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I would note that friendship has never been defined by the casual and vapid interactions at the grocery store. My longest lasting friendships have been ones I f

I would note that friendship has never been defined by the casual and vapid interactions at the grocery store. My longest lasting friendships have been ones I formed on irc 30 years ago and still go on, despite only rarely speaking face to face. People who don’t understand something that didn’t exist when they grew up assume it must not be possible. People assume that games crush creativity, that social interaction online is not actually social interaction. These same biases based on “the way we did it” show up in the RTO debate and other areas of society that are being changed with a new mode of interactions. Human beings are remarkably adaptable, and I don’t think for one second that online interactions are necessarily worse. I do think we are going through a transient period where as a society we adjust, and transient periods are rough. But as we learn to exist with these new modes of living we, as a social whole, will simply adapt how we interact and live, create new social rules about how to best exist with these new tools. As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different. Hand wringing and bans and teeth gnashing will happen, won’t help, and won’t alter the course of a single thing. Better, IMO, to lean into learning how to live with these advances in a healthy way and teach your children that. Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
> As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different. My position doesn't come from resistance to change. It comes from seeing statistics like this: https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy-life-has-doubled-with-social-media/ https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy... and from seeing how social interactions in person have degraded as smartphones became pervasive. >Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids. And yet this is exactly what we do with alcohol. You cannot buy or consume any until the age of 21. Do you think we should simply trust children to self-moderate alcohol consumption?
- jen20 3y ago
  If your world view is formed by an article in the New York Post, and doesn’t even start to account for correlation vs causation, I don’t really know what to tell you. And yes, we should trust people to learn self moderation for alcohol. It works very well across most of Europe. Puritans should be fucked off at every opportunity.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  This is my point about transient periods. What makes us believe that this trend is more than social adjustment to major change? That as a society we don’t have good social coping mechanisms for the new modes of communication and that over time we will adjust as we adjusted to all other disruptive changes? I don’t think children are, by and large, heavy drinkers regardless. These laws are more rooted in prohibition and Puritanism than science. Society prior to age laws didn’t collapse, and alcohol was available to children for at least ten thousand of years. In fact America generally has significantly worse problems with destructive alcoholism than the rest of the world, where the relationship with alcohol isn’t as obsessively restrictive.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

> As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different. My position doesn't come from resistance to change. It comes from seeing statistics like this: https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy-life-has-doubled-with-social-media/ https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy... and from seeing how social interactions in person have degraded as smartphones became pervasive. >Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids. And yet this is exactly what we do with alcohol. You cannot buy or consume any until the age of 21. Do you think we should simply trust children to self-moderate alcohol consumption?

jen20 3y ago
If your world view is formed by an article in the New York Post, and doesn’t even start to account for correlation vs causation, I don’t really know what to tell you. And yes, we should trust people to learn self moderation for alcohol. It works very well across most of Europe. Puritans should be fucked off at every opportunity.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
This is my point about transient periods. What makes us believe that this trend is more than social adjustment to major change? That as a society we don’t have good social coping mechanisms for the new modes of communication and that over time we will adjust as we adjusted to all other disruptive changes? I don’t think children are, by and large, heavy drinkers regardless. These laws are more rooted in prohibition and Puritanism than science. Society prior to age laws didn’t collapse, and alcohol was available to children for at least ten thousand of years. In fact America generally has significantly worse problems with destructive alcoholism than the rest of the world, where the relationship with alcohol isn’t as obsessively restrictive.