Social media reset time

 

It was announced on Monday Under 16's would be banned from social media sites including Tic Tok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, Youtube (although Youtube kids might be exempted), Snapchat and Reddit.

In addition 16-18 year olds who are children will be subject to a curfew limiting hours online, the exact means not being specified as yet with the measures expected to be in effect Spring 2027.

In broad terms I agree having seen how much social media drama has moved into with hardly a day going by with pupils (purr-lease no students) and teachers dealing with matters that can just be an extension of traditional bullying, sexual matters shared for maximum emotional devastation and incitements for the most idiotic death inducing stunts. It's a long cry from scrumping apples, no homework and name calling.

Just on Monday a teacher had a child turn up late for class as they were on social media to 3am. Just think about that  -they are in no state to learn -, one pupil interviewed revealed they did 14hours a week  and more even when phones were allowed in school, another admitted his mate had a devasting time on social media and it upset him to see it.

It isn't that any kind of restrictions will be totally perfect but we have reach a crisis that everybody in society working with children are struggling to deal with and I hate to say it some adults are scarely any better either seeing the zombified masses, backs bent staring into screens as young children they are supposed to walking with are ignored.  It is clearly very addictive too. 

From my perspective things are out of control.

Time to act?

While my head is a bit messed up with some triggering incident caused by stuff on one site we won't go deeply into, discussion is continuing on the topic of under sixteens and social media following a ban on it in Australia and talk of similar schemes elsewhere.

Part of the problem was the internet and especially the social media part were never really designed for young users who in the past might of had to got permission to publish a school magazine and the content would of been moderated prior to it being published could now put anything up with the companies only responding to reports if anyone raised concerns.

And that's too late if slurs, insults, dubious pictures and the like are being posted and traded around as then schools are having to deal with the fall out in school time beyond the issues around just how long younsgters are staring at relatively small screens.

Reports are coming from health professionals about the major rise in eyesight issues and premature, often highly inappropriate sexual behaviour by youngsters copying pr0n they've seen or challenges that are often highly dangerous, even life threatening.

Something has to change here as even as legal adults we can have issues around addiction as the algorithms just keep on finding more and more material to scroll though.

We are now talking serious around a social media ban - not a absolute ban on internet access although a good case can be made for the youngest only doing so under supervision and it is about time.

 

Memory stick musings

I'm just getting on with writing up this blog over the weekend where I have been a bit low in spoons which happens at times with me and where I have things to prepare for on Tuesday for good measure.

Over the last week or so I've  been thinking a bit about the difference in where I am now and where I was at a good eight to ten years ago which may seem only like yesterday to me given how my brain is wired but actually is a significant amount of time.

This ignores the impact Covid had on me in 2020 and the long covide related conditions I am dealing with too.

For one thing, that was the post breakdown period with me where I hit the buffers trying to play a role I had been encouraged to by a lot of so-called disability experts who today I see as people who fundamentally were trying to deny the major part disabilities play in my life and to a large extent shape by denying the impact and in effect having me do slot into their idea of what a 'successful' disabled person was supposed to be - an achiever showing academic abilities despite disabilities rather than a person who is may well be capable but with significant functioning issues that require constant support.

The other stemming from the same place was they also denied how those limitations mean in terms of mental development, I was functioning several years younger having the overview, language and mindset of a more junior child at high school and several years further on at the same point but being expected to perform at an adult level.

This simply isn't and hasn't in a number of decade hasn't occurred because however good I may be at filling in some gaps, the larger ones remain and to an extent even the fact I do fill the minor gaps leaves me the more vulnerable because people focus on that 'achievement' rather than what I cannot cope with and why I struggle making my way through adult life and situations.

Another of the things around this period was discovering networks sometimes websites sometimes hubs and it was one these that caught my eye Monday when looking through a  memory stick with more of an eye to pictures of my old monitor and its screen saver, I spotted some screen prints done off it from a site I spent quite a bit time on.

Yahoo 360 for the youngsters, was a giant hub where lots of groups had spaces on, you could message and blog and your blogs were interactive, you had a update stream from what your friends were doing  and at the time I was looking around  littles and groups, talking with people, exploring that side of life which I enjoyed until it shut down around July 2009.

That lead to a blog being started *cough* to collate what old posts I originally had on Yahoo 360.
That was a part of my coping mechanism back then as I have been recently explaining a little to people about bringing life back into line with what actually works for me, what meets my actual needs not least the 'little' side of me cos not wishing to sound like a record it's not so much age play as being in an actual age regressed by anyone else's standards headspace without an off button.

