the new technology that my parents grew up with would somehow make them dumber (growing up with radio, parents getting television); my parents' generation worried that the technology we grew up with would be bad for us (too much computer, too much gaming, too much Internet). The upcoming generation of parents will grow up wondering whether VR and AR is going to ruin their kids' chances. Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted. There's a term for this worry - it's called 'Juvenoia': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-today-juvenoia/ http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-t... Now, I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be had - it certainly should. I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.

I once said that "Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it"

by alankay 10y ago

I once said that "Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it"

internaut 10y ago

> Kay: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. > Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us. The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves. It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today. I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope! I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.

gkya 10y ago
The introduction to technology, well, essentially I'm talking about internet, is so early on a kids life that we can't just say "we should control ourselves". You can't put your kid in a room full of crisps, sweets, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and expect it to come out ten, fifteen years later as a healthy individual that is not an addict to none of them. This is what we essentially do with the internet. > I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope! You're an adult, I am too. We can realize: this is stealing my life. But a kid can't. And stolen days don't return. This is why I'm commenting: we'd rather raise better individuals than letting them do wtf they want and hoping they'll fix themselves later.
- internaut 10y ago
  I agree. it is pretty sobering. Just yesterday before this thread even started (I work as part-time cleaner) I was polishing a window. Through it I saw some children in a sitting room, one of who was literally standing centimeters away from a giant flat screen television. Glued to it. I thought: "Fuck, they don't have a chance". Their attention spans will be torn to pieces like balls of wool by tiny kittens. Now multiply that effect with the Net + VR and you have an extraordinary psychological effect best compared to a drug. I didn't have a television in my childhood. I read countless books, and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't have done any of the things I could reasonably consider inventive or innovative. They might not be world changing things, but they were mine and my life was better for doing so. I was speaking to a friend who has children a few months ago. He was in the process of uploading photos of his family to Facebook. I asked him whether he considered what he was doing to be a moral act, since he is for practical purposes feeding his children's biometrics into a system that they personally have not, and could not, opt in to. He was poleaxed by the thought. He was about to say something along the lines of 'well everybody's doing this' but I could visibly see the thought struck him that "wow, that's actually a really bad line of reasoning I was about to make". Instead he agreed with me, uncomfortably, but he got it. I don't know how you get millions of people to have that kind of realization. I do think parental responsibility has a huge role though. My parents got rid of the television in the 80s. It was the right thing to do.
  - Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
    The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff". We have to be extremely careful that our arguments have more substance than that. That requires a lot of introspection, to be honest. See, my grandparents worried that the new technology that my parents grew up with would somehow make them dumber (growing up with radio, parents getting television); my parents' generation worried that the technology we grew up with would be bad for us (too much computer, too much gaming, too much Internet). The upcoming generation of parents will grow up wondering whether VR and AR is going to ruin their kids' chances. Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted. There's a term for this worry - it's called 'Juvenoia': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-today-juvenoia/ http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-t... Now, I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be had - it certainly should. I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.