iDisorder

When I was a child, fun was coloring, reading Enid Blyton stories, singing my nursery rhymes, watching Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Voltron, Super Ted and reading my Macmillan series- Ali and Simbi, Edet et al.  Oh, did I forget ten-ten, who is in the garden and others? Life was good…

Today, take a look around see what we have exposed our children to and one can’t help but wonder where the tingling innocent laughter has gone. I strain my ears to hear the succulent palms of children slapping away innocently as they play ten-ten, run around the house and just have fun as children should but all I hear are deafening sounds coming from play stations, eyes permanently glued to the computer and children who do so much “adult stuff”.

Welcome to the age where we get online before getting out bed, where we have become intellectually challenged and where our addiction to immediacy has left us emptier than we can ever imagine. And it will get worse. Who wants to engage in a serious intellectual stimulation when we can chat, play games and ask uncle Google? (He always knowsJ).

With the current incarnation of the internet, the social media and the sense of immediacy they give us, we may be getting not just dumber, our minds unreasonably digitized and unrealistic but also very less intelligent than we are supposed to be.

Meanwhile, chatting has become like blinking. We do it on the go, at work, religious places, in bed and even when we are supposed to be spending quality time with family and friends. According to an article by Tony Dokoupil published in Newsweek, the average person regardless of age sends or receives an average of 400 texts a month, four times the 2007 number. He added that the average teen processes an astounding 3,700texts a month , double the 2007 figure .It’s been  said that addicts report feeling their phone vibrate when in fact nothing is happening, the syndrome is called “phantom- vibration syndrome’. Yeah, you got that right? Me too, I feel it *sighs*. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr said internet addiction “fosters our obsessions, dependence and stress reactions.”  The internet has become a sort of refuge for many, an end to solitude , a global village of friends we haven’t event met yet and may never meet. Lovers meet, date and break up online and unsuspecting victims are defrauded, hearts broken and in some cases death occurs.

 While the internet has made our lives easier, we cannot deny the fact that it has robbed us of the beauty of enjoying real life and has exposed our children to adulthood even before they become children.  In simple English, we have abused it in every form imaginable and not only is it making us sick, our morality has been eroded and yet, in our hypocrisy, we gasp in shock at behavior our children and teenagers exhibit.

 In children, Internet addiction is characterized by a child’s strong desire to be online, and the desire gets in the way of activities like spending time with friends and family, sleeping and doing schoolwork. Parents should therefore focus on preventing this addictive behavior in their youngsters before it becomes a problem. 

Thus, parents should limit the amount of time children can spend online and avoid putting a computer in your child’s room. Instead, computers should be in an area of the home where you can easily monitor what your child is doing online. Children should be encouraged to read books, newsprints using the traditional media. While the internet can be used for home-works, there shouldn’t   be an over dependence on it. Buy text books, encyclopedia and story books for them. Teach them to engage their mind and see the internet as a reference not a place where to spend their entire lives in fantasy.

For adults, well we are adults but being an adult definitely comes with responsibility; in this case responsible internet usage. Scholars recently suggested that our digitized world may support even more extreme forms of mental illness. It’s all overwhelming but even medication will not cure us. Our attention and brains have been seriously altered but we better not accept it as it seem. The internet and its usage are ours to shape and the power to do so in our minds.

 

Picture Courtesy: Google Images