It is just a a few days after the Mobile Web East Africa Conference and one of the things which was highly discussed as you might have read on my earlier post is the issue of the local content.? Going through the blogs today and I came across? tech mtaa with the blog post titled Less clean web contents in Nairobi as the dirty web contents take over.? Thinking about this the whole day, my mind wondered on how it is going to be hard to raise kids in future, what should they be protected from, what exactly? is going to be good for them and how to access it without their minds being corrupted. Yeah tell me, at what age would you like your kid to start? accessing the internet,? keeping in mind that it is the future of everything ranging from learning, to relaxation.? “We the media” generation have access to everything and from almost everywhere, materials whether good or bad travel fast on the internet. ? Probably you will agree with me that controlling access of? the sex websites on the internet is next to impossible unless our government turn out to be like? Chinese government. Even if you could do that the sex materials? move around on the emails like bush fire.
If you have a commercial email address like yahoo and gmail you might have at one time or another got in your inbox nude pictures of someone you know or?? a celeb or famous? important member of the society. Remember the Zain guy, the Father who molested the kids, the Kaz pics, the Former Miss USIU, and how about the nude priest and his lover who was frog matched to the police station by the angry villagers in Kisumu, just to name but a few. Such materials are everywhere and within a click of a search engine button.
Violent and disturbing images
I? remember last year one of the users of iborian.com posted horrible images of the human body parts ripped off by bombs in Gaza Strip and the administrators of the site were forced to remove them after a huge outcry by the members. If the adults could not stomach such images, imagine the effect they would have on the kids. The research has shown that violence in any form of screen media, that is, films, videos, television, computer games and the internet, can have a negative effect on children, particularly young children. I bet it is easier to control what kids watch on most of those media but not on the internet
Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying includes sending hateful messages or even death threats to children, spreading lies about them online, making nasty comments on their social networking profiles, or creating a website to bash their looks or reputation. We have? heard of the kids committing suicide in the other parts of the world after being bullied by somebody on the internet. Well it has not yet happened here in Kenya but its possibility is very real.
Incorrect and inaccurate information
You remember when you were you were young, you believed almost everything and that is why adults still lie about the existence of? Santa Claus? and many other craps up to date. When come to internet children may believe that everything they see on the internet is factual but as we know it, there are a lot of bogus materials on the internet. In the real sense , any person can put any information they like up on the internet and there is no guarantee that the information is accurate. So how do you protect your kids from that?
What next? Is it high time they introduce a subject in schools called Internet?? And here i mean primary school level, with the aim of spelling out the dangers of the free information. Will that help?