"As long as I can see them it's okay right?". Ironically, restricting childrens access to the outside world due to it's potential danger has left children in a much worse state than if they were allowed more physical freedom.
An excellent point. Whenever I hear about people gripe about kids and teenagers being online or playing video games too much, I find myself thinking… have you ever considered that this might be because they aren’t permitted to do stuff that Gen X and prior were almost
expected to do? They retreat to online spaces because that’s one of the few places they’re allowed to
be anymore. And it hasn’t gone well.
The way my experience differs is that I never interacted with anyone online, I never even posted on anywhere I lurked. This makes me worried because the grooming examples on this thread are just the ones we know about. We will never know the true extent of the damage these people cause due to people like me who never actively engaged.
Another big difference with Gen Z is that they were raised in a world where the internet had become mainstream and established, and that affected the general attitude around it.
I was a teenager back in the Web 1.0 era. The internet still wasn’t universally adopted in those days, and the general nuances of what it was and how it worked and how it was different from other things was still fresh in people’s minds. So there was a general awareness, and it was very much emphasized, that you didn’t really know who you were talking to, how easily people could lie about things, etc.
Gen Z, on the other hand, was born and raised in a world where not only was internet usage nearly universal, but we also had the ability to easily post photos* and videos, and sites like Facebook were normalized. Most of the adults around them were no longer suspicious of this new technology, and as a result, I suspect the concept of “internet stranger danger” wasn’t nearly as much of a thing in Gen Z childhoods as it was for millenials. I don’t think a lot of people
in general who started their internet travels in the Facebook era and later are as skeptical as Web 1.0 users tended to be.
* The rise of cameras in phones is another thing I think has had some unintentional side effects. I don’t know that a bit of inconvenience was the main thing stopping us millenials from posting nude photos of ourselves online, but I have my suspicions.
