As your local Eternally Online Elder Millennial, I volunteer to be Social Media Envoy to the Albanese Government

I started a new Sims save today – after reinstalling windows last month I needed to get all the updates and update OBS and all the other things to make streaming possible again. And I got there. It’s cleaner because so much got purged, I’m sure I’ll add to the clutter on the screen, in my life – both Sims and IRL.

I first got online in 2000, aged 17/18. So an older teen, but still a teen. I got onto playing Neopets, chatting through ICQ and Yahoo Groups, and we started online journals and blogging. I made friends around the world. I don’t see banning teens and tweens even from social media as viable, let alone a good thing. Kids already just get their parents and older siblings to make accounts for them or watch hours of appropriate and less-appropriate content. A ban would see kids less able to speak up when things are a bit shady online, less able to know who to turn to if there’s a problem if they’re having to hide that part of their lives and learning to navigate it with less guidance than how many are now – locked down Instagram accounts with a select audience, Minecraft servers with strangers and friends, Youtube channels and Twitter bringing us the headlines more reliably than the national broadcaster.

The country doesn’t know when to actually let kids be kids, and when to criminalise them to to imposed outdated views on what kids should be doing. Access to information when growing up is important, and these days that information and social experimentation happens a lot online. People are worried that kids are being sexualised too young if they’re learning about queerness when really they’re just learning the terminology for what they’re feeling inside themselves that kids in the 90s and earlier couldn’t find out unless they were avid readers borrowing every book in the local library, or were in a very progressive pocket of town. Kids know they’re “not straight” but doesn’t have the words for it, just as trans kids exist and need families who just let them explore themselves – through playing with gender roles, names, types of clothing and more. Kids get to see that Straight, Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgender, Intersex, Asexual and other categories of people are able to grow up into happy and healthy adults and can see that positive possibility for themselves.

I’m loving that future for the kids. Let’s not take it from them.

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