It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
Hey, we must have been in high school at the same time. I saw the same thing going through my final years. But when I went back to visit the school a few years after I left... Things were very different.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"
Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
> It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
"and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it."
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work".
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
Do you really think that people can't come up with such arguments on their own? People aren't very unique, lots of people independently come up with very similar stupid arguments.
Forbidding things doesn't work. Not for kids and not for adults. Hence speakeasys and the end of prohibition, or the war on drugs (which was won by drugs).
In pretty much all countries that instituted heavy restrictions on smoking, e.g. banning smoking from restaurants, you can see an accelerated drop in number of smokers the years after that ban regardless of changes in education. This is particularly easy to verify because it has been done in many countries but all at fairly different points in time. Some did it decades ago, some have done it recently, there are still countries where it's allowed.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
Forbidding things works. People drank less during prohibition, and they do less drugs than they would were they legalized. Hence there is no serious proposal to legalize most hard drugs
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
How in the world would you keep AI out of schools?
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
> With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
> I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.
The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.
Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.
I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
I think age cohortand school makes a difference. Personally I had a perfectly fine time in highschool, most people just got along. Same problems as other posters though, it's just anecdote, and a heavily biased sampling (pretty decent chunk of CS people with poor social skills)
PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
I've had plenty of friends I've only known through the internet and a chat room. It's not the same as being in-person - I don't see a way to reliably turn out healthy adults unless kids talk to each other.
90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
It's fear mongering bullshit. "WHAT UF THERE EMERGENCY". Every room has a phone and a teacher with a phone. Absolute bullshit post Columbine 9/11 fear based nonsense.
Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to “think more in class” because she used to Google answers or use artificial intelligence. “Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do] deep research instead of going straight to AI,” she said.
This kind of blew my mind a bit, as I had always imagined AI being used to do homework, hadn't occurred to me it could be used during a class as well.
That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?
Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison is not a good one.
I encourage you to seek first-hand accounts of what teaching in a contemporary public school classroom is like. Teacher discipline can account for so much.
When I was in university, I had a math teacher that brought extra chalk to class everyday because if he saw you on your phone, he'd snap a piece off and throw it at you pretty damn hard. Maybe that wouldn't exactly work in a high school but damn if Dr Murphy didn't have me paying attention in that class.
Teachers are widely hated by the "stupid" class, which is most people. The students are set up for failure by their parents before they even enter the classroom. This has been going on for 50+ years.
What's also funny about that quote is that by "deep research" she's likely referring to googling the answer or using Wikipedia. Remember when Wikipedia was loathed by high school teachers?
The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.
Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention but I read an implication that using humans to source facts is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm misunderstanding their perspective.
> In the cafeteria, Ryan Tripathi, 16, was paging through “Lord of the Flies,” which he said is slow-going. “I'm just not used to reading,” he said. “I’m usually on my phone.”
Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.
People "roll coal" it because it is kinda amusing to do it, and it is a middle finger towards people they perceive to be preachy.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.
Yeah, being restricted by laws passed by random adults about what things you can and cannot do during school hours - such as being at school itself - is certainly characteristic of being a kid.
I don't think it's actually possible for a parent and community to safely and sanely raise a human child without some amount of coercion the kid doesn't want in the moment, so I don't advocate for this. Still, it is important to acknowledge that being coerced by people more powerful than you who think they know better than you do about what is good for you is unpleasant in and of itself, and society should try to minimize doing this to children to the extent possible.
And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
California just got strict about this, too. I have found a dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal talking that's happening in school as a result, which is great!
Australia banned phones in schools 1-2 years ago and it's been widely recognised as a huge success. I think banning social media like facebook/tiktok/etc for kids would be a huge benefit as well. Leaving just IM/group chats for kids to directly talk to each other without scrolling a feed of ragebait and ai slop.
I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.
You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off of... them having a device.
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
> When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
I do this myself from time to time (and I do it more often if I didn't have bluetooth earbuds), that seems like a perfectly sensible thing to be concerned about.
Banning a 16 year old from minecraft is so far beyond reasonable imo. I'd agree with not giving young kids ipads and walking away. But what sounds like a blanket ban on gaming is absurd.
