I had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I would have been much better off as a person without it.
i think about this a lot as someone who had unfiltered access to the internet since being a kid around 2010. on the one hand i learned to understand english as a young boy, on my own, without realizing. on the other hand i've seen videos of beheadings, terrorist acts, violent accidents, war crimes and many more, lovely things.
that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative. feels positive to me, just not without there being negative aspects.
Same. Im not sure if growing up watching liveleak and browsing 4chan made me a better or worse person.
I think the real effect on my life is that I was addicted to the internet and video games and didn’t socialize enough. My life turned out good, I’m married and have a decent life, but I think I missed out a lot in my university years because I was playing counter strike instead of going out and socializing and making friends. I look back now at how much time I squandered (tens of thousands of hours) but I guess many people feel this way about their younger self.
Exactly. How many hours of WoW makes up for having to explain to a girl in her 20s that it's your first date? How much YouTube does it take to forget that you had to use your cousin as your best man? How many up-votes does it cost to make sure the person who picks your retirement home isn't a stranger?
I also lucked out and ended up married to someone I love, but thinking about the number of experiences I missed out on for lack of trying is enough to make my chest feel tight. You have so much time right up until you don't.
I'm probably a couple of years younger than you, or at least still in this phase you're describing. Love being home and gaming, just got back from a LAN where I played Counter Strike with three friends.
If your life turned out good, there's not much to gain from worrying about the past :)
I agree with you that it isn't necessarily net-negative.
I cannot begin to tell you how much more respect and care I give to the road and cars after witnessing so many videos of how violently and suddenly car accidents can take a life. Many of the horrors of these videos are burnt into my mind and I am confident this is for the better.
We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is.
There are if course mental health limits to this. I never want to be desensitized. But in moderation I think it can be net-positive.
> We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is.
yeah, agree. i guess there's a balance you gotta reach between 'seeing the real world as it is when you're adult' and 'watching a terrorist behead a captive in 4k as a kid'.
i mean there is some kind of bias at play in our societies, as i remember watching documentaries at school as a 13-14 year old, clearly displaying mass-graves at nazi concentration camps. i appreciate having been educated about this topic in such a direct way, yet is is very gruesome and haunting as well.
I heard rumours of such content on the Internet as a teenager in the 1990's. I was never curious enough to seek it out, but there are plenty who were and plenty of those didn't understand how it would affect them. The latter group are the ones that we have to be concerned about. After all there is a world of difference between knowing of or seeing acts of violence and normalizing violence. Depending how far normalizing goes, it may end up being a net-negative for society as a whole.
Frankly, as a parent, that's not the content I think my kids should be watching but it's also not the content that I'm interested in banning.
The content I'm interested in banning is the content that I know (because I've literally worked for the companies making it and seen the sausage made in real time) is intentionally geared to drive user engagement and foster addiction.
Loot boxes.
Online gambling.
Microtransactions.
Constant app notifications.
Updates from your "friends" that your friends didn't actually make.
Advertising.
Content designed to drive fear of missing out.
Content designed to drive sales.
Content to influence behavior through fear, jealousy, and anger.
Endlessly scrolling feeds of tiktok, facebook, instagram, reddit, etc.
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Content like unfiltered violence exists, but it doesn't have the same reach and hold as content that is relentlessly pushed because it makes someone money.
But the content making people money is fucking insidious, because it's "palatable" to most people at first glance, but it reduces my children to walking wallets. It plays on their brains during formative years in ways that are very close to straight up abuse.
It is like religious indoctrination, but for all the negative aspects of humanity, amped up with a solid understanding of statistics, human behavior, and brain chemistry - All to make my children (and myself and my peers, family, parents, society at large) into money making drones for a corporation.
I think that content is where I find banning appropriate. It's not about the message in that content. Kids should be free to learn material that interests them even if it's dark, depressing, violent, or sexual (ideally with an adult they can discuss it with).
Kids should not be free to be robbed in broad daylight, hooked on addictive drugs, or trained like monkeys in a skinner box to give companies money for dopamine.
I'm not that old (got home internet in my teens). But got an old c64 from my uncle when I was in primary school. It came with a stack of magazines. In them was all this code you had to copy paste to get a basic game. I don't remember exactly but I don't recall I had anyway to save them either. I don't have anything to add, but you just made me think of a neat memory.
some types of content are indisputably disturbing for kids, like violence, war footage, sexualized content (esp. a sexualized female image targeting male kids & teens), etc
The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds.
Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
I believe I was driving at 14 in the US. The current Michigan law is 14y9m to get a level 1 license.
The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds.
Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
you can be agnostic while not objectifying the female image to a point of forming a generation of young man that are addicted to porn and can't talk and connect to a real women