One of the first more dedicated spaces I joined was a music related site having shadowed it for a couple of years around the time the Beatles Capitol Albums volume 2 box set came out in 2006 because of some issues that affected initial copies.

It looked at recordings from the "What's the best sounding edition of " and what do you listen with angle which suited me although some there would push you down lines that I didn't find so rewarding and with a times a blind pro older issue policy.

There was a subgroup of "Bones" that had more person rambling conversation on which after a incident got moved to a dedicated site and recently that's been pulled as many of the metaphorically speaking got into bed with Facebook which I never felt comfortable with not least for wanting to keep aspects of this side my life out of limelight of those who misunderstand it.

The other is I do feel more stronger in myself to pursue the life that makes more sense and especially to ensure I'm in those settings that respect my real needs  being prepared to engage with me on the level I'm at, helping me to do what I can for myself while while accepting my child-like vulnerabilities prepared to just step in as needed to deal with any situations I land in.

That's come about through the baby steps I took through that period exploring my needs and making appropriate connections to communities where I really belong.

For me then the 00's were where it all came together,

Talks

There are a number of things I do feel like talking about although it wasn't the best start to the week when it comes to being well.

The first is usually on things like blogs and social media sites you have spaces for profiles that give a space for some background information about yourself and to mention anything that people really need to pay attention to.

One is with me I find chatting literally painful because my hands were damaged in the early nineteen nineties and I struggle with writing, eating and getting dressed so generally I don't tend to do extended informal one on one chat.

The other is more about limits as I find some topics very painful emotional such as emotional, physical and sexual abuse to the point they are triggering and also don't care much for "forced feminization" and associated topics because the start point is a dismissive atttitude to being a male that sets out to redicule by making them like like a parody of a girl with little say in anything.

One topic sometimes people do get me wrong on allied to this is that I have something against boys and men who for whatever reason like sometimes to wear a skirt or a dress who don't see themselves as girls/women.

I may not necessarily get it but if you do and I know some who like dressing more like a school girl in a rather traditional uniform then I'm fine with it.

The bottom line is I respect your right to be you as much as I have to be respected as a fairly traditional adult little boy who wears boys uniform because we're still boys whatever we are wearing.

Being a looked after Adult Child

 

The way that we are, they manner in which our actual developmental age is poses questions that I feel like exploring this week in connection with how we connect with the spaces we share with people whose chronological age we have in common.

To me the tendency to ignore 'mental age' progression with very limited acceptance of how that leaves you leads to whole array of social problems so one of the first things that needs to happen is support services need to spend more time identifying mental age development to devise better ways of handling the existence of people like me who are functionally children and who struggle in adult settings.

A more modern issue is how modern social media deals with us as users.

In the past everything we may of thought we wanted involved going through somebody usually a grown up with some authority like a shop keeper or membership person for a club who could reject our request or deny access to any or all parts of it based on our age or how 'mature' we were.

Social media online is different. A few mouse clicks to say you're over 18 or just enter your date of birth  (or make one up as does happen) and you get full access to any and all groups and unrestricted access to messaging.

'X' applied recently to be a member of a Facebook group but wrote in their details that they identified as 14 year old being age dysphoric and were declined on the basis it was age inappropriate for them to to belong by a moderator.

Personally I feel to have accepted your developmental age accepted and validated by a responsible adult in that way was quite encouraging simply because we can be otherwise in situations we are unable cope with leaving us vulnerable and easily exploited.

I was deliberately shielded from some aspects of school social life by the Mr.Evans, Head of Sixth Form with teachers prepared to intervene for those very reasons.

To me, If we 'identify' as a minor - and many of us do because of how our development has left us  - then it is only right that they treat us like minors including banning us from adult content sites or sub groups because it IS age inappropriate.

I don't think I'm talking out of turn to say having to dodge such content is something we do find upsetting when people post it in our spaces on various sites such as Tumblr so to have someone care enough to ensure we don't see it is just fantastic.

If I cannot barr as a matter of course such groups online I think the operators should do that for me giving me the protections of a actual child onsite and any access to site moderators or counsellors to both help me manage my account and to get quick assistance with any situation I cannot cope with without help.

I would have to forgo any adult privileges in doing so but frankly that would make more sense. 

