Life without the internet made me feel alone and isolated with no recourse by which to find resilience to my abusers. While I can’t say I’d be different with social media and the internet to advise me they were lying to me and treating me unfairly for their own benefit, I’d at least have that perspective, and it wouldn’t be ingrained that I am just broken and should unlife and stop burning resources that could be better used elsewhere.
These days, I have management skills and a support system, but I still deal with suicidality every day, and am incapable of seeing any value I produce to the world (or see it insignificant compared to my footprint), and the internet and social media have figured largely in my comprehension of the mechanics of my mental illness (especially when dealing with professionals who are less interested in understand me as affirming their own ideology, not a new problem, but the current batch is particularly egregious).
It is, as I see it, a human right for people to be informed when they need to make life decisions (with concurrence from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and without access to public information, kids rely on authorities who are either ignorant or complicit in feeding them false information. They should have access not only to the internet, but also to a robust community of people with differing ideas.
Fail to provide this and you get grown-up crackpots like me, who wonder every day if it’s time to check out.
I mean I got along without it, i just played video games and masturbated most of the time
Sounds like you’re older though. Social media wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous a decade ago as it is now.
There was separation between online and everything else. But for these kids, online is everything. The spaces are nearly equal in experience and importance.
Experts: social media is harmful for kids
Schools: let’s use social media as an official communication platform!
WTF.
While I’m at it, the ongoing dialog
It doesn’t sound like the school is actually using it as an official communication platform (thank goodness), just that all of the student run clubs use it as their means of communication, which is just driven by where the majority of them like to communicate. Obviously this is a sign of the issue, which is that most teens are on social media all the time, so that it becomes their preferred mode of communication.
Life as a teen isn’t easy anyway
Glad that shit is over for me. We only had MySpace and MSN Messenger. Must be so much worse now
I’d say so with those constant little dopamine hits. Shit, I’m 40 and I’ve had to put a bunch of efforSHIT IM ON LEMMY AGAIN!
I can echo the frustrations expressed about social media becoming a necessity as it becomes the primary channel for communication by an institution. Both my university and student dorm use exclusively Discord to communicate events, exams, and general announcements. I don’t run Discord on my phone and due to this I have come close to missing several important things, if not for a friend letting me know. I’m not sure what if anything could be done to change this…
Same boat, I just use the Discord website on my phone. The account I created with designated e-mail address for this.
Unfortunately, e-mail notifications are kinda random. It can be like 1 day late before I receive notification that someone tagged me or whatever. They could just use regular mail at this point.
Run a matrix bridge, sure you still have to have an account but at least the malware client doesn’t get installed.
