They call the internet “the new wild west.” They say it’s ruining the attention spans of children. They even go as far as to say that social networks are replacing actual human interaction, but much of this is untrue when examined by one who is actually growing up online as the PBS documentary Growing Up Online put it.
For years the world wide web has been heralded as a genius network for communicating information. We can access nearly anything we want to access in a matter of seconds. Research that used to take weeks can now be plowed through in less than a day with the help of Google and Ebsco Host.
But now it is under attack by older generations for taking their children away. I hate to sound like a teenager but in the words of Will Smith, parents just don’t understand. As a child of this generation, I have obviously spent a vast amount of time on the internet and have been exposed to the evil social networking sites of Facebook and MySpace and I have to admit that they do have potential to be harmful to a child’s social development but that can all be avoided by way of one simple word: responsibility.
The same way that a child must learn that what happens in a video game is not real life, he must also learn that social interaction on the internet is no replacement for an actual social life. He has to understand that he’s only really friends with a small percentage of the five thousand Facebook friends he has.
And this advice really is not all that difficult because even though this generation is hooked on electronic communication, we’re still human and we still need real human interaction to survive and in the end we’ll get it.
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