5 ms·

When I was a kid and did something stupid because one of my friends did, my Mammy used to scornfully say "If <friend> jumped in the fire, would you do it too?"

When I was a kid and did something stupid because one of my friends did, my Mammy used to scornfully say "If <friend> jumped in the fire, would you do it too?" At what point did TikTok, YouTube et al become in loco parentis for so many people?

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> At what point did TikTok, YouTube et al become in loco parentis for so many people? Honestly, when Gen X started to have kids: they were latchkey kids, often with divorced parents, so they were used to the delegation of parental roles to devices like the TV more than any other generation before them. Millennials (like myself) have seen the 2nd iteration of this and grew up on the early internet, for good or for bad, and have learned to have better hygiene about it as we went through the pitfalls first hand after spending countless hours on AIM or forums: I personally spend a great deal of time online on my laptop, but it's 70-90% productive based things: studying for my AI and ML degree, or self-learning: reading articles, scientific journals, listening to podcasts, trying to get better at pytorch and tensorflow etc... Only 10% of my time is ever spent online with things like HN or Reddit (I like requesting DALL-E 2 prompts), and to be honest I want that ratio to be even less on the social side than what it is now because of things like this. Luckily, I'm seeing a significant downtrend in later Gen Z's reliance on social media dependence, some outright rejecting it entirely--unlike those that were born in the late 90s who's entire existence was built on these things. I hope this continues, and we can get back to sanity where having a kid requires you to interact with them and be involved instead of just shoving them in front of a device and expecting them to find their way. There will be plenty of time for that in the 21st century, but I just don't see how we can't see a direct correlation between ever absurdity in children's behaviour be it in very real mental health issues to things like woke-based non-sense to the their very early exposure to these things.

Melting_Harps 4y ago

> At what point did TikTok, YouTube et al become in loco parentis for so many people? Honestly, when Gen X started to have kids: they were latchkey kids, often with divorced parents, so they were used to the delegation of parental roles to devices like the TV more than any other generation before them. Millennials (like myself) have seen the 2nd iteration of this and grew up on the early internet, for good or for bad, and have learned to have better hygiene about it as we went through the pitfalls first hand after spending countless hours on AIM or forums: I personally spend a great deal of time online on my laptop, but it's 70-90% productive based things: studying for my AI and ML degree, or self-learning: reading articles, scientific journals, listening to podcasts, trying to get better at pytorch and tensorflow etc... Only 10% of my time is ever spent online with things like HN or Reddit (I like requesting DALL-E 2 prompts), and to be honest I want that ratio to be even less on the social side than what it is now because of things like this. Luckily, I'm seeing a significant downtrend in later Gen Z's reliance on social media dependence, some outright rejecting it entirely--unlike those that were born in the late 90s who's entire existence was built on these things. I hope this continues, and we can get back to sanity where having a kid requires you to interact with them and be involved instead of just shoving them in front of a device and expecting them to find their way. There will be plenty of time for that in the 21st century, but I just don't see how we can't see a direct correlation between ever absurdity in children's behaviour be it in very real mental health issues to things like woke-based non-sense to the their very early exposure to these things.