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Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
(yorkshirebylines.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Technology
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All true, however there is some truly depraved shit available online and I would argue prior to the internet you would have a much lower chance of getting exposed to that. And thats the stuff that can change you in not so good ways.
I mean, 2 girls 1 cup would have never been on any TV station. Real decapitations probably not either. Some of the graphic war footage we see today, some of it might be on TV but the real gory stuff, not really.
I know these are maybe outliers, but still, you can get to experience a lot more freaky shit these days than back in the day with no internet. And a lot easier or worse, by accident.
Edit: also being exposed to stuff like TikTok these days is a bit different than reading magazines about the latest looks. Selfies were not a thing before you had phones with cameras (and internet) either. There are a lot of differences from back then to now.
That stuff was available. You just had to go out of your way to go see it. The same mostly applies to today's internet.
Did your parents let you run off into a garbage dump? No. Well, mine didn't.
People seem to think that there's only a two position switch for devices: unfettered access, or none.
If you aren't supervising and communicating with your kids, you really shouldn't let them have internet access. It isn't the internet that's the problem there, it's adults not taking the time to do their job. It's absurdly easy to block or otherwise limit access to unwanted sites/services. That's the bare minimum a parent needs to learn. But it's still the beginning. You always, always communicate with your kids. You do the job, or it's on you.
And, having grown up reading crap like Cosmo and Elle, and the teenage versions of them, saying that tiktok is worse is joke. The invasive data mining is, but the content isn't. Hell, Cosmo in particular is a major stain on the beauty standards of the world. Besides, it is absurdly easy to block specific services if a parent puts in a half hour of work.
None of which matters. The point is that it isn't "the internet" or "that phone" that's the problem. If a parent isn't going to put in the minimum effort to teach their kids, the kids are fucked way harder than by anything they'll see online.
I'm only 19, so I'm part of the generation that grew up with phones. Me and my friends all saw 2 girls 1 cup and that gore stuff but I don't feel like it really had any lasting negative effect on us. At the end of the day, it was still just videos. I think watching that stuff was just kind of showing the others how tough or manly you were.