18 ms·

I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that. But with unlimited net access also comes ext

• krstck 13y ago
  > But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... Those are all there in the real world, too. You can't protect kids from anything harmful or scary, nor should you. Stumbling across a porn or horror site is probably more traumatizing for the adult, anyway. It's like people have forgotten what it's like to be a kid! You've been told your whole life what to do, so there is nothing more amazing than the freedom to be treated like everyone else on the internet.
  • d23 13y ago
    Yup, I can honestly say that I wouldn't be the person I am today without that unfettered access. I genuinely consider the internet to have parented me more intellectually than my parents ever did (at least, beyond the age of 10 or so).
  • codygman 13y ago
    You're not really a 4 year old until you see your first beheading on the internet!
    • vex 13y ago
      I saw plenty of beheading videos and weird pornography on kazaa when I was 11-12. And I turned out just fine today, thanks.
  • DanielStraight 13y ago
    Really? Aside from rather extreme or contrived situations, the average person in the real world simply does not witness multiple graphic deaths or see thousands of women naked. Can we at least consider that there might be a psychological impact of the fact that in one afternoon you can see more horrors and more nudity than 99.999999% of the world would have seen in a lifetime two decades ago? That there is so incredibly much disturbing content and porn on the internet that the expected reaction is "meh", followed by moving on to yet more violence and porn? That there is so much porn that the craziest fetish you can imagine probably doesn't just exist online, but has an entire website dedicated to it? It is not just a difference of quantity either. The internet trains you to just move on from things which would have been life-changing events had you witnessed them in the real world pre-1990. Do you really think seeing a picture of a mass grave on the internet is the same as seeing one in real life? Do you think even seeing one in real life now is the same as seeing one in real life before it was possible to just ask the internet for thousands of pictures of one? In any fair comparison, the internet is absolutely nothing like real life.
    • marktangotango 13y ago
      Thank you for posting this. Too me the most worrying aspect of it all is the dehumanization of the people depicted in these videos. It's a very short journey from 'people like me' to 'people not like me' to 'not people at all'. Much of the evil that has occurred thru out history happened because the people following the orders somehow justified their acts by considering the victims to be something less than human.
    • Consultant32452 13y ago
      I think you have made a very strong argument that the internet content is not particularly damaging. As you assert you can see some pretty horrific stuff and just move right along. Of course seeing a picture on the internet is different than real life. Seeing that stuff in real life would be seriously damaging. Seeing it on the internet is "meh." I'd also like to add that I don't believe I've ever personally seen pictures of mass graves anywhere other than conventional media, television and news magazines. Yes, everything is on the internet, but if you're not looking for it you're not generally going to find it. And if you're looking for it, you're likely not going to be seriously harmed by seeing it.
• superuser2 13y ago
  >Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised. There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want. (As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.) >violent videos So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it. >social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult. As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school. >Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator. These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    Music is self learn able with instruments like the guitar, using online tabs and videos as a learning resource. There's quite a lot of famous self taught guitarists, although instruction at some stage can be useful. Sports can be pretty cheap too, playing soccer in a field is a popular activity with poor British youth.
    • superuser2 13y ago
      Good point on guitar, I guess I was thinking of piano, strings, and voice, which are quite popular where I live. Sports can be cheap but in extreme cases of (sub)urban sprawl, getting to a field - or the field where an organized game is happening - is pretty difficult without a car. Also you can't really play organized, coached, team sports without your parents signing liability waivers.
• hrktb 13y ago
  I'm on the fence. I think it's a matter of age, and being able to follow on damaging content/encounters. My kid if too small to go around the web yet, but I have the feeling there will be a point where as parents my wife and I will need to let him do what he wants without asking us anything, but we keep the ability to check the logs of everything he accessed with any device in the house It means being able to have red flags triggered on specific things or be able to trace what happened on some social network 2 days ago. 20 years ago my parents didn't care much what I saw of who I talked to in a ny given day as long as I looked fine, but there is a huge gap between the content we could randomly access to physically, and the kind of content one can now stumble on online. The hard part of course is at which point (8 years old ? 10 ?) will it be ok to let a kid with unlimited internet access and just try to guide him/her to dismiss corruptive infos and follow up on things the kid is not able to deal with alone.
