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>limiting life outcomes of millions around the globe The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such

>limiting life outcomes of millions around the globe The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such are extremely US centric. Smartphones were a positive revolution for so much of the world. Consider the hundreds of millions of children (more than the entire US population exclusively used in this argument) growing up in rural poor households surrounded by illiteracy. They suddenly had access to the wider world. They had the opportunity to take initiative in ways they didn't have before. They had access to limitless education, and an easy way to pick up a global language. When kids left the village for a city they could video chat with family instead of going months of no contact. To some extent, I'm talking about the final leg of the internet revolution, not phones specifically, but in many areas of the world where electricity is intermittent, it was phones that finally drove wider internet penetration. Are there downsides? Certainly. is smartphone addiction and social media a problem? Research says that it probably is, but for a long time I've felt that the positive impacts on a global scale are being downplayed, especially in the US. Not everyone who gained cell phone connectivity had a PC at home with a steady power supply as a baseline, and schools stocked with computers. We have a huge wave of new people growing up who had access to far more information than the previous generation. If I'm going to make a casual, broad-sweeping generalization of impact, I'll hazard to guess that the positive impact is being greatly underappreciated globally.

dash2 1y ago
Are poor people more likely than rich people to use smartphones for literacy and education? My wife comes from a poor household in a developing country and the kids there are mostly playing games on them.
- fleischhauf 1y ago
  keyword is mostly here. it opens up the opportunities where there was really nothing before.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  Intuitively, kids are kids, and kids like to play. That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before. Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify. For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide). Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago). Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc. The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift. If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)
JKCalhoun 1y ago
You sound like a spokesperson for MIT's Media Lab and Nicholas Negroponte. I was skeptical of their message then, even more skeptical now. You acknowledge the downsides but I think we disagree wildly as to whether these outweigh the upside. I'd rather see a One Book Per Child global initiative. (Maybe Dolly Parton is on to something—Nicholas Negroponte should take note.)
- DiscourseFan 1y ago
  Its all very dialectical or whatever

dash2 1y ago

Are poor people more likely than rich people to use smartphones for literacy and education? My wife comes from a poor household in a developing country and the kids there are mostly playing games on them.

fleischhauf 1y ago
keyword is mostly here. it opens up the opportunities where there was really nothing before.
Fade_Dance 1y ago
Intuitively, kids are kids, and kids like to play. That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before. Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify. For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide). Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago). Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc. The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift. If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)

JKCalhoun 1y ago

You sound like a spokesperson for MIT's Media Lab and Nicholas Negroponte. I was skeptical of their message then, even more skeptical now. You acknowledge the downsides but I think we disagree wildly as to whether these outweigh the upside. I'd rather see a One Book Per Child global initiative. (Maybe Dolly Parton is on to something—Nicholas Negroponte should take note.)

DiscourseFan 1y ago
Its all very dialectical or whatever