View and vote on the article here: The Potential Impact of the Internet on Children
The Potential Impact of the Internet on Children| Category | | | Summary | | This article expresses my personal opinion on the impact of the Internet on our younger generations, should they be left unmonitored and unsupervised. |
| | Body | Where did I begin?
Ten years ago, in 1997 I discovered the Internet. I was twenty years old and going through college. That's how I found it you see -- through education. The Internet was nowhere near the wonder that it is now: we had terribly unstable dialup connections, and they disconnected if you sneezed within half a mile of the modem. Things were much different then, and the content was much less diverse.
At that point, my access to the Internet was purely for educational purposes - I was not there out of boredom, but rather I was there on my quest for knowledge. Since I spent most of my time in college, I didn't have my own computer at home, and I didn't really need one. I've had access to computers since I was eight years old, and I still remember the Commodore 64 I first got my hands on. I didn't actually purchase a computer of my own until my early twenties. I grew up with the C64, an Atari ST, a Sinclair Spectrum and a Compaq Presario. Mostly, I used the computers at college; they were considerably more advanced and useful for my studies than anything else I had.
I left college and started work, and very much missed the easily-attained access to the Internet, so I decided the best thing for me to do was to purchase my own computer, run a phone line into my room and order Internet access from my telecommunications provider. It took about two weeks in total for this to happen: an engineer came out and installed a second point in my room and British Telecom sent me a CD with all the necessary information my computer needed to connect itself to the Internet. I was whizzing my way around the information highway in no time at all.
Let me also say at this point that I am glad that I'd gotten through school and found myself a job before purchasing my own computer.
Why do I say that? Well, it's the very point of this article. The Internet is a very, very easy place to get stuck in. It consumes you and it's highly addictive. It is all too easy to say, "Oh, I'll look for a job tomorrow," or "I'll sign up for school next week, I still have time." Yes you have time, but you can burn it away playing that all too wonderful game you found where you make friends far, FAR away in another country and have more fun with than you would with the kids at school every day who pick on you and beat you up for being different. It can start when you are very young, or even if you're not. If you're of school age then it's easy to hide away from the real world and exist online as the person you want to be instead of the person you are - you're no longer the school loner that everyone picks on; you can have an entirely different fantasy persona on the Internet. If you're working, you're not the quiet one in the office who's overly geeky - the one who looks at the floor and goes red when a girl catches you staring at her. You're someone else entirely.
Now, if you're not working and you're supposed to be looking for a job or signing up for college or university, you're bound to be using the Internet to einvent yourself after a fashion. The problem is, unless you have enough willpower to keep from getting distracted from reality, you will forget what you need to be doing in real life. Reality exists, and reality isn't the Internet.
It doesn't matter that scifi films talk about the existence of Earth and humanity on a mainframe. The Matrix isn't real no matter how much you want it to be - and you're not sitting there like Neo "waiting to be discovered", you're just not. Your World of Warcraft friends might be the only friends you have in the world because you stopped talking to real people, but the fact remains that you do have a life and you can't live it entirely on the Internet.
Have you ever been fired because you called in sick too many times because you either wanted to game all day, or you were up gaming all night and couldn't work the next day? Has your social life gone down the drain because it's much easier to interact via the Internet than it is in person? Are you socially phobic because you've gotten used to staying in with your machine?
The ease with which we have access to the Internet makes living in a fantasy world all too easy. We as adults are as susceptible to this as we like to think only children are. So that being said I would like to further voice my opinion on the subject.
An example.
(Note: The following is wholly fictional.)
Toby is eleven years old. When he was ten, he asked his middle-class parents for a computer for his upcoming birthday. His parents, being the loving and caring parents that they are, obliged him with the caveat that they weren't so savvy with the Internet so he might have to teach them a thing or two. Toby was pleased with this because it meant he could probably pull the wool over their eyes a little and not get caught. Both his parents work hard for a living and they lived in a nice detached family home. Toby is an only child and as such, has unfortunately never learned to share very well - and was subject to being spoiled on occasion. His grandparents, whilst equally loving, were not so easily giving with material things and wanted Toby to understand the value of life as opposed to material possessions.
