The immense success of internet in the post-modern societies all over the world bodes ill for you and your children if you have been quite discerning enough to see through the areas on the web people, especially the youngsters and children with access to the internet love.
No need to guess what are the dungeons available on this information super highway that come easily to your desktop, Smartphone, etc., for the mere click of a button. No metaphysical or real space-time constrictions, which a human mind is at least psychologically subjected to.
leave the moral-immoral debate aside; it is time to wonder about the unparalleled success of the social media where almost everyone in your neighbourhood has an account and it demands no debate that the mess-up has made the world of communications a better place, and that it has made even an imperfect novice some sort of communication expert in his own right.
Good side of social media, we all know, as we do its bad sides. The time is now to throw a little guesswork on ourselves, not into that inner recess of our minds to re-discover ourselves in psycho-spiritual lights, rather for a re-check of our attitude on the social media. It makes for even a little less than a passing guess to know how pretentious we have become on the internet—pedantic if you are learned, gaudy or a little fake otherwise. It starts from one’s profile pictures—well this is not always true, but then, well, it is usually the case with the youngsters. People try to look best. There are youngsters who would rather hide behind the posters of a Bruce lee or John Cena, or maybe a Bollywood starlet in their profile picture, giving wannabe friends an impression that they are the typical introvert type sensitive guys who do don’t have any self-propagating attitude, but then they cannot help telling you that they look somehow akin to their ideals.
Youngsters and even professionals lie on social media. Their hobbies, their likes—this one is more to placate others and win their attention towards themselves, if not to win their admiration—are often bogus.
These may be harmless tools to win over someone or find some room for oneself in the world that demands attention at microcosmic or the macrocosmic level. But see how and what are the repercussions. People who pretend on social media in small or big scale, people who lie about their status, their looks, and likes over there in whatever legally permissible innocuous manners, cannot help to think straight in their real life. The pressure to be what you are not may be taking its toll on you also in areas where your abilities lie. Why try to give extra acuity that are far away from the real or the required, for this will only make our own character more mystical, even to our own conscious selvesIJ
The trouble is the increasing propensity of indulging oneself in internet games or browsing the internet, and in these digital times of ours, children are becoming the first prey of the internet ghoul.
Reading as a habit has diminished like never before. A recent research has distressing data for you if you care for your children’s reading habits. It says that a child’s enjoyment of reading books decline with age—not a man’s age that, which should not be the case for whatever reason if you ever had had a liking for reading books earlier. It says that when your children are between 6 to 8 years of age, they may report if you enquire about them, that they love picking up a book and read it. Many would like a story being read to them so that they could delve into the world of fancy and imagination in the meanwhile. But as they advance in age—say when they are between the age of 15 to 17 years, they cannot help spending more time getting logged into internet for whatever reasons.
And the decline of reading habit in this category of age is a whopping 80 per cent. The lure of a computer screen may be more enchanting than the dazzle of printed words for your children, and the truth is that as a parent, you must concede that you want your child to spend more time reading books than spend it on the internet.
An interesting fact for you, which is well researched—a study finds that there is a direct correlation between the bedtime stories you tell your children and their success in education. The finding is that you must not stop telling these bedtime stories of yours to your children till he or she has attained 11 years of age for his academic success. And if you are a willing taker of this assumption, then you must have a treasure trove of stories at your disposal, if not one stroke, then you must mine or dig out this gold of imagination on a daily basis. The best will be if you prefer a book for the purpose and never Google it. There are E-books plentily available on the internet in PDF, HTMl or E-PUB formats, easy, and handy to read and carry with you, but then what about the distractions that may pop up from a social medium messenger of yours, drawing your attention to a post you cannot help liking. God save you if you do that merely to impress or draw attention.
(The writer is District Information and Public Relations Officer, Gajapati. All opinions are personal)