can we like…. talk about what a healthy relationship with technology looks like? not just for us, but for future generations: its super easy for us to accept tech unquestioningly bc many millennials and gen-Zers grew up alongside the growth of tech, and had a naturally evolving level of exposure to it. but what about the 5 year olds with tablets? the 8 year olds with perfectly curated instagrams?? i’m as obsessed with my phone as the rest of us, but can we please stop simply bemoaning how none of us read as much as we were kids and start exploring how all these screens might be affecting the kids growing up right now?
i work in customer service and please know that i am not baby-boomer aggrandizing when i say i have seen so many children, literally toddlers, dead-silent and completely, utterly absorbed in tablets bigger than their heads. i’ve seen a shitton of pre-pubescent girls posing for pictures together, planning their angles and backgrounds, and checking what shots their mom took bc they’re worried “they might look fat.” like. i’m talking 7 year olds. this isn’t meant to be some holier than thou bullshit, this is me being legitimately terrified about a problem i really haven’t seen any of us discuss or even acknowledge
In one of my psychology classes the teacher told us about a study that showed that toddlers nowadays have a hard time learning how to write and do fine motor things because of the skip the stage of learning with their hands and all they do is swipe and click.
oh!! my god!!! that is an incredibly literal/physical symptom of these newfound techno-reliances we’ve formed. a professor of mine referred to it as our “tech fetishization,” this expectation that all updated forms of tech are innately and unquestionably good things. we see technology as an amorphous, abstract concept vs. a substantive influence in our mental, emotional, and physical states but holy shit it really, really is
@ y’all in the notes completely missing the point and thinking this is about millennials turning into the ‘Thomas Edison was a witch!’ or ‘kids these days!’ crowd…
Look, I fucking love technology. I love what the advancements in my lifetime have been able to make possible. The sheer amount of information and communication and creative tools available is incredible, and I often wonder how different my life would be now if I’d grown up with all these things available and accessible. (How many more things would I know how to do? How much more music could I have written? How much more art could I have produced? Could I have started my own businesses sooner? How many more people from how many more places would I know?)
But the things in the above posts are problems. I see plenty of bitching now about the effects that ‘TV / video game babysitting’ had on you - you think handing a 2-year-old a tablet to shut them up isn’t just another incarnation of the same thing?
We bitch about how fucked up algorithms are all over the internet, and you don’t think kids having nearly unmonitored access is a problem? You don’t see a potential for how this could be fucking someone up? Open a YouTube page as a new user (with zero history, cookies, etc.), click on an innocuous video, and let autoplay run for a bit. It gets weird real fast. (Even with filters.)
As difficult as ‘don’t worry about looking like the people in the magazines, they don’t look like that either’ was for us, you don’t think there’s a potential for more damage with social media etc. now? Everybody has access to filters and photoshop etc. The whole ‘influencer’ thing is that ‘anybody can be a star, you can make yourself, you don’t have to wait for a studio etc. to discover you.’ Seven-year-olds obsessing whether they look fat or if their instagrams can compete with some random person who’s edited the shit out of their photos (and they’re not a movie star, just a random person, so it must be real!) is messed up.
Kids coming into schools with lower vocabulary levels because they haven’t heard as many words from people by a certain age - because it’s easier to sit them in front of a pretty, addicting game to keep them occupied and behaving than spend the time interacting with them person-to-person - is messed up.
There are so many amazing tools we have now that are awesome for helping kids learn and grow. (I would have killed to be able to have ‘how to’ videos on YouTube when I was a kid - there were so many things I wanted to learn that if my parents didn’t know or the school / library didn’t have resources on, I was SOL.) But I’d love to see actual conversations about the problems growing up with tech is causing - without it devolving into the usual thinkpieces and comments that do just break it down as ‘tech is bad!’ or ‘tech is fine, ya loser dinosaurs!’ There’s absolutely a healthy balance here somewhere. I just don’t think people are all that invested in finding it.
This is an absolutely vital conversation to have, and it often gets shut down as a “fear of progress.” No, we need to acknowledge that technology evolves exponentially faster than our biology, and we need to examine what that means and what kind of repercussions that might have on our future generations.
If you want something to keep your kids occupied and quiet: give them a lead pencil and a blank sheet of paper, or a small drawing pad to draw in for trips. Or books (take them to the library! or get the books used from used bookstores/church sales/yard sales). Teach them how to read. Let them figure out how to entertain themselves instead of handing them a phone or iPad or whatever.
This is what my parents did for me. It exercises the kids’ brains, particularly the centers associated with creativity/mental imaging/thinking (as opposed to phones that provide the image for you and engage the front part of your brain more than the parts associated with task focussing).
You signed up to be a parent; that doesn’t mean you can stick your kid in front of an ipad/phone/tv/computer all day so they don’t bother you. BE A PARENT, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR KIDS, TEACH THEM TO USE TECH RESPONSIBLY, TEACH THEM HOW TO BE POLITE IN PUBLIC.
-FemaleWarrior, She/They
I think a lot of it is parents not knowing what to do other than just banning the use of the things.
I mean, certain limitations on the use can be healthy, like “no screens after lights out”, but banning it completely isn’t really an option any more,
The biggest thing is that if you tell a kid “No, don’t do that!”, you have to give them something else to do instead, preferably something more fun and satisfying than the screen.
One positive is that you can use screens to find things to do instead of screens irl. Look up art to draw, places to go, songs to sing, meals to cook, etc.
Oh yeah definitely. Parents banning screens and then not taking their children to the library or letting them go to the park or what have you and refusing to get other things that allow the child to entertain themselves in other ways is awful.
And what you are describing is a good way to responsibly use tech! But kids need to be taught how to do that instead of going for the game apps. And also be provided drawing tools, or be given the option of picking out a family activity or something for places to go, etc, in order for that to be responsible tech use.
Why do Bigfoot hunters try to lure him with a mating call? Do they have a game plan for if a squatch comes barreling toward them out of the woods full tilt with a raging boner?
what the fuck do you think the point of finding Bigfoot is
The Shape of Forests (2019) dir. Guillermo Del Toro
Just received this message from another girl in the industry to pass along!
THIS IS HOW THE CLUBS ARE MAKING US EMPLOYEES AND NOT INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS
DO NOT DO THIS, you are fucking US ALL.
The only grounds to get your house fees and tips back that we have to stand on are that we are employees. Employees don’t tip out and employees don’t pay house fees. Independent contractors pay rent for a place to practice their business and tip those who help them do their job.
PLEASE, I am leaving this industry in two years because I am old, I promise this won’t affect me. DO NOT FUCK YOURSELVES BECAUSE YOU HEAR YOU CAN GET MONEY BACK, educate yourself about what is happening in California and
STOP RUINING BEING A STRIPPER!!!!!!
I’d rather die than be an employee
First of all y’all come work in Cali and see how you like being an employee before you go and fuck up the rest of the country by joining this lawsuit. I’m salty.
meme in spanish: (uses a word very similar to its equivalents in every other language that has at least some root in latin, rest of the spoken dialogue can be guessed from context) everyone at the same time: This meme transcends language
