Journal #8748

How did he afford it? Junior pay rates suck. And I can't imagine inability to talk leaves many positions viable.

ADHD plague incoming.

The moment I came here:Back on topic:
Anyways, I think how that happening is quite normal, because it happened to my cousins, and my brother, but in a different way.

As an example, I gave my Android phone to one of my closer relatives (she has around 6 months of age), with an accordion app opened, so I could somehow entertain her.

Guess what. She played a chord like a pro, with her 2 tiny hands. My aunt started laughing at that.

So yeah, I think it's very normal for the ultra-young people to embrace technology very quickly.

Like my brother, who is 6, and my cousin-neighbour, who is 8, they both know the difference between a PS4, Xbox One, and a PC (alas, modern children typically learn that at that age).

My brother has a Roblox account, and he plays Roblox every day. He once tried to map for it, but it was a lot different from GoldSrc, so I also didn't know.

And then my cousin, he just knows everything, but just like me, he doesn't have any of that (a PS4, a copy of GTA V, a debit card). The same goes for my brother, I still owe him a copy of Portal 2 which I promised for his birthday.

And all 3 of us know about the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Because the first thing we used to do was going to the Internet and watching videos about it.

So, there's the outcome:
If you're given a multimedia device, you will learn a lot, in a relatively very small amount of time.

This is going to be a horrible generation.

Discuss?

Don't tell me what to do!

I think this is utter stupidity and spoiling. It can only harm children to give them such tools so early. There's no advantage in it, unless you want to make experiments on your children, that is.

Admer, I got my first smartphone one or two years ago, and I never had any problem using it. That's not only me: Everyone my age I know, even though they're sometimes very bad at computer, know how to use a smartphone. So, justifying the fact of giving children tablets so they can learn how to use it, that's rubbish.

It's already known that smartphones and tablets lead to all sort of problems, like neck problems. If you start very young to spend much time using those tools then I guarantee you'll get a lot of them, because consequences are more serious on babies. The lack of other real activities could also lead to some other problems, like socializing, language learning, dexterity...

this next generation of children will be raised by... the internet.
Just think about that for a second.

Kids raised by Internet memes and social media. What could possibly go wrong ?

Every time I see a mother/father giving his/her phone to his/her kid in the train. I want to rip and tear the phone.

My son still plays with legos, he builds his own "computers" with cardboard and spare cables, he loves to draw and loves to (try) read books all nights, he play with his electronic piano and an old guitar that I never been able to fix, he loves to design a build robots with things like used cans and sticks, he loves to paint with watercolors as his mom do... that's what I consider normal, maybe someday he'll play with a computer or a PS4, but I'm sure he's happier with the cardboard, the sticks, the crayons, his books and playing with me and his mom

We are all doomed.

The year my sister entered secondary school, her school had decided that instead of textbooks the students would each have a tablet with ebooks, for a number of reasons including the effect the weight of daily carrying a bag full of books has on growth. I certainly see the point of that; in my school all first year students had to take every available subject. I was a very small until about 15 or 16 so I would say the bag I had to carry would have been an appreciable fraction of my weight.
I think it's a good idea in theory, but the way they implemented it wasn't. One of the factors in the decision was that over the time spent in school it would be cheaper for the parents than buying new textbooks every year, however they chose iPads as the tablet of choice, which only one company sells, at quite a high price. Of course since the student owned the tablet there was the question of what level of control the school could have over them. From what I have heard a lot of the students spend most of their time in class using the tablet to browse Facebook. And there is also the fact that at this point most of her classes have gone back to using textbooks anyway, which defeats the purpose of the idea.
I can see many reasons why a scheme like that, if implemented well could be beneficial. As well as that, since technology is becoming more and more important as time goes on I can see reasons for introducing children to technology relatively early. However that also depends on implementation. Using it as a substitute for parenting is no good. I would at least argue that a tablet is a better parenting substitute than a television, as there is at least some level of interactivity there.

I think all of this is stupid. I see no positive outcome of it.

Honestly young kids and technology don't mix well most of the time. I used to be glued to the computer when I was at home, and looking back I can see it was super unhealthy both physically and mentally, I had little friends and would just sit at the computer doing nothing.

Two of my little cousin discovered Roblox and Minecraft and have become unhealthily addicted to them, they fight with parents because they don't want to get off to eat dinner, or go to bed. And this is two different cousins, from two sides of my family, literally across the country from each other. It's really worrying that this seems to be getting more prevalent.

I have no research on the topic but personally I wouldn't be surprised if this is what's contributing to what seems to be a large rise in ADHD and Autism in the world. I've gotten better with age, but some don't.

EDIT: Maybe not Autism, I'm not entirely sure what the causes of Autism are, but I know it isn't caused by vaccines like some idiots think.

You call these people idiot when you just said the same kind of things...

But besides that line, I agree with everything above.

