It’s not just the kids.
I had to take my dad to the dentist today, so I was in the waiting room for about 2 hours. I think everyone that came in during that time was at least 40, and I was the only one reading. Not even lobby magazines, everyone was just staring at their phone. One guy brought a laptop, but at least he was probably just doing work. I got about 80 pages more into Lyall Watson’s Lifetide and an issue of Popular Mechanics while they were constantly checking Facebook.
This is the downside to the internet. There is a world of just about any information that you want in you hand. It’s fasinating, powerful, and is driving a lot of STEM today. The other side is social media and instant gratification. Like gambling, you get little shots of dopamime everytime someone likes a post, or reblogs, or retweets, etc… It’s an addiction and from kids to the older generation are hooked on it.
This problem is as old as the hills. It’s called addiction. I admit that I have it. I find myself looking at my phone or the computer screen WAY too often. It’s instant gratification. Just like the opium epidemic of times past man has always had addiction problems. It is most obvious when man has lots of idle time. If you are too busy foraging for food or have to till the fields or hunt you don’t have time on your hands to pursue an addiction. Today we have more and more idle time which man fills with the cheapest gratification he can get. Today that’s not opium, it’s electrons…
Completely agree all around. I’m deep in netsec and other interesting things online. While I’m not into social media, I’m online much more than not. It’s not healthy at all but I do it anyway.
I think we 
should let people turn 18 before we write articles talking shit about them.
But why is this waste of time worse than any other waste of time. Assuming they are just on social media and not doing anything useful at all, which seems unlikely, why is that worse than rubiks cubes, video games, reading fiction, or drawing?
It’s probably worse because of all the advertisements and marketing that is constantly going on.
What’s magic about 18? Besides, Jay was right that it’s not just people under 18. As for magazines, I’ll take the interwebz over People Magazine any day. As for addiction, I’d call it “habit forming.” (I hate that word, and still think it should be reserved for chemical dependency.)
Its the age, in the States, at which you have control over your life. If I critique you before then then I’m critiquing your parents and blaming it on you. If the gang you live under has a different age of relative freedom then I’ll use that instead, but I believe that this publication is a US publication.
It’s a number. People do stupid and brilliant things before and after that age, without regard to their parents.
Ok, but if someone is literally being held hostage and denied contractual capacity, if that person will have the cops called on them for escape if they leave the building not unlike a prisoner in jail, I am going to withhold judgment on them until such time that they are free-ish.
But we’re not talking about statistical outliers.
Right now I don’t see it. People are happy to be crushed by the government because they can go home to their 60" TV and Netflix and veg out. Even online we have automated tools to grab shows, movies, files, etc… so we don’t even have to search anymore. It’s all about automation if at all possible.
Like I said, we would need a massive shift in the social consciousness to make it happen and that takes time. Bittorrent launched in April of 2001 and a report in 2014 by the EU showed that the public consciousness on the usage of it and piracy itself is considered okay. That’s 13 years for something on the internet that moves at lightning speed.
I’d say they’re both pretty common. People don’t get brilliant on the day the government considers them adults.