>Sir Tim Berners-Lee says too many young people do not have internet access and the digital divide has widened during the pandemic.
Given the mental health crisis in young people (especially girls) stemming from social media use and ever present landmine of writing something inappropriate that will destroy your life later ... is that such a bad thing?
To me that sounds as ridiculous as saying: "Given the high rates of obesity due to overconsumption of food, is the scarcity of food in developing countries such a bad thing?"
Isn't it more like: "Given the high rates of obesity due to overconsumption of junk food, is the unchecked availability and aggressive marketing of unhealthy, addictive junk food really a good thing?"
He said access to the internet, not to Facebook or something. You know, that thing that has new wonders of the world and incredible educational content such as Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
Yes, the internet has some "wonders", and I appreciate them greatly. (If I didn't think it had value, I wouldn't have spent the last decade-plus of my life working on internet-related software and standards.)
However, it also has a huge amount of toxic garbage, by no means restricted to a few "social media" sites.
Whether we can stem the deluge of junk, so that the average person's experience of the internet is actually a net positive, seems uncertain at this point. I don't think we've yet figured out how to manage this.
You're ridiculously off-topic and plain wrong. Internet access is in fact necessary for a lot of people. And since now in many countries children socialize online, not just in real life, it's a necessary aspect of their life.
>Internet access is in fact necessary for a lot of people.
We're talking about children. Internet is a fact of modern life and yes, at some point in their development, children will be exposed to it ... nobody is denying that. I fundamentally disagree however that internet access (limited or otherwise) is fundamentally necessary for child development, or academic success or education in general. That's bullcrap.
>And since now in many countries children socialize online, not just in real life, it's a necessary aspect of their life.
Yeah. I know. We're in the midst of a mental health crisis especially amongst girls brought on by social media use. That's not a good thing by the way.
>I fundamentally disagree however that internet access (limited or otherwise) is fundamentally necessary for child development, or academic success or education in general.
I don't think that's true for many parts of the world, where the level of education attainable through standard means would hardly meet your standard of what is deemed reasonable. For such places, the internet is the only way for children to make steps towards that standard, albeit not easily.
In what way is "internet access" equivalent to "the unchecked availability and aggressive marketing of unhealthy, addictive junk food" in this analogy? I'm quite sure you've misunderstood the analogy.
That can be seen as "poorer people don't have enough access to the Internet" or as "the people in charge created too much reliance on the Internet". If COVID had happened 30 years ago, the risk tolerance would be different and we'd be much more reluctant to close schools for an extended period of time.
Okay? By that logic, the entire world has created too much reliance on the internet.
We closed school when we had no power for 4 days two years ago. To extend your logic, schools have created too much reliance on electricity. If this was 100 years ago, the buildings would be different and we wouldn't have needed to close schools for an extended period. That argument doesn't make sense or have a purpose, but it makes just as much sense as your argument, to me.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here, I guess is what I'm getting at.
What I'm getting at is that to whatever extent poorer kids are falling behind academically right now, it isn't really for lack of Internet access, but because we made policy decisions assuming everybody could learn-from-home for months.
That's fair, but lack of internet access absolutely is a major problem. I still don't understand why you would try to remove that from the policy decisions about learning from home.
Except for poorer kids where "learning from home" isn't working. I think this approach that "we can just stay home and do everything online, we're saving lives, everything's fine," is generating a lot of unforeseen costs to society in the longer term.
He is making the point that young people have found it hard to learn over the lockdown because of not being able to have access to education. He said, "A shocking number of kids in the UK don't have meaningful connectivity."
This has nothing to do with the toxicity of social networks.
I believe that connection to educational services should be free for all families that can't afford it in the UK.
>His point is that young people have had to rely on the internet for education most of the past year and that’s been difficult for less wealthy people.
I think that needs to be qualified because this kind of argumentation tends rely on naive and simplified tropes and stereotypes of various class groups.
What are you on about? Wealth and income are absolutely tied to ease and quality of technology/internet access in the home. That's not a stereotype, it's a fact (at least in the US).
I'm not trying to be flippant, but do literally any cursory search related to income and technology and you'll find many, many, many scholarly articles supporting that statement.
I have to assume that the lesson holds true for other countries, though I do need to admit ignorance to that fact.
>Wealth and income are absolutely tied to ease and quality of technology/internet access in the home.
And you think fiber internet, a MacBook Pro, iPad, and a big screen tv equates to better grades? Better learning? Better education? When it comes to education a book, pencil and paper and a teacher is all you really need. Heck, technology may even be a hindrance because of the distraction aspect.
There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.
It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society. A child growing up in a single-parent home, especially where drugs or alcohol is an issue and living in a crime-filled, violent neighborhood (defund the police!) will be challenged. You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.
