100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you have to make a conscious effort to "go on the computer", and when there are significant opportunity costs to doing so, you naturally put it into its proper perspective.
A smart phone is a human right, according to you? Of course you can ban them. The addicts will have to wean off, but after that, there's no disadvantage.
I think it is a human right that I decide for myself what is good for me and what is bad for me. I have for example Instagram and Facebook, but only to look what kind of Magic the Gathering Events are at the weekend, do I look at reels and doom scroll? No. So I would not say I am addicted despite having a smartphone.
Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.
And look where that has taken us. Perhaps that was true for the last few decades. But now that period is over, and our ability to exercise our right and to coordinate without it has atrophied to our great detriment.
<tangent>And then we look at AI and think "surely this time it will be different"</tangent>
And why not the one 1895? Some people seem to prefer this as well, but you perhaps would not like it.
If you prefer living without a smartphone its completly up to you and I would always stand for your right to not have one, but on the other side I am also standing for the right to have one if someone desires one.
Are you also standing up for the right of 12 year olds to access porn and graphic violence though?
That's a somewhat loaded question, I'll assume you're not (correct me if I'm wrong) and move on to the question of should 12 year olds have smartphones and if so how should they limit access to porn and graphic violence when used by 12 year olds?
Please don't fob this off by requiring that all parents should have CS degrees or IT qualifications, that's not a thing.
I think this is a very funny question. Since different countries seem to answer this very differently.
In countries like the US the first Season of The Walking Dead was aired with an age rating of TV-14. At the same time the same in Germany this season was rated with an Rating of 18 (Germany uses 0,6,12,18 as ages for rating). So I am somewhat puzzled. Similar when a movie shows a pair of boobs or at least implies some sexual elements the US tend to rate the movie often with their MA-rating. However, in Germany thats different. It seems we have different children in both countries. As the ones in the US are more okay with violence and it does not affect them, where the childs in Germany are more okay with sexual elements.
This was just an example how stupid many rating systems are, their are very dependent on the country and the society you live in. So there is no inherent universalism to what a 12 or a 14 or a 16 year old should see or not.
My point, and I tried to argue this multiple times in this post, is that a goverment should not simply impose more and more bans and restrictions. This seems like the easy way out, but has always drawbacks. One is already described in the article, namely that the parents already start loosing awareness that the internet might be a dangerous place. Since they think: Yeah, there is a ban so its solved!
We should rather give the parents the time such that they can communicate often enough with their child to understand what problems its facing. In what kind of world the child lives and what they are consuming. If both parents are working 40 hours+ each week, they are not able to do this. Someone also mentioned in this thread "why is obesity not first fixed.", it might be a different issue, but the solution is the same. More time for parents mean that they can cook more healthy meals and do not rely on garbage food because they are stressed out.
There are degrees to it. The current problem has a "perfect storm" aspect to it, with multiple pieces working together in perfect harmony.
1. a "small" device that a person can use while moving
2. cheap/free internet access (wifi and/or mobile data)
3. high fidelity display with high refresh rate
4. a camera (I would probably group this together with 3)
Disabling 2 or 3 of those would short circuit the delivery mechanism of the "opioid" while still allowing the device to fulfill its more "useful" purposes.
Examples:
- A small internet device without a hi-res display _and_ a camera is still useful for "knowledge at your fingertips", communication, navigation, payments, etc.
- A device with a hi-res display, with a camera, with internet access, but not "small" is either a laptop or a tablet. That breaks the mechanism of one-half of social media addiction, which is the capability to instantly create and upload content right on the spot. (Although I would argue a tablet will still have that problem)
- A camera that doesn't have internet access can still allow a user to record events, but uploading the content will have to be delayed to a later time. A fair trade-off in my opinion.
And this is all possible with current hardware, by extending Parental Controls to disable the camera, and/or internet access, and/or handicapping the beautiful crown jewel displays.
Agree but the parents want the hardware for the kids' safety, and it has to be a smartphone specifically so the parents can GPS track them and to do facetime calls to prove they're OK...