> "The idea here seems to be that it's OK for people to watch hours of TV a day every day."
No, the idea is that it's unfair for people who watch 6 hours of TV/day to be trying to support authoritarian and intrusive legislation against young people on the grounds that the young people "spend too much time watching screens, which is bad for them and bad for society". The idea isn't "it's OK to watch 6 hours of TV", it's "if you want to be left alone to watch 6 hours of TV, stop trying to control the life of someone else who wants to be left alone to watch 6 hours of TikTok".
> "The issue is really that doing _anything_ mindlessly is a waste of life."
No, that's a different issue. The issue is that the government in the UK keeps pushing for more and more authoritarian surveillance and control laws over the internet and smartphones and justifying it with the kind of rhetoric used in the blog - screen time is bad because of radicalisation, spectres of terrorism, the collapse of society and community, and etc. And the Conservative government's largest voter base in the UK is the elderly.
> "There's also an enormous difference here in that older people often can't really do much else."
I'm assuming your grandma is significantly older than 65? With a UK average life expectancy in the 80s, a lot of people past 65 are still well capable of doing things; even then part of the problem mentioned in the blog post is that UK society supports little else for people to do, what with the cost of living crisis (Conservative government mostly voted for by older people policies of austerity, running public services into the ground), Brexit, mostly voted for by older people, house price crisis, largely propped up by - and beneficial to - older people, the binge drinking culture, wider social issue where the one thing to go out to of an evening is go to the pub, the car focus instead of public transport focus (Conservative government, see above).
That is, there is a big feeling in the UK that the elderly have screwed up the country's future with selfish short-term policies, which disproportionately hurts the young who have more future to care about and fewer saved resources, and are trying to control the young even more while living on pension payments propped up by the working young.
No, the idea is that it's unfair for people who watch 6 hours of TV/day to be trying to support authoritarian and intrusive legislation against young people on the grounds that the young people "spend too much time watching screens, which is bad for them and bad for society". The idea isn't "it's OK to watch 6 hours of TV", it's "if you want to be left alone to watch 6 hours of TV, stop trying to control the life of someone else who wants to be left alone to watch 6 hours of TikTok".
> "The issue is really that doing _anything_ mindlessly is a waste of life."
No, that's a different issue. The issue is that the government in the UK keeps pushing for more and more authoritarian surveillance and control laws over the internet and smartphones and justifying it with the kind of rhetoric used in the blog - screen time is bad because of radicalisation, spectres of terrorism, the collapse of society and community, and etc. And the Conservative government's largest voter base in the UK is the elderly.
> "There's also an enormous difference here in that older people often can't really do much else."
I'm assuming your grandma is significantly older than 65? With a UK average life expectancy in the 80s, a lot of people past 65 are still well capable of doing things; even then part of the problem mentioned in the blog post is that UK society supports little else for people to do, what with the cost of living crisis (Conservative government mostly voted for by older people policies of austerity, running public services into the ground), Brexit, mostly voted for by older people, house price crisis, largely propped up by - and beneficial to - older people, the binge drinking culture, wider social issue where the one thing to go out to of an evening is go to the pub, the car focus instead of public transport focus (Conservative government, see above).
That is, there is a big feeling in the UK that the elderly have screwed up the country's future with selfish short-term policies, which disproportionately hurts the young who have more future to care about and fewer saved resources, and are trying to control the young even more while living on pension payments propped up by the working young.