What drives me nuts personally is how nobody is asking the adults that ALREADY grew up online as kids what impact it has.
This is hardly the first time we've had a panic about kids on the internet; the first one I remember is the freak out that led to COPPA in the late 90s. At the time, perhaps people could be forgiven for not asking us since we were the first generation of kids who had unrestricted Internet access and we were still kids (nobody wants children's opinions), but now there are plenty of formerly Too Online Children that are adults.
If having unrestricted information/internet access at an early age does change your brain, why aren't we comparing people in their 30s who grew up online with people in their 30s who didn't? That would be super interesting, and there are many aspects of growing up online that definitely did change my experience. (E.G. being able to pretend to be an adult and be addressed as an equal based on my ideas online made it very hard to function in the real world where acting like an adult's equal was inappropriate, I had access to information that many adults did not and that caused problems, I had access to information that my local culture considered 'inappropriate' but was acceptable online [information about female puberty is one], etc.)
Lots of people deciding what our experiences did to us without asking us.
This is hardly the first time we've had a panic about kids on the internet; the first one I remember is the freak out that led to COPPA in the late 90s. At the time, perhaps people could be forgiven for not asking us since we were the first generation of kids who had unrestricted Internet access and we were still kids (nobody wants children's opinions), but now there are plenty of formerly Too Online Children that are adults.
If having unrestricted information/internet access at an early age does change your brain, why aren't we comparing people in their 30s who grew up online with people in their 30s who didn't? That would be super interesting, and there are many aspects of growing up online that definitely did change my experience. (E.G. being able to pretend to be an adult and be addressed as an equal based on my ideas online made it very hard to function in the real world where acting like an adult's equal was inappropriate, I had access to information that many adults did not and that caused problems, I had access to information that my local culture considered 'inappropriate' but was acceptable online [information about female puberty is one], etc.)
Lots of people deciding what our experiences did to us without asking us.