Serious question (I don't have kids of my own): before smartphones and tablets and the ubiquity of laptops and computers, what did parents do to get some peaceful time to themselves?
It's hard to believe that parents were only able to achieve this during the past 15-20 years.
(When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent plenty of time outdoors with my friends in the neighborhood, and also inside, in front of my Nintendo, either with friends or without. Not sure how much peace my parents got, but I assume it was non-zero.)
Same thing they do now: Get a nanny, ask the grandparents, playdates, ... Putting kids in front of a device is lazy, and unfortunately, most of us are lazy.
What era are you talking about? Later than the 90s had computers and game consoles. Before that it was going outside and digging holes, throwing stones.
Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents at dinner.
Inane appeals to tradition are boring as fuck and completely useless. We should continue to circumcise infant males because we did it for decades (centuries?) and got by just fine! This says nothing about whether kids having access to cellphones is worthwhile and everything about how garbage your argument against them is.
The only offering that possibly might have been compelling enough to charge for was Messenger if it existed in a vacuum, but there were already numerous services offering much the same for free (e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM), and when others realized that is what the people actually wanted, many more immediately threw their hat in the ring (e.g. iMessage). There would have been no practical hope of it making it as a paid service.
assuming they were able to acquire customers and dominate the world with that business model, would that have prevented them from doing algorithmic feeds and promoting clickbait and poisoning politics and the rest?
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part?
My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
> Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that the kids are exposed to violent images.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
This is really funny for me to read because as a kid we were prohibited from having telecommunications devices while at school entirely. We were also prohibited from speaking during lunchtime. Our lunch was most definitely not loud.
When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.
In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was always evil.
Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can understand anything while all are shouting. It's surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to allow children to have a conversation.
If the teacher completely forbids talking, they will just talk right around the corner, or write on paper. They will be just unable to impose it on the children for long.
It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.
There is certainly an unhealthy dose of "kids these days" bullshit that inevitably propagates literally every single generation. This is especially disappointing on a forum for "hackers" though. I wouldn't be the person I am today without unrestricted internet access as a teen. My parents wanted me in their ignorant little conservative box not knowing or understanding anything outside of it. Their ignorance exceeded mine, so I was able to circumvent them by the very means many "hacker" news participants would love to see locked down and eliminated. I can't help but think of them as simple and pathetic as my parents were trying to strictly control what I could learn. They are the very definition of an anti-hacker culturally.
No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.
Crazy, I went to boarding school 2009-2011 and our dinner hall was always loud with talking and laughter. However sometimes it would slowly get quieter until the room went silent with everyone looking oddly at each other, then a massive wave of laughter would erupt.
Some weird phenomenon.
I also remember downloading Froggy jump on my iPhone and playing it with friends, but you certainly put your phone away more than you do now. You also had it taken off of you if you were on it when you shouldn't have been. If my parents found out they took my phone off of me, they'd probably crack it at me because I wasn't paying attention. I get the feeling many parents might just get angry at the teacher rather than their child.
As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.
I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
In the early 2000s, when everyone had a phone but no smart phones, we had this "thing" at the college bar:
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
It makes me so sad that it's possible for technology to steal the need to talk and play, even from our youth. If you have little kids you know how frantically they NEED to yap and play. I hold such horror for anything that would sap such life away.
It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.
For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
Problem is for the first month of lessons it is not joy, it is hard frustrating work where you sound bad and know it. Even when you are good lessons often are pushing you to do hard things and so they are not pure joy.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
Practicing is always hard and I struggle to find time or energy to push myself but my goal was to be able to play basic chords and make up silly songs around the campfire so everything else is just a bonus.
For a lot of young people the screen is social - the equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still comms.
The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short video clips that are largely designed to sell product, stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty, etc.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
Most of the social of screens is when you get to a place without them you have something common to talk about. "how about [local sports team]", "what did you think about [whatever happened on latest soap opera]", "lets pretend I'm [some character on cartoon]". It is all shorthand for we have something in common and can skip getting to know each other.
Individual screens can be isolating, they can also be somewhat social. I agree, not a complete replacement for other social activities for sure. But, as a kid with internet connected videogames growing up, those internet connected games kept me playing with friends from school and other groups even if we weren't able to physically get together that evening.
