the reason smartphones are considered smart phones is because they can run apps that don’t come pre-installed, and aren’t coded by someone who had their hands on the phone.
smartphones have a GPS and can run apps that let you use a map, other kinds of phone can’t without being built specifically to do so.
smartphones let you actually fact check what people are saying outside of your house or a library, other kinds of phone don’t.
smartphones let you cover up dissociation by looking into their blank screens, you kind of can with other phones, but only if nobody is looking at your hands.
you can easily find a smartphone simply by tracking it, you can’t do that if it doesn’t have GPS integration. they make it much easier to find you if you’ve been kidnapped, and there are several apps that act as a dead man’s switch for all OSs
also if you’re gonna take the smart out of a phone by preventing you from downloading anything or uninstalling anything, and only giving it apps that fix the problems that smartphones fix, you’re gonna need a really good antivirus and your device will be considered entirely bloatware by anyone who wants a handheld computer.
and people are just gonna make smaller laptops to work around the ban if it’s even considered legal.
btw, someone disagreeing with you doesn’t mean they’re addicted to anything. if that were how things worked, i’d be addicted to literally every substance known to man.
they’re going to do it anyway. they always have, just in different ways than they do now.
to prevent some of them from becoming addicted to their phones though, diagnose and medicate adhd more, and regularly give the kids training against peer pressure
Parents should restrict their kids time on a screen.
Anyway, what is this new option?
I think we are forgetting that older generations have hated the younger ones for thousands of years at this point.
It’s not about that; it’s about the mental health of children.
Ah, yes, just because I disagree with banning smartphones, I must be an addict 
. Nice non sequitur there…
Alright, so I don’t think smartphones and tablets should be banned. Why is that? Here are a few reasons:
While it could fix the immediate problem of young children being addicted to the internet and consuming unhealthy content available through it, it won’t prevent those kids form developing trauma, but just change the nature of it. Kids nowadays are often being left with smartphones due to their parents being overworked and unable to take proper care of them. Another problem is that many young parents are overly lax with rules they set for their children, etc., due to trauma caused by their own harsh and strict upbringing (basically they don’t want to bring upon their children the harm their parents caused them, and end up going too far the other way). Banning smartphones, etc., will just create a generation of depressed, lonely, neglected children. It’s basically just a band-aid solution that does not address the underlying issues stemming from economic problems, legal problems and generational trauma, that cause many parents to be neglectful of their kids.
It’s basically impossible to do. Why? Well: 1) Smartphones and tablets are extremely useful technologies, and their removal would cause more problems than it would fix. 2) They are extremely integrated into our cultures and day-to-day lives; their banning would cause people to riot French style x3. 3) Any legislation attempting to delegalize them (if it would even reach the parliament), would have to face challenges of intense lobbying from technological giants like Apple or Samsung and strong public backlash. Likely it also wouldn’t be very popular amongst deputies. Overall, it would have very slim chances of passing. The only certain way of ensuring such laws are in place would be through dictatorship/oligarchy, but that comes with its own set of issues.
Generally, I think that the best solution to the “iPad kid” crisis is through widespread societal changes, including education system reforms, changes to work culture, better worker rights, educating parents on the best ways to raise their children, etc., all scientifically informed. This is going to take lots of time and effort, but I believe it can be done someday.
For the present, here’s a rough advice for parents: severely limit and monitor children’s screen time, and in the case where a child does not have their own electronics, do not give them their own electronics until they are mature enough (13 years old, for example). Children should absolutely have no access to TikTok and other social media, access to YouTube should be strictly limited by the parents. Kids should also be appropriately educated about the dangers of the internet. If there are older children present, they could be tasked with monitoring what their younger peers are watching and intervening when they notice harmful content.
How large is the chance that Yuyi was an IPad kid (if they didn’t lie about their age for whatever reason)?
It’s a non sequitor, not an ad hominem.
Smartphones and ipads are very different to computers, the way you use them is very different, I think that they are more like televisions than computerns.
