Internet and teenagers

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.