It's so fucked up.
Transcript: Twitter post by Emily Horner
emhornerbooks
reading "We invented suburbs where everybody lives a half-hour drive from their friends and there's no sidewalks or bike infrastructure and we blame smartphones for children being lonely."
Which was in response to Rob Sand 0
robsandla sying "'The relationship between smartphone/ Internet use and loneliness was BIG' Children Are Lonelier Than Ever. Can Anything Be Done?"
End transcript.
My response:
Also parents these days are so afraid of strangers kidnapping their kids that they won't let them play outside. Which is absurd, because statistically they're FAR more likely to be kidnapped by a family member than by a stranger. Same goes for child molestation.
I probably sound like a boomer, but in my day my parents let me wander around all over the neighborhood. My one rule was I was to either stay within shouting distance or come back by dinnertime. My ADHD ass couldn't follow that rule since I couldn't remember the rule in the heat of the moment and also still can't keep track of time, so Mom and Dad would go from shouting to using a bicycle horn. If that didn't work, Dad would get in the car and look for me. I think the fact I never really got in trouble for that added to my unlikliness to follow those particular rules. (Most that ever happened was Dad was highly annoyed about having to put pants and shoes on.)
All of that was preamble to the following: If someone from the future went back and told kid me that in 15 years mobile phones would be so cheap that even homeless people could buy one with spare change, I would have been so jealous of future kids as I imagined they could go anywhere they wanted and have their mom call them to say "Hey, dinner is in 20 minutes, start hiking your ass home," on a device that had a built in clock as well.
Instead, kids had their freedoms restricted to an insane degree. Which, now I think of it, is just a microcosm of the macrocosm, as the country shuffles ever closer to permanent fascism enabled by big tech companies spying on everyone. This was cross-posted from https://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org/342768.html
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