First, nice Neal Stephenson reference, second, you're right to challenge the notion that banning social media is equivalent to banning information. It's about time-scale. I figure my kids can and should read anything they want in book form. But they cannot and should not see anything they want from the internet. The time-scale of the internet is too short, the quality of information (particularly commentary) is very poor, the opportunity to "engage" is too distracting. I'm not convinced anyone is really able to handle the onslaught of the internet - I am certain that children are not.
Beautifully put. Time-scale is what we're kind of dancing around when we talk about information consumption. When I was in high school, it was easy to sit, alone, with my calculus text book and devour everything free of distractions. I can't imagine what it's like to try to learn something like that in today's environment, where your time is a zero-sum game of attention manipulation. Now, I'm not saying we should all become luddites or something, and make our kids start from scratch with technology ... but ... there is at least some wisdom in that perspective. I do wonder if my (and by the looks of it some others' here) recent hostility to technology is because I'm a millennial, so my experiences with it straddle the analog-to-digital transformation and I can actually remember how things used to be.