Toby is also an incredibly intelligent boy, and excels in all subjects at school. Some of the teachers say he could be a bona fide genius. Therefore, Toby is regarded as one of the top pupils in his school, and it is predicted he will go far. So with that in mind, you would perhaps think Toby would be very happy in school, right? Wrong.
In fact, Toby is an incredibly unhappy boy. He's bored; everything is too easy for him. he's also quite gangly and plain-looking. Whilst the other boys and girls are now holding hands and kissing behind whatever bike shed there is, he's standing off to the side with his bespectacled nose buried in a book, being pointed and laughed at for being the school geek. He has no friends; not even others who are like him because he can't tolerate them. Most of them simply aren't up to his level of intelligence, and they bore him. He's the stereotypical geek loner.
Toby has absolutely NO clue as to how to socialise. He did try to make friends at one point, but he was snubbed and laughed at. So, he became more introverted.
So what happened?
Well, Toby would go through the motions at school. He knew he had to be there, and there was nothing he could do about that. He'd occasionally lie about feeling ill so he could sneak a day off, but nothing that would draw attention to himself. And what would he do on those days off?
Surf the 'Net. Religiously, without fail. He'd game - he's absolutely brilliant at Counterstrike, and has a high level elf mage on World of Warcraft, with lots of friends there because he's good at what he does and he's actually very funny when he wants to be. People think he's older than he is because of his typing skills - he's never admitted he's only eleven years old.
When he's not playing games, he's scouring for warez and pirated software. He's learning several different programming languages, and is considering trying Linux on a laptop, if he can con his parents into letting him have one for school. Now, Toby isn't a bad person, he's just incredibly bored and very introverted; the Internet is his way of linking to the outside world.
This isn't just on his "sick" days off school, either; he does this every night: he gets in from school, grabs a drink and something out of the fridge and goes upstairs to plug into the mainframe. He does all his homework at lunch-break during school, so he doesn't have to worry about it eating into his Internet time at home. Whenever his parents ask him if he's OK, he simply tells them he's doing homework and studying. He comes down to dinner to chitchat with them so they actually see him and don't start bothering him in his room. He broaches the subject of a laptop for school, giving the reasoning that he could type up notes in class and refer to them later for homework. His mother, less clued-in on technology than her husband, simply says "ask your father", and as his father is currently scanning the Financial Times for stocks and shares, he simply says "we'll see about one next month when I get my bonus." Toby knows this means yes, and does an internal "w00t!", says thank you, and stuffs his dinner down quickly with a happy expression. He then escapes back up to his Internet haven and starts looking at Linux distros.
Fast forward a few years - Toby is now fifteen. He's gone through puberty, still gangly and plain-looking but with a little fuzz on his face. He's got the same hormonal urges as the next fifteen year old boy, but has no clue how to act on them. School is the same; no friends and lots of mockery from the masses. He shrugs it all off, because he doesn't care. Herein lies the problem: he doesn't care. He has little to no social skill. He wouldn't know what to do in a social situation. He can't communicate with people very well because he doesn't talk to anyone aside from teachers, who have noticed his lack of socialisation and written home about it several times. His parents have gotten quite worried, and rightly so. His room looks different now; he has his own game server, a room full of geeky contraptions and not one, but several computers. He owns a Macbook, a PC and he still treasures his old laptop running Gentoo. He's a veritable ubergeek and he's only fifteen years old: he's beyond a wizard in most programming languages, and he's a skilled hacker who actively involves himself in campaigns on the Internet.
The only interaction Toby has with other people is via gaming, or via forums. People still don't know how old he is, but they do know one thing; he's a highly skilled Internet user and the Internet is his life.
Toby passes his exams with flying colours and his parents want to know if he's staying on for sixth form, or going to college. He tells them he doesn't know yet and wants a break from school because he's worked very hard and deserves a break. His parents frown on this, but hope it's just a phase. They're increasingly worried about his lack of peer interaction, but he gets around that by telling them he talks to his school friends on instant messenger, even though he doesn't have any.
