Bismillah alhamdulillah.
The internet has gone from being an esoteric experiment by the US Department of Defence to a vital fourth utility for many after water, electricity and gas within the space of around 20 years. As a result the flow of information around the world and consequent interaction has increased tremendously. The available content has grown exponentially fuelled in large part by the advent of Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 for the uninitiated are the wide range of websites that have allowed every day people to add to the growing body of content that constitutes the internet. Examples include blogs (Blogger, WordPress, video blogs through YouTube etc.), micro blog sites (i.e Twitter) and wikis (the most famous being wikipedia). For parents the internet has become an awkward challenge.
The internet has increasingly become part and parcel of daily education, with children being given websites as sources of information. They are frequently set research tasks that require them to search for data using search engines such as Google. They are then required collate, sort, analyse and finally synthesise something new from this information. But along side this it has become a tool par-excellence for children to do things their parents would on the whole think are not morally sound or in the best interests of their children. So what exactly is wrong with unfettered and unlimited access to the internet?
In short there are two main grievances against this level of access: The first and most common is that such a level of access is a big waste of time. The second which tends to concern parents and educators more than children is exposure to indecent and morally corrupting material. While the internet offers the phenomenal potential of saving time with access to quality resources of information in reality for many it fails to deliver. The quality information on the internet though growing rapidly is dwindled by the more rapid growth of poor quality material. The islands of quality in an ever growing ocean of junk are becoming harder to find.
Consider the following simple example which probably happens day-in and day-out in houses with children who have an education system that relies heavily on internet access. The simple task of searching for more information about a country’s map. Perhaps a question has been set for a primary school child to draw a picture of a country. In the pre-internet age this would have been a simple task – the child would have to go to their assigned textbook or atlas, find the country in question and then trace or copy it in some fashion. In the internet enabled age the child may be given a website to search but usually finds him/herself sitting in front of Google or another search engine and typing ‘map of country x’. This usually results in millions of possible pages. The child then starts to browse a few. The maps that they come across may be overly complex or simple. The quest for the right level map itself becomes an end in itself and consumes time. A previously 5 minute task suddenly extends itself to a 30 minute task. As soon the child gathers 10 sites each with a different map s/he is left to decide which map they think will work best.
With time the browsing and searching skills of the child improve and they learn from their friends that they can search for images using the Google image search engine. This then starts to bring up many pictures sometimes in context and sometimes outside context. Alongside this, images related to the country may start to appear some suitable and others clearly immoral. If the child succeeds in not being distracted by the insidious adverts, images and indecent imagery they eventually, as the clock hands get closer and closer to midnight, realise that their homework is due and begin to concentrate on the task on hand eventually deciding on a suitable map. A simple task has been converted by the unbridled access to information into an obstacle course that is seemingly free and rich but comes at the cost of time and morality.
So how can parents respond to the challenge of the internet and minimise these two areas of harm? In the next article I will, Inshallah discuss the main strategies in controlling internet content.
Filed under: IT, children and internet, internet and time wasting, parents and internet, Taming the Internet