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
As a society we've proven over and over again that we're unable to solve these problems that require coordination against greed. We've pulled the smartphone out of Pandora's box.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in the first place and that this was just about pushing back against the helicopter parents.
I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the students are already staring at a screen during class, they continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.
The "Safety" excuse is bullshit. What safety problem could exist in a school that a child with a cell phone can solve? Fire? School administrators will call the fire department. Intruder? School administrators will call the police. School shooter? Same. There's nothing that a child with a cell phone will fix.
Why should articles like these always start with some fictional story like a novel? The actual news is buried somewhere half-way after the throw-away story.
It is following a magazine style. This is partly to elicit an emotional reaction and partly I suspect because the copy writer is bored and wishes they were writing novels instead.
if it's a proper news source they (and every other paper) already reported it who knows how many times. "city is about to ban phones in schools" "city is banning phones in schools" "the phones in schools were banned". everybody who needs to know already knows
This is not intended to be a news piece. It's a story. But whoever is in charge of CMS messed up categories. It should not be labeled news
annoying? if you want Crime and Punishment to be "guy killed a grandma" that's your thing but believe me this style is not annoying to many people aside from vocal minority
It’s fascinating to see a practice that was previously limited to Silicon Valley executives become first a national class signifier and now go mainstream.
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still bring a standalone camera to school.
I don't think smartphones should be allowed in schools but as someone who was dumbfounded by the lunchtime cacophony of my peers, I wouldn't lead with that as a triumph.
Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their healthy social environment. I personally was always able to find a quiet spot.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids, believe it or not.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want noise during lunch. The library should always be open during lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know how to dress for any other weather).
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
So I have eye witness accounts of this lunchroom saying that's not true. The lunchroom was deafeningly loud before the ban.
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and learning about society and human nature enough
I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there will always be variations by school.
A whole lot of people who got to their great tech jobs by commoditizing their screen addictions (I.e a significant amount of this very website) are massively harmed by these policies. I can’t believe that the folks here nearly universally like this.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll through apps.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)
Why is it that Hacker News is overwhelmingly liberal on most issues but when it comes to teenagers/children incredibly authoritarian and big government?
It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
Did we ever allow the students to smoke in the classroom?
We allowed teachers to smoke in the classroom, so in some sense..
We allowed it in designated areas outside the classroom between classes…
Hey, we must have been in high school at the same time. I saw the same thing going through my final years. But when I went back to visit the school a few years after I left... Things were very different.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
This.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct
Agreed.
There existed a period of time where handheld communication devices existed and were banned.
Sometime later, someone somewhere made a conscious choice to change policy. It didn’t just happen.
> someone somewhere
Must have been a powerful person.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"
Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
I think it will eventually settle into a net positive - we're just in the Wild West of smartphones still.
I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
I agree but you have to tone down the rhetoric otherwise you won’t persuade anyone who isn’t already convinced.
It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
> It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
> Next let's ban kids from social media.
We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
> They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID
They didn't and they haven't.
It's more nudge nudge wink wink age restriction theatre than 1984 total surveillance.
The onus is on platforms (Facebook, Youtube, et al) to adhere to the request to restrict minors.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban...
ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.
It absolutely did not. ChatGPT is free to use and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it.
When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
https://futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework
Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
“most people I know” argument always wins :)
most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
"and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it."
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work".
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
the ipod touch was released after the iphone fyi
I assumed the OP meant chat agents like Character.ai, not ChatGPT.
I mean, "cigarettes are the devil", especially for teenagers also have stuck.
Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
> All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
You can't just declare any opposition to your point of view as being in bad faith. (which is ironically in bad faith)
> If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
I hope you're trolling, because if not...
Do you really think that people can't come up with such arguments on their own? People aren't very unique, lots of people independently come up with very similar stupid arguments.
Indeed you don't
It seems that they do indeed see what you’re saying…
You have to look beneath what people say, and consider what they think. The quoted arguments are quite clearly nonsense and must be rationalisations.