Six months go by and Toby's still in his room, on the Internet, with no friends, and no intention of going to college. His parents are exasperated because Toby is vastly intelligent - but he refuses to leave the house to do anything else. He is almost completely nocturnal, and doesn't even go down to dinner anymore. Sometimes his parents don't see him for days because he is sleeping at opposing times. Yet because they weren't closely monitoring him when he was younger, and because now he gets angry when they broach the subject of college with him, they leave him alone.
His grandparents however, are not so easy. Toby's parents go to them out of desperation, hoping their firm hand could sway him to at least apply for college. Toby's grandparents have no idea how the Internet works, but they realise it's been the cause of his now near-total reclusion. Their generation doesn't want to know about the Internet so much, so removing it is easy for them.
On their advice, Toby's parents arrange for the Internet to be disconnected. He wakes up during the small hours to find there's no connection and tries desperately to reconnect himself, but to no avail. He waits until his father wakes up for work and charges out of his room exclaiming that the Internet isn't working. His father mumbles something along the lines of: "yes, we disconnected it, it's not doing you any good."
Toby is mortified. He doesn't know anything else, doesn't do anything else and needs his Internet access to live. He has no social skills at all. He wouldn't know where to start, and because his parents didn't clamp down on his excessive usage and lack of social interaction in the first place - he is now completely socially inept.
A huge fight breaks out, resulting in Toby breaking down completely - the Internet is Toby's fantasy reality, and his reality was just unplugged.
Toby's parents decide they can't deal with his distressed state, and pack him off to stay with his grandparents - who force him to attend college, and further instruct the college to monitor his Internet access and social interaction.
Now, I realise that sounded like a very generalised and dramatic example, and it was written as such for a reason - I wanted to make a point.
Back to me again.
I learned social skills, went to school/college and started work before the Internet really took off. I am very grateful for that. I am not a parent yet, but should I ever be I know I won't allow a child of mine to get that hooked on the Internet. I will monitor them closely and teach them that the Internet is a highly valuable and educational tool - but if you allow it to take over your life, you run the risk of losing everything in it.
We are very lucky indeed to have the Internet. It has connected the world in ways we cannot fathom and enriched our lives exponentially. It continues to do so. It educates us, gives us access to information we would never have gotten access to if it didn't exist in this medium. It brings people together. Simply put it's a wonderful tool - but one that should be used in moderation.
We cannot allow our younger generations to become so wrapped up in it to the point where they have no social skills, no actual friends in the flesh and no life away from home. What happens to them when they leave school - assuming they finish school, and have nothing to arm themselves with in the real world? Not all children are as intelligent or willing to learn as my fictional example, Toby. Some of them just game online, night after night after night. And if and when they finish school, then what? What happens to these children if their parents don't care enough to notice? As well as the Internet being wonderful, it is also a breeding ground for paedophiles and other sex offenders. More and more often, we hear horrendous things in the news about missing children and teenagers who were groomed on the Internet by predators.
Then there is Internet content itself. There are things parents can use on their computers to protect their children such as e-blaster, but are they using them? Are parents taking the time to learn about the Internet and technology so that they can better protect their children? Some are, and some aren't. It's the ones that aren't that are ultimately responsible for socially and developmentally inept children to come.
You can usually tell from the way a person interacts on the Internet just how involved they are. Fairly recently, I encountered a teenager online via IRC who had just received some quite upsetting news. He burst into the channel and started ranting about it - the channel holding close to sixty people at the time. A properly socialised person would know that there is a time and a place for such things, and for their own sake asking for help online from a room full of strangers who are likely not best equipped to help you is a bad idea. The discussion surrounding the problem became quite nasty, people left the channel, and the person was left feeling horrible, not to mention mocked. In the given situation, the correct thing to do would have been to call the police, but instead this person came in asking how he could "handle it himself." This is not a pleasant situation.
If the Internet is the only social interaction a person gets from a young age, the consequences can be disastrous. If you recognise some of the negative aspects written here in YOURSELF, ask yourself if you want to carry on like that - and furthermore if you're ever planning to have a family, do you ever want to be responsible for someone you didn't monitor properly in their early years?
The Internet is a fabulous place, but it is also the facilitator of human failure, and we should never forget that.
:pixel:
:Academy Publications:
Credits:
e-blaster
|
|
Replies:
|
2007-10-27 01:51:53
2007-10-20 15:19:25