I'd like to share a topic of discussion with you all: fear mongering about the internet and its dangers, 2019 edition.
It's been a matter of personal reflection and perplexity how there seems to be a massive push to make the internet children safe in the last few years. More precisely, since the year of invention of the Iphone (2007) when the internet-accessibility potentialities of smartphones had been revealed and made a marketable product by Mr. Jobs.
Coincidentally, many tiny event bubbles started forming and wrecking havoc into the internet we all knew and loved at the time. If previously, owning a personal computer and working an internet connection was considered tech savvy, with the passage of time the user friendly interfaces has brought it to level with a wider, but despite that -adult- audience. But the toy-like shape of the smartphones, their bright colors and smooth edges made it simple and "safe" enough for parents to trust their children with it.
If any of you is a 4chan refugee, the year 2007 cca will be familiar to you as the endless summer, aka the time where the influx of new users made it impossible to preserve chan culture and instruct the newcomers with timely fashion, leading to the widespread decay of imageboards as a whole.
Youtube itself had to quickly adapt to this influx of children, which left to their own accord and with little supervision started exploring their sexuality to the pleasure of pedophiles worldwide, leading to the ever increasing surveillance (that today is culminating into AI-guided censorship).
And with those two big rocks conquered, the rest of the internet felt like adapting was the profitable choice. Facebook, Tumblr, and many others have since adapted to the playful, pastel colored & safe child-friendly standard, with many more social networks spawning from this seemingly unanimous wave.
Now, connecting the dots, where does this path lead us? Why is it so important to make this enviroenment child friendly when children are only a part of the equation and not the whole? Why should the adult internet adapt to the newfags, and not the other way around, enforcing loss of privacy to keep the younger ones away from content not adequate to them?
My personal opinion is this. The media companies, toghether with many countries percieve the internet as the natural, most convenient and widespread electrical nanny. If the television was previously used to grow children (which also received heavy ruling for the same reason) now the next successor to it should indeed be the device many children already carry in their pocket! In this twisted world moved by an economy that prevents many parents from teaching anything worthwhile to their offsprings, we resort to judging the parenting capabilities of an everchanging and ultimately uncontrollable cluster of software, over what should be the healthy alternative of preventing these children from accessing the internet all toghether and experiencing instead a normal childhood, surrounded by their own kind.
<What are your thoughts about it?
<What's the better solution in this case scenario?
Keep in mind the same mentality is hemorraging also over the movie industry and videogames aswell!