Many of Shoshana's argument's seemed to boil down to "because the 1A" and it came off weak, at least to me. That's a weird thing to have to say, because while I am not a free speech absolutist, if there's a spectrum I'm definitely closer to free speech absolutism than the opposite extreme. One thing that stood out to me was when you pushed back that we limit things like alcohol, and she came back with the fact that alcohol does measurable damage to your body and mind...and it's like, well, that's also kind of the point of a big chunk of Haidt's book, no? Real psychological effects on kids exposed to social media?
The podcast with Shoshana was frustrating for me to listen to. At every turn, she posits that laws can't change because first amendment concerns, therefore it's up to the parents to solve the problem. This problem is not intractable as she seems to think. My son uses our Xbox and it's limited, by my discretion, to a specific ESRB rating. Something like that could be doable for apps/games/social media on the kids devices.
I had the exact same experience. I follow Shoshana on social media and in general I find her to to be pretty reasonable, but on this front I think her arguments were pretty weak. I think she put forth the idea a few times that you can learn stuff from social media, and Jeremiah rightly pushed back that you're not banning kids from the entire internet, just social media. Also, we have a test case for kids learning things without social media, it seemed like it worked okay, and that was basically everything that existed pre-2000.
I think the idea that you're not banning kids from the whole internet is ignoring that so much of what constitutes the internet now *is* social media. Back when I was a kid/teenager in the 2000s I used to go to a handful of fan forums, I'd read blogs, I'd read and write fanfiction on fanfiction.net or browse/draw fanart on DeviantArt, go to sites like Ebaumsworld or Albino Black Sheep or Newgrounds to play Flash games or watch Flash cartoons, read stories on FMyLife, take quizzes on Quizilla... and those don't exist anymore for the most part. That's not even counting proto-social media like GaiaOnline, Club Penguin, Omegle, Myspace.
I used to use StumbleUpon to explore the internet when it was a wild west frontier, but there's no purpose for something like that now. We've centralized everything that used to be separated around a dozen or so sites, most of which we'd be banning kids from accessing.
Many of Shoshana's argument's seemed to boil down to "because the 1A" and it came off weak, at least to me. That's a weird thing to have to say, because while I am not a free speech absolutist, if there's a spectrum I'm definitely closer to free speech absolutism than the opposite extreme. One thing that stood out to me was when you pushed back that we limit things like alcohol, and she came back with the fact that alcohol does measurable damage to your body and mind...and it's like, well, that's also kind of the point of a big chunk of Haidt's book, no? Real psychological effects on kids exposed to social media?
The podcast with Shoshana was frustrating for me to listen to. At every turn, she posits that laws can't change because first amendment concerns, therefore it's up to the parents to solve the problem. This problem is not intractable as she seems to think. My son uses our Xbox and it's limited, by my discretion, to a specific ESRB rating. Something like that could be doable for apps/games/social media on the kids devices.
I had the exact same experience. I follow Shoshana on social media and in general I find her to to be pretty reasonable, but on this front I think her arguments were pretty weak. I think she put forth the idea a few times that you can learn stuff from social media, and Jeremiah rightly pushed back that you're not banning kids from the entire internet, just social media. Also, we have a test case for kids learning things without social media, it seemed like it worked okay, and that was basically everything that existed pre-2000.
I think the idea that you're not banning kids from the whole internet is ignoring that so much of what constitutes the internet now *is* social media. Back when I was a kid/teenager in the 2000s I used to go to a handful of fan forums, I'd read blogs, I'd read and write fanfiction on fanfiction.net or browse/draw fanart on DeviantArt, go to sites like Ebaumsworld or Albino Black Sheep or Newgrounds to play Flash games or watch Flash cartoons, read stories on FMyLife, take quizzes on Quizilla... and those don't exist anymore for the most part. That's not even counting proto-social media like GaiaOnline, Club Penguin, Omegle, Myspace.
I used to use StumbleUpon to explore the internet when it was a wild west frontier, but there's no purpose for something like that now. We've centralized everything that used to be separated around a dozen or so sites, most of which we'd be banning kids from accessing.