Progress

As Monday saw us enter July, as is my usual want I marked Canada Day (what I was brought up as "Dominion Day") with friends talking away and listening to things.

Things have been going fairly well here where I have worked on my Wordpress Blog versions of my Tumblrs where around late last year and in the first few days of this, They were imported, a fancy term for being copied over as is, from Tumblr to Wordpress using a software tool because of problem of posts being removed and the still real issue of accounts just being terminated at random with no prior warning.
One problem with the importer is it seemed to lose reblogged images and also somehow to have corrupted the database which in simple terms means if wish to edit the post, perhaps captioning it which is usual on a traditional blogging structure you can't cos while it is showing you can't open it up.
This meant spending some time tidying some entries up adding by hand the missing images and where possible remaking posts that couldn't be edited and if a post couldn't be tided up and wasn't necessary as perhaps I had talked about it before, deleting it.
As I mentioned on Friday on the main blog, I now have a Chromebook which is made by Asus for Junior/Prep School boys (and girls) which starts up like lightning and by making it synchronize bookmarks and passwords means no faffing about managing them on two or more machines.
One of the accounts predates my original Tumblr and certain aspects of it reflected the mired world I was in at the time so I remade parts of it such as changing the account avatar from a generic anime image to that of a real boy, using real initials, marking myself down as Male rather than 'rather not tell' and name for the user ID and changing the wallpaper to something more Masculine.
This is matching the changes I made at the music forum where increasingly my posts are become more obviously male having come out as 'male' there too and increasingly I am bonding more and more with men.
One indication of which is I contributed to a off topic thread about growing beards which is something I'd never of done in recent past and where the original poster made reference to wishing to show more of his masculinity by such acts which would indicate in some respects I'm not alone.
The difference in this is for me in that time I was with ASB and joined Tumblr I have learned to embrace my maleness and to increasingly feel confident in asserting my innate masculinity which while I'm shaven I do keep my natural body hair intact and visible and am increasing acting on my masculine instincts.

Tension

One contribution to how you are feeling and by extension how you may behave  under its influence is the other things that are going on in your world and an increasing area I find is in the online world.
On social media in particular, groups fragment periodically with the segmented part starting a battle in part to justify to whoever is listening  just why they split off and to blacken the name of the very group not so long ago they were proud to be a member of.
You see people who for medical/disability based reasons unable to withstand endless negative and aggressive discourse actively pouring oil on the fires who fail to see after just saying why the don't like interaction with one group, make accusations often baseless just to enjoy watching the fireworks.
This week last for instance someone triggered an investigation into my main age regression Tumblr that's so safe for work and minor friendly you'd wonder like how someone could feel justified in do so even thoug when looked at by actual people it was restored as it was.
I find this not just troubling from how it has left certain communities feeling just interacting with anyone is just like walking on eggshells but also I find it spills over into me feeling disheartened about being the age regressed person I am and times seeping into feeling on edge with people.
That's one reason sometimes I limit the amount of time I'm on and make a point of doing things more positive like reading an uplifting story instead.

R.I.P. Friends Reunited

This blog was only started at the beginning of the month but with me its tenth year which in the world of computing and the internet which is some time.

The origins of this blog go back to joining Friends Reunited in 2004 which had a blogging or perhaps more accurately a journalling facility to which you could send links via email to but was designed for site members to help keep in touch with each other.

I looked at it, tried it but even Blogger circa 2006 was better but I just wasn't sure about this blogging thing and some of the stuff I wanted to talk about like last weeks post.

The site Friends Reunited launched in 2001 with a simple premise which was to enable people to get in touch with each other by holding information people freely submitted about the school, college, university and places of work they went to in groups.
You could search by name, year, place or establishment they had something to do with which soon made this UK site one of the biggest sites on the web.

 I joined to keep track of some of my friends who were still alive (many sadly have life-shortening conditions) from the schools we attended using it to get back in touch and learn more about how our lives had moved. 

It's success bought it to the attentions of various groups like ITV Plc who bought and in the eyes of many messed it up to fit its commercial interests introducing fees too and in 2010 it was returned to it's original owners.

The world has moved on since those heady days, with the growth of things like Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr etc and so in that time its users fell.

It'll be closed shortly simply because it's really lost what would keep it a  sustainable entity a lot of big users posting with the small number left using it to just post messages to each other.
R.I.P Friends Reunited.