> Smartphones give children the ability to bully each other at a scale unlike any other.
People problem.
> Smartphones give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on.
People problem.
> Smartphones give children a new avenue for social exclusion.
People problem.
> Smartphones make every single child afraid that what they are doing is being recorded by someone else.
People problem.
> Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.
People problem.
Smartphones aren't the problem. They are just things. They don't make people do things. They just enable people to do things in a different medium.
> Writing off all of this and boldly claiming that smartphones aren't the problem, it's all just coincedental correlation, makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense when you realize the smartphone is nothing more than a tool and the people are the problem. If you take away all the assholes, are smartphones going to have the same effect?
Your comment completely lacks understanding about human behavior. It's like saying that a heroin addict should just learn to ignore the ready opium-filled syringe on his bedside table.
No, humans don't work like this. You gotta throw the whole thing in the garbage or lock it down so much (basically possible with current platforms) to never encounter those addicting uses.
By this logic you'd be fine if we gave every person on earth a nuclear bomb? It doesn't take a genius to understand that various pieces of technology might either change the incentive structure of society in such a way as to produce more of certain behaviors and less of others or might enable the assholes you refer to to do more harm than they used to do and in either case undesirable outcomes might increase.
Unless you believe that the common good doesn't exist or that human's don't have any business trying to construct their society in such a way as to seek some form of it, you have to take the social effects of technology into account when making policy. Just asserting that all things ultimately come down to individual decisions is really weird. Like even if you believe it in some libertarian free market fantasy framework, the vast majority of people think differently and your comment provides no justification whatsoever for why "ultimately people are responsible" is a useful way to think about these problems.
All those people problems are enabled by smartphones. Now which of those two can you do: Ban smartphones (or most of their functionality) or tell people to please not be <everything above>?
People problem.
> Smartphones give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on.
People problem.
> Smartphones give children a new avenue for social exclusion.
People problem.
> Smartphones make every single child afraid that what they are doing is being recorded by someone else.
People problem.
> Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.
People problem.
Smartphones aren't the problem. They are just things. They don't make people do things. They just enable people to do things in a different medium.
> Writing off all of this and boldly claiming that smartphones aren't the problem, it's all just coincedental correlation, makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense when you realize the smartphone is nothing more than a tool and the people are the problem. If you take away all the assholes, are smartphones going to have the same effect?