Forbidding things doesn't work. Not for kids and not for adults. Hence speakeasys and the end of prohibition, or the war on drugs (which was won by drugs).
In pretty much all countries that instituted heavy restrictions on smoking, e.g. banning smoking from restaurants, you can see an accelerated drop in number of smokers the years after that ban regardless of changes in education. This is particularly easy to verify because it has been done in many countries but all at fairly different points in time. Some did it decades ago, some have done it recently, there are still countries where it's allowed.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
Forbidding things works. People drank less during prohibition, and they do less drugs than they would were they legalized. Hence there is no serious proposal to legalize most hard drugs
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_fighting
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football
WHOA! Classroom learning is fundamental. As a public school survivor, I learned more on my own than in any classroom.
I wonder how long until they do the same to AI in schools?
How in the world would you keep AI out of schools?
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
most instruction can and should be done without computers. and ban cell phones.
This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.
I think the operative word here is 'let'.
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
> With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
> I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
Everyone went all in on tech during Covid. NYC schools were one of the slowest to recover and are still dealing with the knock on effects.
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.
The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.
Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
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Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
Worst case you can switch jobs. It's not easy, but it's a lot easier than switching schools.
Also, bullying in school has no consequences, but outside it might have some.
Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
I think the user means that bullies in school face little consequences, but a bully at work may get called by HR and potentially disciplined.
Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.
No consequence for the bully I mean.
I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
I think age cohortand school makes a difference. Personally I had a perfectly fine time in highschool, most people just got along. Same problems as other posters though, it's just anecdote, and a heavily biased sampling (pretty decent chunk of CS people with poor social skills)
PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
>What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson.
valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.
a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
Avoidance: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems
The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
I don't think they're reframing. They weren't bullied or were the bullies themselves.
Or there simply weren’t any bullies.
Not everybody’s childhood played out like Lord of the Flies.
Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
I think USA does everything later than in other countries.
So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.
It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the world.
I've had plenty of friends I've only known through the internet and a chat room. It's not the same as being in-person - I don't see a way to reliably turn out healthy adults unless kids talk to each other.
90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
It's fear mongering bullshit. "WHAT UF THERE EMERGENCY". Every room has a phone and a teacher with a phone. Absolute bullshit post Columbine 9/11 fear based nonsense.
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That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?
Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison is not a good one.
I encourage you to seek first-hand accounts of what teaching in a contemporary public school classroom is like. Teacher discipline can account for so much.
When I was in university, I had a math teacher that brought extra chalk to class everyday because if he saw you on your phone, he'd snap a piece off and throw it at you pretty damn hard. Maybe that wouldn't exactly work in a high school but damn if Dr Murphy didn't have me paying attention in that class.
It's "literal violence" now and you'd get sued and lose your job.
Teachers are widely hated by the "stupid" class, which is most people. The students are set up for failure by their parents before they even enter the classroom. This has been going on for 50+ years.
What's also funny about that quote is that by "deep research" she's likely referring to googling the answer or using Wikipedia. Remember when Wikipedia was loathed by high school teachers?
The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.
Are you saying that reading comprehension is an outdated technology?
Look, I had a zoomer colleague of mine ask GPT to solve a moral dilemma in a personality test at work...
It's...rough out there.
As a certified couch psychologist, I'd wager this is also about the influencer culture and reaction videos etc.
People WANT to know how to feel about things, so they watch how other people react to them and form their opinions on that.
In the zoomer colleague case they most likely had a vague opinion, but needed a second opinion from someone (or something) to form their own properly
Which is really sad.
I mean, if my goal was getting the correct answer that will satisfy the employer, I'd ask GPT too. The employer might not like my honest answer.
Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention but I read an implication that using humans to source facts is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm misunderstanding their perspective.
> Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text.
Found the optimist. (no, it unfortunately not required. Imagine, if you will, the world's worst version of the Telephone game...)
Sure, but the same failure mode exists for readers of human writing.
> In the cafeteria, Ryan Tripathi, 16, was paging through “Lord of the Flies,” which he said is slow-going. “I'm just not used to reading,” he said. “I’m usually on my phone.”
Damn, that hits pretty hard.
Understandable, I never finished Lord of the Flies despite not having a smartphone at the time.