Computer addiction it´s like a kind of Autism, Louimi, of course it is not a diagnosis but people act like if they suffer of this disease (isolation, repetitive actions, lack of socialization...), and I agree that there are quite not intelligent people that says that Autism is caused by vaccines

I´m not so in disagree with brendanmint with the fact that addiction to new tecnologies could , unluckyly, assemble diseases like Autism, but, of course, It´s far from being a cause of ADHD or Autism itself.

I'm not sure about you, but I have been glued to a PC, since I was 4, and it probably brought me almost 0% social life (I've never gone out by myself), including cracky bones (but I like cracking them, so whatever), but the lifestyle has brought me a lot of nice things, too:

1. New times, new opportunities
Perhaps the thing I wanted to know when I was 4, was "how did they make this game?". Well, I do know now, 10 years later, so that's a plus.

Also, having good skills with computer software (and perhaps making software) and probably with assembling hardware, can open a lot of more opportunities when it comes to finding a job, or in education, because there are so many different fields in the IT industry:
-programming/software engineering
-server administration
-video production
-music production (some people live off of making music in FL Studio)
-art
-game design (found your own game studio, or become employed in a popular game company)
And so on...

2. I am the first one who is asked, when something isn't OK, in the entire town

So yeah, until I was 9, my dad fixed all the computer-related issues.
And when I started troubleshooting on my own at the age of 10, I started rocking at it. I did my own OS re-installs, cracked my own bought games (yes, this country has paid pirated games) etc.

Lel, when I was 10 I still plugged off my PC, instead of shutting it off. No wonder I had to reinstall Windows XP 2 times a month.

3. I learned tons of information

So this one was already mentioned above, but here we go again:
At the moment, I know these languages: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, English, Turkish, and a bit of German, Russian and Spanish, and barely some words in French, Latin and only 1 word in Polish and Chinese.

Of course, there are other things too, like mapping. How would I learn mapping if I never went to the Internet? The same applies for texturing, modelling, coding, music making and video editing.

4. A little amount of friends

Now, not real life friends, but Facebook friends. Some of you have thousands of FB friends, I only have less than a 100, and I don't know 20 of them, who are actually my classmates' parents.

Seriously, I hate Facebook. I mean, it's the biggest time eater in the world. Facebook users spend hours glued at their chat box. And one of my classmates, specifically, the one I used to love, uses our school's Wi-Fi to use Facebook Messenger.
She chats during small breaks! How ridiculous is that! She has the option of face-to-face conversation with another classmate in the same classroom, but instead she just chats with her.

Now, my obsession with Facebook started in 5th grade, 4 years ago. But then, everyone was annoyed by me. I was annoying to them, but they're just jealous because I have excellent marks from most of the subjects. +I map for a plenty of games

So, 1 year later, in 2013, I fell in love, but I wanted to kill myself because she didn't like me at all. So I became paranoid, and life didn't make sense anymore.

The "crisis" still carried on in 2014, again, life didn't make any sense, and I wanted to do suicide. (In 2015, things turned out greatly, and I deactivated my FB account a year later).

And, having mentioned 2014, it's one of my favourite years! That's when:

5. I started mapping for Counter-Strike

Finally, my old glory has returned at the end of that year!
I shouted to my bro: "Ajdin!!! I'm making a map change!" (He calls maps "map changes", it's Sven Co-op's fault).

And that's the story of Crater 2015, my first map ever.

Then I started ambitious projects, and 90% of them failed, even though the idea was good. The only surviving projects were: 'school_destroy' and 'project_oldcastle' which turned into dm/fy_stoned.

So yeah, I had a great pre-teen-hood. Now I'm 14, and I've never been better! ALL because of me powering on a PC at the age of 4.

Now, I obviously missed a lot of things during my childhood: hanging out with friends, walking along the streets of Stolac, learning about my country's landscape etc.

But no, I don't regret for not hanging out with my friends. In fact, these "friends" turned into street people, they swear at everything (oh, the profanity!), they have no culture and proper behaviour, and are overall degenerics.
Some of them, at the age of 13, started smoking and drinking beer! And exactly all of th--- OK, let's not mention that, it's not for kids. Let's just say it's a sin in Islam, and it's a bad thing to do, even though some doctors say it's healthy.

Well, that's exactly why I don't regret it, because I'll soon move on to high school, and then college, and those "friends" will probably work as soldiers (not a great paycheck here), or work another low-paid job.

Well, I've made my point here. Admer456 out!

You are clearly not old enough to understand the implications of this.

@Admer: Overshare much? I know you're young and still learning about yourself and the world, but perhaps you should consider being a bit more self-conscious on how much you say to random people on the internet.

@Stu/others: I kinda disagree with the general sentiment here. A tablet is simply a toy just like anything else, with proper supervision (as is needed with literally everything!) there's no problem with a child using one. But it seems I'm in the minority.

@Penguinboy

One could easily track down where I live, good point. And then they would come at me, not very good.

And since I make maps, and a lot of other things, I think that all I told you above is pretty much 80% of the information you'll ever read about me.
Therefore, I'm stopping being very informative about myself.