Also, banning them would cause more harm than good, as the problem is caused by bad parenting.
Thanks! I’ll correct it now!
Edit: Done!
Worse, it’s a totalitarian solution that causes a new prohibition. After alcohol was prohibited the law responded to all drinking of alcohol the same, so if adults were doing it illegally, suddenly teenagers could do it just as easily as adults. If for example you make dumb phones with like 5 apps for basic stuff and no ability to connect the the internet, just a few servers for weather data or whatever, than than people will jailbreak and hack them immediately, and now apps do exist, and you no longer have the ability to ban them from a centralized store for having truely awful things (will not describe on forum), or mildly annoying things (apple tends to ban random stuff). Letting apps exist gives you power to regulate them, because normal people won’t be trying to get around your authority. Also, how easy would it be to make one of these with a 5G card and tell your phone provider you need a sim card for it?
Oh god i do not want to think about Quebec’s education system. The issue there is not the kids imo, the schools have terrible organization that doesn’t benefit the children, but puts tons of pressure on them. The teachers are then responsible for keeping everything full speed and so who do they give this stressful job? People without teaching degrees. It’s no wonder it doesn’t turn out well. (I’m biased, I know Quebecois students and not Quebecois teachers)
See, this is useful information. If you’re a conservative who wants everything to go back to how it was, or a progressive who wants everyone to raise their kids in harmony/eat healthy food/but time and energy into social activism or whatever you have to accept, people can’t afford that! The far left has the covered by saying they want to end capitalism which could possibly fix everything enough that their ideals can work, but it isn’t a guarantee. The far right tends to get on conspiratorial thinking that they can fix everything by attacking someone, which is basically the same thing but with negative evidence instead of very little evidence.
Anyways, on the phone topic, my opinion is to regulate social media. I don’t care about the hardware, I fact I’d much prefer if it let you do more things! I think social media providers do not care at all about the wellbeing of their customer base, and as such, have to have it forced on them. I enjoy socializing on social media, and I enjoy well made content that is on social media, but I dislike all the stuff in between (philosophically, I had to uninstall TikTok or I’d stare at it for hours). A rule I think would help a lot in the short run and slow everything down in the long run and probably be very hard to enforce would be requiring algorithms people understand. No one understands chatGPT or the youtube recommendation algorithm, or the search algorithm, or tiktok’s algorithm. People used to understand the youtube and google ones, but the old ones weren’t addictive enough so google upgraded them. All social media companies really want an addictive product, but they want plausible deniability, and incomprehensible algorithms happen to be more performant anyways. If we took them to court today they could argue til the end of the world that they train algorithms for engagement metrics and user feedback, but if someone had to understand these algorithms I think in a lot of cases either the product would be a lot less addictive, or one of those people could be called as a witness and say basically, that their company was breaking the law. (assuming a future law about social media addictiveness.)
If I broke the politics rules it was an accident
We will see hhyyrylainen’s judgement on if this post (or that part of it) is allowed on the forum.
Other than the fact that this already exists to an extent, it will only end up with a population that does not truly know anything as all information is interconnected.
Yep. Another problem is that most education systems practice an outdated style of teaching that has been proven time and time again to be ineffective and harmful. For example, in Poland it got to the point where many children are literally overworked with schoolwork. Various studies have shown that Polish schoolchildren have more labour-intensive days than adults working full time jobs. The main reasons for this are as follows:
This all adds up to many kids having barely any time to themselves, which is very unhealthy of their mental wellbeing.
Polish education system is also notorious for abuse, mainly of psychological and emotional kind. But that’s yet another can of worms.
That’s seen as bad?
Mine was an eight hour day with a 3 minute time in between and a 12 minute lunch with a long line. I’ve gotten assignments which were mathematically impossible to finish, example “watch this 20 minute video in 15 minutes”, but not much homework.
Hmmmm….
What are ALL the changes the school system needs to undergo?