I think it's a prerequisite for a book to become required reading in schools to be boring as shit first :)
Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.
Some people will slap a label like "liberal" on "using my smartphone whenever the hell I want". And then people will think that's how it should be.
An electronic version of coal rolling. "You can't tell me this is unhealthy, and I'm going to prove it!"
People "roll coal" it because it is kinda amusing to do it, and it is a middle finger towards people they perceive to be preachy.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Obviously, I don't do this deliberately.
Sounds more like "freedom" which New York has taken away with some big government regulations.
/S
Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.
Yeah, being restricted by laws passed by random adults about what things you can and cannot do during school hours - such as being at school itself - is certainly characteristic of being a kid.
I don't think it's actually possible for a parent and community to safely and sanely raise a human child without some amount of coercion the kid doesn't want in the moment, so I don't advocate for this. Still, it is important to acknowledge that being coerced by people more powerful than you who think they know better than you do about what is good for you is unpleasant in and of itself, and society should try to minimize doing this to children to the extent possible.
And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...
> how (US) universal
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
California just got strict about this, too. I have found a dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal talking that's happening in school as a result, which is great!
Australia banned phones in schools 1-2 years ago and it's been widely recognised as a huge success. I think banning social media like facebook/tiktok/etc for kids would be a huge benefit as well. Leaving just IM/group chats for kids to directly talk to each other without scrolling a feed of ragebait and ai slop.
I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.
You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off of... them having a device.
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
> When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
I do this myself from time to time (and I do it more often if I didn't have bluetooth earbuds), that seems like a perfectly sensible thing to be concerned about.
Banning a 16 year old from minecraft is so far beyond reasonable imo. I'd agree with not giving young kids ipads and walking away. But what sounds like a blanket ban on gaming is absurd.
Serious question (I don't have kids of my own): before smartphones and tablets and the ubiquity of laptops and computers, what did parents do to get some peaceful time to themselves?
It's hard to believe that parents were only able to achieve this during the past 15-20 years.
(When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent plenty of time outdoors with my friends in the neighborhood, and also inside, in front of my Nintendo, either with friends or without. Not sure how much peace my parents got, but I assume it was non-zero.)
Same thing they do now: Get a nanny, ask the grandparents, playdates, ... Putting kids in front of a device is lazy, and unfortunately, most of us are lazy.
What era are you talking about? Later than the 90s had computers and game consoles. Before that it was going outside and digging holes, throwing stones.
Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents at dinner.
>> There is no need for a phone during the school day
I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.
We got by just fine during the school day for decades (centuries?) before smartphones existed, and we can continue to do so without them.
Inane appeals to tradition are boring as fuck and completely useless. We should continue to circumcise infant males because we did it for decades (centuries?) and got by just fine! This says nothing about whether kids having access to cellphones is worthwhile and everything about how garbage your argument against them is.
Everybody else has a phone so the expectation is that they can do change of plans and you're supposed to know where your kid is.
Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.
> Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.
If society were ignorant, then it’s forgivable. But society is not ignorant.
We know tech companies deliver things bad for us (lies and manipulation).
And we knowingly choose it, over the good (truth).
Why would anyone expect them to deliver what is best for us when the purpose of a company is to deliver what others want?
Because social media sites like Facebook literally said they're going to make the world better, by connecting more people and empowering more ideas.
It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it, myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
They could have gone down the path of being a service with a monthly subscription. Instead of making the customer become the product.
Imagine an alternate universe where, since you were paying them, they kept you safe and secure online, and kept the bad actors away.
The only offering that possibly might have been compelling enough to charge for was Messenger if it existed in a vacuum, but there were already numerous services offering much the same for free (e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM), and when others realized that is what the people actually wanted, many more immediately threw their hat in the ring (e.g. iMessage). There would have been no practical hope of it making it as a paid service.
assuming they were able to acquire customers and dominate the world with that business model, would that have prevented them from doing algorithmic feeds and promoting clickbait and poisoning politics and the rest?
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part? My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
> Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that the kids are exposed to violent images.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
> the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!
How do you know? :)
This is really funny for me to read because as a kid we were prohibited from having telecommunications devices while at school entirely. We were also prohibited from speaking during lunchtime. Our lunch was most definitely not loud.
