I had both experiences. When I was at my mom's house, technology was heavily limited, and in the hour a day I was allowed online, they were hovering over my sho

I had both experiences. When I was at my mom's house, technology was heavily limited, and in the hour a day I was allowed online, they were hovering over my shoulder the whole time. When I was at my dad's house, unlimited access. I definitely gained more benefit from the unlimited access. However, I've always been a person who has been both very inquisitive and strongly ethical. I self-censored a lot of smut from myself online. I also used my time constructively. At age 12, figured out the ins and outs of audio codecs (I wanted to get audio files from my favourite NES/SNES games but wasn't allowed Napster, so I figured out how to convert MIDIs to WAVs with WinAmp). Started learning about emulation, first as a way to play video games and later as a programming exercise. I stumbled across the Earthbound hacking project as my introduction to assembly. Learned how to rip videos from video games. Fucked around with Blender for 3D modeling, and made a few shitty Flash programs. Eventually wired up my computer into the home theatre system. I played with network sniffing tools and taught myself the details of TCP/IP, wireless, mail protocols, etc. I played with various linux boot disks (Slax, Ubuntu, Arch) just to see what happened, figured out how to do sysadmin stuff from that. I did all of this before I turned 17, and I did it specifically because I had unlimited, unsupervised access to computers and the internet. I can definitely see that perhaps others wouldn't be quite as driven as I was (my brother and sister, same opportunities, but they just fucked around on Facebook/youtube/etc). But at the same time, I think there is a certain subset of people (such as myself) who drastically benefit from unrestricted internet access. And, TeMPOraL, I'm right with you. Most of the things that technophobic people spend their time on in "real life" feels like total nonsense. My mom, stepdad, and extended family still mock me for wasting all my time online, and yet they spend an ungodly amount of time watching shitty TV all day.