>fiber internet, a MacBook Pro, iPad, and a big screen tv
No, but I (and this is not meant to be hateful) do believe you are out of touch with the reality of this situation. It's not about having fiber, it's about having anything except dial-up or a cell phone as an option. It's not about a macbook pro or an ipad, it's about not trying to do your homework on a shared family smartphone. The television isn't even a thing, not sure what that has to do with anything.
>There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.
That is a very bold statement. Please cite.
>It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society.
This is also a SUPER bold statement. Please cite.
>You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.
And yet, wealth and parent income are consistently shown to be the greatest predictor of future achievement, even when controlling for other variables such as ethnicity, gender, location. My citations:
And that's just from 30 seconds of searching while out of the office. If I was at the office today, I could cite any number of the books and articles on my shelves on this subject, as this is literally what I have built my career in higher education on.
>And that's just from 30 seconds of searching while out of the office.
So you google around for 10 mins, to cherry pick studies, that you didn't even bother to read, as a way to confirm your preconceived conclusion? You think that this is a valid way of argument? Uh huh. Cherry picking data to fit a preconceived conclusion is how science is done ... right?
Right now we're graduating functionally illiterate kids at incredible rates. Tell me the MECHANISM (not correlation) by which low-income equals to illiteracy in the context of our society which provides schools, school-buses, books, and teachers. By the way, every single school in America is good and is staffed by good quality teachers.
Having grown up in my city's immigrant ghetto (surrounded by Eastern European, Iranian, Filipino and Hong Kong immigrants), in a low-income (but loving) household with no English knowledge, and being an immigrant myself, I always like to see how those who grew up privileged see everyone else. I really do want to know your MECHANISM of how low-income translates to illiteracy (as an example). And on a slight tangent, in my personal experience, the most lectures on poverty and privilege I get are from people who were born in the country and grew up firmly in the upper middle class.
I can guarantee you're going to find low-income households with academically high performing children, and here we're talking about just literacy (not even high academic achievement). Quickly enough you'll find that income is not a good gauge and that other factors dominate.
How much access do kids have to books and a teacher right now if they don't have internet access?
Our library has contactless pickup, so you can still get books. But only provided you first go the library website over the internet and reserve them.
Our library has a Kindle lending library, provided of course that you access the library website to check them out and download the book to your ~$100 Kindle device over the internet.
Preventing people’s access to something because of the potential downsides to it? You can apply it to any facility. That’s the same mentality that keeps girls locked up in some cultures, to keep them “safe”.
>Preventing people’s access to something because of the potential downsides to it?
We're not talking about adults, we're talking about children. Yes, at some point they need to be exposed to the internet because the internet is a fact of life. I'm just not sold that any child (say, under the age of 14) who doesn't have access to the internet would somehow be crippled socially, culturally or academically. I have yet to see any study that suggests limiting access to the internet for children, or even no access internet is greatly detrimental. Contrast this with the FACT that there is a mental health crisis happening right now due social media use, and that there is no effective way to segrate internet from social media. So what is the argument here? What if there is no safe-level of social media use for children? By the way it is not uncommon to see children of tech-savvy parents, who may work in the industry, outright banning or tightly controlling internet access to their children.
That kids definitely won't be desperate to work around and overcome.
But I'm sort-of in favor, to encourage technical skills. Set up society so kids have to learn pentesting to see boobs, and seven proxies to not get found out and told off by the local morality commisar. Instant generational competence upgrade.
2) Schools are closed because of government mandated lockdowns. Not every region or nation decided to close their schools. In fact, most didn't. We're not even sure if that level of lockdown was good policy. Certainly there are credible epidemiologists who vehemently disagree with either lockdows or school closures.
3) The level of learning by remote instruction ... the data isn't out yet, but it isn't looking great. Maybe it's better than nothing but maybe not by much.
4) This is a generational pandemic that came suddenly and required big government bureaucracies to turn on a dime, and the internet to facilitate remote work was the most natural choice. But what are you saying, had this happened in 1992, no learning would be done? Or as the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention" and we would find alternatives. We educated children just fine before the internet. In fact I suspect we would come up with something better than zoom classes.
5) But OK. Let's give the internet points for assisting with this pandemic. Let's draft laws that in the event of global pandemics you leverage the internet for remote learning. What is your argument for post-pandemic world?
But overall I vehemently disagree with the notion that: "No internet == no teaching."
False equivalency. We prevent children buying alcohol and firearms because they might harm themselves and other people not because other people might use those things to harm them.
the original comment seemed to be concerned with kids harming themselves, but at any rate we prevent kids gambling as well which is much closer to the dynamics of social media than alcohol or firearms.
Given the mental health crisis in young people (especially girls) stemming from social media use and ever present landmine of writing something inappropriate that will destroy your life later ... is that such a bad thing?