From games to education and from businesses to shopping auctions, everything has gone online. While sitting at home we enjoy a complete freedom to travel throughout the world. Of course this has created ease for us but at the same time have we considered the fact even for a while that what has been our younger generation up to with this new ‘blessing’?
Joe – Our lazy future
“Joe, a 15-year-old boy after school is desperate to arrive home at the earliest so that he could check his emails and chat with his online friends. After all he runs a forum on msn and is free to upload new games on the forum. Joe never indulges in any kind of sports activity even during school hours because he thinks that the time he would give to sports, would be best consumed while thinking how to promote his forum. For this reason he is overweight.
Joe’s Future Plans –Joe is determined to get admission in an online university. This according to him would be helpful in increasing his social circle of friends on the Internet. However the main reason for preferring an online university over regular university is the fact that Joe does not like to work hard. ”.
The above example reveals about how Internet dependency has been increased among our younger generation which possess the following characteristics:
Lack of Confidence
Children that rely completely on Internet are not able to face the world or any conditions that require hard work from them. Online forums and social gathering makes them vulnerable enough to face the physical world.
No work, no play
Today our whole generation is a victim of laziness and according to a survey out of 100 high school students, 80 are online for 10-12 hours per day.
Lack of Physical Exercise and sleep disorders
Most of the students have ‘cyber’ mania type of attitude which is evident from ‘late night sitting’, ‘Internet shopping craze’ and chatting in late hours. This has not only alleviated the motivation factor from the lives of our young ones but has also slowed down the process of learning in them. Sitting hours before the screen has caused dullness to their growing bodies and mind which has resulted in sleep disorders, poor health and poor eating habits.
Cyber Crime
With the advent of “hacking made easy” tools, students are more interested in such hacking attacks which have taken a form of sports rather than the traditional ‘sports’. According to Interpol (police agency), currently there are more than 30,000 websites which are providing some type of automated hacking tools, just for fun for the students (Cordesman, 2002, p. 11).
Today children instead of going to the libraries for notes, assignments and essays prefer to do it through ‘copy pasting’ from the internet because libraries would make them to borrow books, prepare notes and doing assignments. For this they need to type, to get good grades. So, why put so much effort in driving miles, book selection and borrowing from their local libraries when everything is offered on Internet and that even free of charge. They only have to type the keyword in the text box and with a single click of mouse they get hundreds of links from which they only have to select the required text, copy it and then paste it in the document.
This one click has changed the lives of our generation in many ways. For those who have pressures from their professors and are instructed not to plagiarize, they go to online buying of assignments. This helps our children a lot in solving their problems. They don’t have to utilize their own capabilities, no need of learning, and above all for those who are slow typists, internet is an ideal place for they don’t have to hurt their fingers.
The rest of the work has been completed with ‘cyber reading rooms’ which provide the students with the best of opportunity to practice reading for school play tryouts, meet with an author, participate in a library contest, pick up a bibliography, listen to a book talk or story being read, and much more (Craver, 2002, p. 125) . Such rooms are aimed to meet the educational reading needs of our students and faculty (Yu et al, 2005). Of course it looks beneficial for the students to stick to the internet but does our elders and professors realize how this technology has been rusting our students’ physical and mental capabilities?
Works Cited
- Cordesman H. Anthony, (2002) Cyber-Threats, Information Warfare, and Critical Infrastructure Protection: Defending the U.S. Homeland: Praeger: Westport, CT.
- Craver W. Kathleen, (2002) Creating Cyber Libraries: An Instructional Guide for School Library Media Specialists: Libraries Unlimited: Greenwood Village, CO.
- Yu Theresa, Cabral Kyle, Frissell & Pelowski Susan, (2005) “So Far but Yet So Close: Student Chat Room Immediacy, Learning, and Performance in an Online Course” In: Journal of Interactive Learning Research. Volume: 16. Issue: 4.