You can always tell a Milford man.
When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.
In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was always evil.
Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can understand anything while all are shouting. It's surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to allow children to have a conversation.
in small doses, but I've seen them go overboard to the point where we are better off without.
If the teacher completely forbids talking, they will just talk right around the corner, or write on paper. They will be just unable to impose it on the children for long.
I think my parents went to this school. Did the nuns slap you with rulers?
It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
It's also difficult to build social skills if your peers around you are stuck looking down at their phones as opposed to looking at those around them.
If you're wanting to meet new people and chat with new people but a large chunk of them are sitting on their phones it makes it more difficult.
pandemic factor is i think critical here
Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.
There is certainly an unhealthy dose of "kids these days" bullshit that inevitably propagates literally every single generation. This is especially disappointing on a forum for "hackers" though. I wouldn't be the person I am today without unrestricted internet access as a teen. My parents wanted me in their ignorant little conservative box not knowing or understanding anything outside of it. Their ignorance exceeded mine, so I was able to circumvent them by the very means many "hacker" news participants would love to see locked down and eliminated. I can't help but think of them as simple and pathetic as my parents were trying to strictly control what I could learn. They are the very definition of an anti-hacker culturally.
No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.
> In 2020, school systems in the United States began to close down in March because of the spread of COVID-19
I definitely know who was president in March of 2020. Before they lost their election 8 months later.
Somehow it seems a lot of people don't.
It isn’t who was president it is who supported keeping schools closed.
Crazy, I went to boarding school 2009-2011 and our dinner hall was always loud with talking and laughter. However sometimes it would slowly get quieter until the room went silent with everyone looking oddly at each other, then a massive wave of laughter would erupt.
Some weird phenomenon.
I also remember downloading Froggy jump on my iPhone and playing it with friends, but you certainly put your phone away more than you do now. You also had it taken off of you if you were on it when you shouldn't have been. If my parents found out they took my phone off of me, they'd probably crack it at me because I wasn't paying attention. I get the feeling many parents might just get angry at the teacher rather than their child.
As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.
I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
In the early 2000s, when everyone had a phone but no smart phones, we had this "thing" at the college bar:
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
It makes me so sad that it's possible for technology to steal the need to talk and play, even from our youth. If you have little kids you know how frantically they NEED to yap and play. I hold such horror for anything that would sap such life away.
It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.
For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
Yup. I'm Gen X (1972), and I'd read a book, watch TV, or (once we hit the mid-80s) I had a home computer.
I spent much of my free childhood hours from about 1976 to 1988 in front of a computer screen. But I was certainly not in the mainstream.
I don't think the mainstream people end up on HN.
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These things are not remotely comparable. Smartphones, especially social media double depression and suicide rates among teens.
Music is medicine. I’ve been taking guitar for a few years now and it’s pure joy.
Problem is for the first month of lessons it is not joy, it is hard frustrating work where you sound bad and know it. Even when you are good lessons often are pushing you to do hard things and so they are not pure joy.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
Practicing is always hard and I struggle to find time or energy to push myself but my goal was to be able to play basic chords and make up silly songs around the campfire so everything else is just a bonus.
Even then, individual screens is isolating.
Collapsing in front of the TV with the family was still quality time enjoying something together.
For a lot of young people the screen is social - the equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still comms.
The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short video clips that are largely designed to sell product, stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty, etc.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
Most of the social of screens is when you get to a place without them you have something common to talk about. "how about [local sports team]", "what did you think about [whatever happened on latest soap opera]", "lets pretend I'm [some character on cartoon]". It is all shorthand for we have something in common and can skip getting to know each other.
Individual screens let parents get some peace and quiet for a while. As with everything, moderation is the key, not abstention.
Individual screens can be isolating, they can also be somewhat social. I agree, not a complete replacement for other social activities for sure. But, as a kid with internet connected videogames growing up, those internet connected games kept me playing with friends from school and other groups even if we weren't able to physically get together that evening.
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
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The play-based childhood is over; the phone-based childhood is here.
Not universally though, the local skate park and sports fields see plenty of activity.
