Kids on the internet

Like most of my generation, I remember a time before the internet. Although it existed, it was in its early stages and was primarily used to host and share information. My very first experience with it was in the mid-90’s, where my dad showed me what Google was. He said “type in anything you want here” and so I typed in “cars” into the search box. And then magically, images of cars popped up. I remember being mind-blown that it could link the word cars with images of cars and automatically show them to me. It felt like magic. I then proceeded to use the internet for my automobile obsession and started making all sorts of crazy PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents using images and data from the magical world wide web.

And slowly, it creeped in more and more into life. We got computers at school and there were classes being taught on how to use software and how to type efficiently. It was clear in 1998 that the computer would be an essential tool for the future, so they were preparing us early. And then it just took over everything. By the time I was in high school, everyone around me had their own personal laptops. By the time I was in college, everyone around me had an internet-connected smartphone. And when I entered the workforce, a connected world was suddenly the norm. Employees were expected to be online and available, friends expected you to respond immediately when they reached out on whatever messaging platform they chose to reach out to you on, and even online dating had moved to mobile in full swing. And this all happened in less than twenty years.

It blows my mind to think about this. My childhood, adolescence, and young adult life has seen the creation and transformation of humanity’s most profound invention to date. This is the very beginning of the information era, and it’s only going to get crazier from here. Now that an entirely new generation is coming online for the first time, they’re perceiving the technology as something totally different. Fifth and sixth graders have smartphones with all sorts of connected apps. They have access to the entire internet and the world’s knowledge in their palms. I wouldn’t blame them if they questioned the value of going to school or college when everything they could ever wish to know was a simple Google search away.

But of course, there’s the nefarious side of this technology. Every article that you’ve seen about gamified apps designed to release dopamine in adults and get them addicted to games like Candy Crush is exaggerated ten times when you think about the children using these same products. Likes, notifications, and subscriptions on social media are designed around the same principle, and we know the effect is bad enough on adults. Imagine what it’s like being twelve and craving this same sugar. Your brain’s developmental psychology is directly impacted by these desires and it completely transforms how you perceive instant versus delayed gratification.

When tech companies design these products, they are absolutely not designing for kids. They completely ignore this market entirely and just focus on monetization methods using adults as personas. But real life isn’t so simple, is it? You can’t assume perfect parenting. There’s nothing stopping little Tommy from picking up his mother’s phone that she left unlocked on the couch while she had to go turn off the stove. There’s nothing stopping young Jill from tapping around random websites on the family iPad until she lands on something inappropriate. Despite the parents’ best intentions, they can’t control what the kids will be exposed to at school or when they have unlimited access to download anything they want from the App Store.

Look at Fortnite for a good recent example. Tons of parents have expressed frustrations with their kids being helplessly addicted to the game. Do you think Epic had the 12-18 year olds as a demographic when designing the Battle Royale mode for Fortnite? Not at all. They were just making a game with an approachable art style that would have a lasting appeal and it just became this huge cultural phenomenon, taking off amongst teenagers in particular. And now who controls what the teammates these kids are paired up with aren’t creeps on the internet? Who’s moderating any of these interactions? Certainly not Epic.

It’s the same with social media. Finstas are a very common phenomenon, and communities of kids in school are trying their best to stick to ephemeral apps that the adults would never find out about. They spread it like wildfire and word-of-mouth does its thing, attracting hundreds and thousands of school networks to the app. None of this is reflected in the company’s metrics. They just look at DAUs/WAUs/MAUs. They don’t care how many of them are kids. They’ll blatantly buy any marketing tool that will give them more attributions, clicks, sponsorships, targeting, and advertising so that they can boost their metrics to attract investors in their next Series-B round of funding. No-one cares that thousands of kids were unknowingly exposed to clickbait or fake news circulated by one of the content providers. Even if this miraculously comes to light, it’s not a big enough problem for the company to care. After all, it’s the user’s choice to look at the content, right? They should know better than to fall for it.

This is where the crucial divide comes in. When your users are adults, you can easily shrug off these things by saying that the adults are actively choosing to engage with this type of content (even the NSFW stuff) and the responsibility thus lies entirely on them. But what if your brain hasn’t developed enough yet to make these meaningful choices for yourself? Can you really tame your pre-adolescent curiosity enough to not want to click on a news article that says “You won’t believe what these girls did next!” accompanied by a thumbnail of a particularly vivacious group of women by a beach? You could make a pretty solid argument that these garbage content providers are relying entirely on teenagers and kids to drive clicks, not actual users who care about their news.

Video is even worse. Instagram has turned into a never-ending drip feed of dopamine, with auto-playing video previews in the Explore feed and Instagram Live constantly having something dazzling to keep your mind occupied. Most adults are pretty cognizant of how they’re spending their time and are usually aware of when they’re spending too much time watching useless videos. Who’s telling the kids when to stop watching? The counter-argument here is usually “Well we watched a lot of TV when we were kids too,” and okay, fine. But TV shows had a designated start and stop time. Yes, there were channels that showed cartoons 24×7, but “TV time” was mandated in many households and you couldn’t really watch TV in school. When you have a smartphone on you at all times, how can parents effectively enforce a screen-time limit on their kids’ smartphone usage?

What I’m getting at is that those who grew up with the slow creep of the connected world into our daily lives have witnessed it go from a weird place where funky geocities sites were hosted to an information database to a messaging platform to a news outlet to a mobile revolution in social media. We know how this started, how it got to where it is, and where the limitations are. We know how to spot a site or app that’s likely to be malware, we know what news articles are fake (most of us, at least), and we’re quick to tell what a tech product is trying to do and are actively trying to stray away from things like over-surveillance or intrusions of privacy. But the kids can’t possibly keep up with this. They entered into this giant connected world and will be the ones in control of it twenty years from now, with brains that developed using technology that wasn’t designed with them in mind but technology that they used anyway. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s going to be a very different world when it’s led by a generation that grew up in the connected world rather than with it.

No movie captures the essence of this quite like Eighth Grade. It’s actually what inspired me to write this post. Bo Burnham’s directorial debut features a young eighth grader about to enter high school, and it paints a terrifying picture of what today’s kids have to live with and put themselves through in order to just get by every day. Online interactions seem more meaningful than ones in real life, and it’s far easier to just live in the digital world than it is to engage with actual people. Kayla, the star of the film, finds it far more comfortable to interact with technology than with humans. Even all the kids in school are so pre-occupied with scrolling and swiping on smartphones that they completely miss the world around them.

I probably sound like an old person yelling at the new generation at this point, but I’d like to stress that none of this is a fault of the kids. It’s all a gigantic failure on the capitalistic system designed to favor artificially inflated metrics about daily active users with a reckless disregard for who these users are. It’s also a sign of a massive system breakdown when we’ve failed to enforce age restrictions for content online. None of this seems like a big deal right now, but give it a few years and watch what happens to how we consume content, spend our time online, and interact with technology in general. I really think we’re poised for a major shift in how we view the digital world in the next twenty or so years, and it’ll be led by the generation that found themselves in a fully connected world and was forced to create a new lifestyle in order to survive in it.