  • superuser2 13y ago
    The litmus test: Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts? If not, then what exactly justified reading texts/facebook messages/emails between friends? >corruptive infos What exactly is corruptive information?
    • heartbreak 13y ago
      Mmm...tricky. Is it okay for the school to contact you when your child does not show up at school?
      • superuser2 13y ago
        School attendance is a legal mandate and you are financially responsible for serious fines if he doesn't. So yes. This is very different from telling you what he talked about at lunch or what he read in the library.
        • seestheday 13y ago
• jeorgun 13y ago
  My parents never restricted / supervised me and my brother's internet access much, if at all. I think this gave us an advantage, more than anything else, in terms of learning responsible internet usage from a relatively young age, and knowing that I wasn't being carefully watched everywhere I went online (by them, anyway!) was more or less essential in my getting involved in the communities that led to my developing an interest in programming. Of course, really this comes down to parenting philosophy more than anything else, but those are my 2¢.
• leoc 13y ago
  It's perfectly possible that you're both right, alas: that the best way to get pre-teens into programming is to give them free access to the internet, and that giving them free access to the internet is a bad thing to do given some of the other, … non-technical content out there.
• klrr 13y ago
  I think you underestimate the intellect of younger people. Teach them that there is shady stuff on the internet and to avoid it rather than restricting them. Restricting them will just make them more curious anyway.
• kstenerud 13y ago
  That stuff was there during the BBS days as well. I just don't buy that "seeing bad shit fucks people up forever" bullshit. You wrap your kids in cotton and stifle them throughout their childhoods with your helicopter parenting, and then you have the AUDACITY to complain when they grow up weak and immature?
  • omilu 13y ago
    Hush now baby, baby don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your Nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here Under her wing She won't let you fly but she might let you sing Mama will keep baby cosy and warm Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Of course Mama's gonna help build the wall
• Crito 13y ago
  When I was young, probably 12 or 13 I think, I saw a series of images of a spider bite on a mans thumb causing the thumb to swell, split open, go necrotic, and eventually require amputation. Did this damage me? No, I'm fine. I gagged when I saw the images, then I scrolled down and looked at some more. Lasting effects? Well today as an adult, I smash spiders when I see them. Not a big deal.
  • archagon 13y ago
    I disagree. I saw a ton of stuff I never should have seen at that age. It didn't scar me for life, but it's desensitized me to a lot of terrible things. Unless you're a doctor, I just don't think it's healthy to look at NSFL gore, go "meh", and move on to something else. I also occasionally have those images flash in my head. I don't want them there, but there's nothing I can do about that now. (Granted, the same thing would have happened if I first saw them in my 20s, but at least I would have known what not to click.)
    • Crito 13y ago
      I don't think that desensitization is an inherently bad thing. There are any number of things that people become desensitized to as they grow up. In this modern society, there are many adults who have never so much as seen a dead body (having never even gone to wakes). In previous generations, and in different societies, seeing dead bodies is common place and does not have the same power to disturb. Does it harm a child to desensitize them to the sight of a dead human body? I don't think so. Does it help? Probably. It opens them up to being able to experience a wider range things, even if it is just going to somebodies wake, being able to watch that optional-attendance autopsy video in highschool, or consider becoming a doctor. Further, in particularly prudish societies people may not be desensitized to exposed human flesh. Is an Amish child going to be damaged by the sight of a bare ankle? Is an American child going to be damaged by the sight of a finnish sauna? I sincerely doubt it. On the other hand, which is going to have a more difficult time wearing speedos when they join the swim team? Many humans in industrialized societies are unaccustomed to the sight of an animal being slaughtered and butchered. Are children that grow up in farming communities where they are desensitized to this somehow at a disadvantage when compared to children who grow up in urban communities and only know meat as "that stuff that comes from the store"?
