[carapace]

Reading the threads here about parents trying to manage their kids' online usage something strikes me. It's a little hard to articulate, but I might call it the "assumption of normalcy" in regard to media/technology. People assume, to various degrees, that current forms of technology and levels of usage are "fine, just fine", yet if you think about it for a bit it seems really more like a "boiling frog" situation. What I mean is that we are engaged in a massive open-air social/psychological experiment of sorts, and we're more or less doing it on auto-pilot.

From that POV the policy changes that China has introduced seem like an attempt to opt-out, which would make Chinese kids into a kind of "control group" for our media/internet/phone/game mass experiment. The problem is that there are so many confounding variables that it seems unlikely that we can learn much from it after all. And it's moot anyway since there's no political way to enforce similar bans in the West.

FWIW, if I had kids I would ban the Internet, smart phones, and even cable TV. I've been on the Internet, there's no way I would expose my kids to it, even with ad-blockers. The Internet used to be Burning Man, now it's Bangkok. I wouldn't let my kids wander around the open Internet any more than around the back alleys of Bangkok. I feel for parents that are dealing with this.