How has the
Internet affected younger generations? I believe that teenagers today are quite
different than teenagers at my time. Maybe I sound like a grandma, but I know
it’s true. Internet open the access to a huge amount of information, but it’s
not like a library, because this platform doesn’t need an intermediary, this
means that a kid from 3 to 17 years old doesn’t have control of the things he
is watching at the computer. And this is a big problem I guess, because parents
normally don’t know how to use computers or they don’t know the websites their
kids like. This explains why kids today don’t surprise with anything. They could
watch people dying (like the video of the guy who jumped from Costanera
Center), animals suffering, etc. and they wouldn’t feel sad. In my time, when
the people from my generation were kids, their parents controlled what they
watched in the TV for example, teenagers couldn’t watch adult’s programs or
violent movies. That doesn’t happen today. Maybe that’s the reason why kids
today don’t react against bullying, or they do cyber bullying.
But I guess
that this access to information has some advantages too. For example younger
generations can learn things through Internet and sometimes this could be
better than the education from schools, or sometimes Internet can act as a
complement. I see this in my sister, for example. She’s 14 and she would like
to be a doctor, so she watches science channels in youtube and she learns about
it. She also uses this website to learn English. It’s common today that younger
generations know more about English because internet, they had to learn this language
because the whole network uses it.
I believe
that Internet it’s a good technology, but we need to control it access to our
children.
