I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
When I was in high school in the 90's, the fames Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
There existed a period of time where handheld communication devices existed and were banned.
Sometime later, someone somewhere made a conscious choice to change policy. It didn’t just happen.
Must have been a powerful person.
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
> If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
I hope you're trolling, because if not...
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.
a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.
Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to “think more in class” because she used to Google answers or use artificial intelligence. “Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do] deep research instead of going straight to AI,” she said.
It's...rough out there.
People WANT to know how to feel about things, so they watch how other people react to them and form their opinions on that.
In the zoomer colleague case they most likely had a vague opinion, but needed a second opinion from someone (or something) to form their own properly
Which is really sad.
Found the optimist. (no, it unfortunately not required. Imagine, if you will, the world's worst version of the Telephone game...)
Damn, that hits pretty hard.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Obviously, I don't do this deliberately.
/S
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
It's hard to believe that parents were only able to achieve this during the past 15-20 years.
(When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent plenty of time outdoors with my friends in the neighborhood, and also inside, in front of my Nintendo, either with friends or without. Not sure how much peace my parents got, but I assume it was non-zero.)
I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.
If society were ignorant, then it’s forgivable. But society is not ignorant.
We know tech companies deliver things bad for us (lies and manipulation).
And we knowingly choose it, over the good (truth).
It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it, myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Imagine an alternate universe where, since you were paying them, they kept you safe and secure online, and kept the bad actors away.
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
How do you know? :)
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
If you're wanting to meet new people and chat with new people but a large chunk of them are sitting on their phones it makes it more difficult.
I definitely know who was president in March of 2020. Before they lost their election 8 months later.
Somehow it seems a lot of people don't.
Some weird phenomenon.
I also remember downloading Froggy jump on my iPhone and playing it with friends, but you certainly put your phone away more than you do now. You also had it taken off of you if you were on it when you shouldn't have been. If my parents found out they took my phone off of me, they'd probably crack it at me because I wasn't paying attention. I get the feeling many parents might just get angry at the teacher rather than their child.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
Collapsing in front of the TV with the family was still quality time enjoying something together.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
Sure if “at least one match” means activity.
Back in the day, you couldn’t find parking for several blocks radius around every public sports field.
As a society we do get to answer these questions.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
This is not intended to be a news piece. It's a story. But whoever is in charge of CMS messed up categories. It should not be labeled news
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
"NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
Reversion to the past is not preparation for the future.