[harryf]

> And, in addition, we have to establish that parents should regulate their kids' use of online/social media tools in such a way that we reduce the devolutionary effect on human interaction that is occurring now.

Basically: yes! But with lots of caveats.

- Parents shouldn't be able to play Big Brother in their children's lives - it's important for all kinds of reasons, especially sexual development, that children and teenagers get to have a safe degree of privacy e.g. son who's gay vs father who's homophobic

- "I blame the parents" needs to be eliminated from the conversation. Parenting today is full of bad compromises e.g. give your kids access to social media and expose them to a random stream of cultural influences vs. isolate them and risk social exclusion. And most parents anyway have little extra time / energy for keeping tabs on whether your child's use of a VR headset or whatever latest consumer tech found its way into your household is harmful or not.

- we need to exercise collective wisdom on what social media does to children. Seeing my daughter using musical.ly for example really makes we wonder if we're training a generation of narcissists.

...and that's just three off the top of my head

[Zak]

> we need to exercise collective wisdom on what social media does to children

You seem to be suggesting some sort of regulation. Since you weren't concrete and specific, I can't respond to that directly, but I urge you to keep in mind:

* Many things that are valuable to adults may be dangerous to children. Consider a kitchen knife, power tools or cleaning chemicals.

* With all the privacy concerns that are in the public eye lately, age verification, which is probably difficult to separate from identity verification, seems fairly unappealing.

[watwut]

Kids able to read and write enough for Facebook are remarkably safe around kitchen knife and cleaning chemicals. Teenagera are fully able to operate power tools.

[Zak]

Many, perhaps most are indeed. I think most teenagers are also able to use social media in ways that aren't harmful to them.

[watwut]

One difference is that while your safety around knife or tool depends only on you, your safety on social media can easily be ended by other people.

You don't have full control over social media you do have around cleaning and knives.

[primitur]

>we're training a generation of narcissists

This is an age-old conundrum, and I don't think we'll ever be rid of it. However, I do believe we need to refine the current situation such that it doesn't become the #1 dominating factor in social discourse.

It would be nice to see a social network arise that rewards altruism and empathy, for example, while demoting narcissism and solipsism... Perhaps that will come, somehow. In some ways I believe we already have these platforms in some forms (github comes to mind) ..