• belorn 13y ago
  When will people understand that people online is no different from people you meet in real life. Some are shady, some will cause trouble if you talk to them, and violence exist everywhere? Violent videos are bad, but so is bullying. Should we demand that parents supervise their kids at school to prevent bullying? What about all the shady people on the street, in the store, or on buses. Should a responsible parent prevent a child from ever leaving the home alone? 24/7 supervising is not healthy. Constant watching will cause worse psychological harm than any extremely violent video will do. Instead, talk to the child, and one might learn that they are not interesting to see people burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaws, and thus will close videos that has that kind of content.
• jkrems 13y ago
  Kids are capable of closing windows. Yes, they might see something gruesome and have nightmares because of it. But they learn and close the window quicker next time.
• hifier 13y ago
  The beauty of the internet is that you have unfettered access to mountains of information. When I was in my early teens it was this information and ease of access that allowed me to learn about computers and how they worked. I would spend hours reading reviews of hardware components and researching solutions to hardware and software problems. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are ways of protecting your kids while still giving them the access that can seed a lifetime of curiosity.
• rdtsc 13y ago
  Technological access used to mean just that technological access not chat access to potential predators. I had a Z80 based ZX Spectrum (Sinclair) clone growing up. I had books on Z80 assembly, BASIC, tapes full of compilers (forth, C and pascal) but also tons of games. The worst I could do in my room was catch the house on fire ;-) but anyway, does it makes sense to have a laptop today and be cut-off from the internet? Is it realistic? I don't know. I would certainly be "going out of your way" from the default setup most people assume today.
• pantalaimon 13y ago
  Don't say you didn't browse rotten.com when you were 13, we would do so on school computers even before I had internet at home. (meh, now the page is only displaying odd advertisements for silly smartphone apps)
  • 70forty 13y ago
    Yep, rotten.com among others exposed me to things that I'm sure would've horrified my parents if they knew. I don't regret it though, I think it shaped me positively. I was around 11 when I saw this for instance: http://www.sibkray.ru/upload/blog/e4b/07.jpg http://www.sibkray.ru/upload/blog/e4b/07.jpg (extremely NSFW) I still consider it to be the most powerful image I've ever seen. It made me realize the absolute horror of war, in an instant. I would rather my child see this image than witness the cartoon violence of Call of Duty and then see military propaganda like the commercial below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkKF4ZcqW14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkKF4ZcqW14 Kids can handle reality with the right guidance. I have been "desensitized" I suppose, but only in that I'm capable of seeing similar images without cringing. Hopefully that would extend to a situation in which someone was critically injured, I would be able to jump in and help them without hesitation or squeamishness over the blood/gore involved.
• xerophtye 13y ago
  I am surprised you only mentioned violent videos and everyone seems to be going on and on about that. Aren't we forgetting porn? I thought parents were much more concerned about THAT rather than violent videos
  • nsxwolf 13y ago
    You're not allowed to have anything but the most positive possible opinion of porn on HN, so that was possibly self-censorship on the OPs part.
    • xerophtye 13y ago
      Well not saying anything about porn itself but I believe we are in universal agreement to keep children away from porn.
• SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  >I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home. I'm a hacker and "the net" didn't exist before I was 18. My learning came from the books I bought, and the magazines I subscribed to. Somehow, without IRC or Google to help, I taught myself to program a computer, and wrote an entire game in assembly language (reinventing the concept of linking object files in the process) which I then sold. While I was in high school. I also designed and built an expansion board for my computer with only the IC technical manuals. By college I was doing real video game consulting work. I had one awesome friend who was also a good programmer, and we lived and breathed programming together. But beyond that, I was on my own. It can happen without unfettered Internet access at 9 years old.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]