Teens

In England, Australia and Switzerland parents want to ban mobile phones from children beneath 14 years of age. In theory this is an excellent idea this is a fantastic and fabulous idea, because it means parents can avoid spending thousands of francs per year on mobile phones, and tech is seen as toxic. In practice parents are scapegoating the medium, rather than the source of the problem. Facebook, Zynga, Supercell and many other companies are deliberately targeting people to make their platforms addictive and compelling.

Today I read from Techcrunch and The Verge that there are new tools to limit things so that people can only get comments from friends and family. The irony isn’t lost on me. The irony I’m thinking about is that we have built a social media landscape where the content from strangers floods our timelines without us wanting to see it. Rather than just give us chronological timelines with posts from our friends, they add mitigation factors for slowing down and stopping harrasment.