Marketing BS: Gatekeeping Children
We can't let the kids see this
Three related stories from Friday last week:
Senators have asked Meta to to drop plans for opening it’s Horizon Worlds metaverse app to teenagers
Apple delayed approval of an email-app with AI-powered language tools, asked the app to raise its age restriction to 17+
TikTok is restricting those under the age of 18 to 60-minutes of usage per day.
In all three cases gatekeepers (government, platform, company itself) are attempting to block or limit new technology (VR, AI, short-form video specifically) from getting into the hands of children and teenagers. This is not a new trend. One of my favorite websites is “Pessimists Archive”. The site collects examples of how the media, government and pundits responded to old technologies when they were new. The examples seem hilarious today (“The Dangers of Novel Reading”, “Hatred of the umbrella”, “Photographs are made to lie”, “Bicycles are blamed for youth insanity”), but that has not stopped anyone for fear-mongering whatever the latest technology is. When I as a kid it was Dungeons & Dragons. Now the game is considered a great use of time for kids to socialize with one another. The last decade has been about the dangers of social media. That fear has not gone away, but that hasn’t stopped innovative-fear warriors from moving on to the next technology.
While these concerns and editorials will not stop, I have a prediction that 30 years from now no one will be worried about kids using AI and VR, because their parents will have grown up with it. But those same parents will be concerned about whatever the NEW technology is.
Keep it simple,
Edward