Just until they are shutdown to put in pickleball for retirees.
> Not universally though, the local skate park and sports fields see plenty of activity.
Sure if “at least one match” means activity.
Back in the day, you couldn’t find parking for several blocks radius around every public sports field.
Thankfully that state is far from evenly-distributed.
It’s here but do we think it’s better? Should it stay?
As a society we do get to answer these questions.
As a society we've proven over and over again that we're unable to solve these problems that require coordination against greed. We've pulled the smartphone out of Pandora's box.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
No, the issue is that most parents don’t want to do any parenting. There’s a product that makes children shut up, of course it’s selling out.
I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in the first place and that this was just about pushing back against the helicopter parents.
I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the students are already staring at a screen during class, they continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.
Kids have phones for "safety" reasons. It's pretty irrational, but hard to push back against without help from on high.
The "Safety" excuse is bullshit. What safety problem could exist in a school that a child with a cell phone can solve? Fire? School administrators will call the fire department. Intruder? School administrators will call the police. School shooter? Same. There's nothing that a child with a cell phone will fix.
Yeah, I think people are downvoting me because they don't realize I meant what you're saying when I called it irrational.
Just get the standardized test scores you need and call it a day. I find this to be very performative from a student perspective.
Why should articles like these always start with some fictional story like a novel? The actual news is buried somewhere half-way after the throw-away story.
It is following a magazine style. This is partly to elicit an emotional reaction and partly I suspect because the copy writer is bored and wishes they were writing novels instead.
if it's a proper news source they (and every other paper) already reported it who knows how many times. "city is about to ban phones in schools" "city is banning phones in schools" "the phones in schools were banned". everybody who needs to know already knows
This is not intended to be a news piece. It's a story. But whoever is in charge of CMS messed up categories. It should not be labeled news
It is an annoying writing style that is done on a lot of sites in both news articles and "stories" as you call them.
annoying? if you want Crime and Punishment to be "guy killed a grandma" that's your thing but believe me this style is not annoying to many people aside from vocal minority
It’s fascinating to see a practice that was previously limited to Silicon Valley executives become first a national class signifier and now go mainstream.
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
FOOD FIGHT!!
Is it just me who finds it annoying that some people like using the pattern "make something <adjective> again"? Like, you don't have any other choice?
Smartphones are this century's cigarrettes.
No more kids cameras in the classroom
This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still bring a standalone camera to school.
Which would cause a lot of questions if you pull it out in the classroom.
I don't think smartphones should be allowed in schools but as someone who was dumbfounded by the lunchtime cacophony of my peers, I wouldn't lead with that as a triumph.
Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their healthy social environment. I personally was always able to find a quiet spot.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids, believe it or not.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want noise during lunch. The library should always be open during lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know how to dress for any other weather).
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
Tech will prevail on the long term, even with these misguided bans.
The smartphone OSs hide all that "tech". They are not more educational (by themselves) than interactive advertisement streams.
title should include "school" like in original article:
"NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"
The ban will be revoked after Meta sues for business damages caused by unlawful government interference with their customer acquisition operations. /s
We need to sue Meta (et al.) for social damage caused by unlawful acquisition of addicts from the public education system. (My personal opinion)
So I have eye witness accounts of this lunchroom saying that's not true. The lunchroom was deafeningly loud before the ban.
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and learning about society and human nature enough
I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there will always be variations by school.
A whole lot of people who got to their great tech jobs by commoditizing their screen addictions (I.e a significant amount of this very website) are massively harmed by these policies. I can’t believe that the folks here nearly universally like this.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll through apps.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
The school president is 17?
Yes, the president of the student-elected body of mostly-powerless "school government."
The student-elected body is often called the Student Council.
Sometimes each grade level will have a class president.
Varies from school to school for the details.
it’s an america thing
Other countries don't have prefects? Wikipedia seems to indicate the phenomenon is worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_president
We wouldn't call such a thing a president, but yes.
That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)
All of this read and written on a smartphone.
Reversion to the past is not preparation for the future.
Why is it that Hacker News is overwhelmingly liberal on most issues but when it comes to teenagers/children incredibly authoritarian and big government?