[September 02, 2011] Gains and Pains of Internet Use Among Youths Tweet Sep 02, 2011 (Daily Trust/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- Youths, today no doubt live in an age of information abundance. Ours is an era of information superhighway. Gone are the days when it takes donkey months to send messages across from one border to another. Marshall Mc Luhan was absolutely right when he said that the world has been reduced to a mere "global village". We now live in a borderless and barrier-free society where exchange of ideas, thoughts, feelings and all forms of communications are virtually not restricted. The internet has afforded youths from diverse ethnic, religious and socio-cultural backgrounds to interact freely thereby engendering cross fertilization of ideas and building of relationships. The plethora of the new media such as face book, twitter, my space, net-blog, Skype, you-tube, yahoo instant messaging, Google search, e-mail and host of other online facilities have made information gathering and sharing as accessible as possible. The world of paper and print is gradually giving way to a digital world where everything has digital form whether text, graphics or sound. The digitized world being fast and current, the younger generation is moving fast towards the digital way. Cyberspace and blogosphere are the new worlds of the young generation who exploit and experiment all possibilities of the digital environment. The rapid growth of electronic media with all their potential to change the pattern one gathers and communicates information have brought about attendant positive and negative possibilities of using and misusing the media. On the positive side, the electronic media like the internet provides facility to communicate faster, retrieve and handle information in a more effortless way. Countless opportunities abound for youths to explore through good use of internet resources. Youths can take advantage of valuable e-learning materials and on-line courses available on the internet to make accelerated progress in their educational pursuit. There are on-line resources virtually on any subject under the globe which they can equally explore in tackling their academic challenges. Similarly, overseas and local scholarship opportunities can be accessed via the internet thereby assisting talented but often time less privileged students gain admissions to pursue courses within and outside the shores of this country. Many Nigerian youths are today studying courses abroad courtesy of the admissions they secured through the help of the internet. More so, millions of job opportunities abound today on the internet for unemployed youths who are seeking for jobs. Indeed, most organizations in keeping with the spirit of the internet age now advertise most of their jobs on the net for easy access. The internet equally provides opportunity for sales and purchases of varieties of products online. What this implies is that, with your master card, you can shop for products of your choice right in the comfort of your room or office without necessarily going through the hassle of travelling. Internet magic you would say! The younger generation views the internet as a useful source of information and channel for speedy communication. It is also an effective medium of socialization and interaction. Using a couple of keywords and clicks on the mouse, students could have sufficient materials to cobble together an assignment. Notwithstanding the numerous gains of the use of internet, there are however, attendant negative tendencies in the use of internet among youths which can better be termed as the "pains of internet use" among youths. According to an internet expert, Ellery, "the speed of the cut-and-paste process serves to reduce the opportunities to reflect, leading to carelessness in thought, carelessness in citing material and ultimately to plagiarism". Lazy students nowadays hardly spend quality time in conducting thorough research in their study as they merely hijack the internet and turned it to a surrogate brain while they send their brains on exile. The excessive use of the internet may also cause distraction from their studies. More worrisome of the "pains of internet use" among youths is perhaps the spending of precious man hours that would have been utilized in doing better things in browsing immoral, pornographic and polluting sexual contents. Besides polluting their minds with these dirty pornographic contents, some of them go step further by posting such contents on face book and other social media to equally pollute the moral sensibilities of other innocent users. This attitude is no doubt condemnable and youths must be advised to concentrate on exploiting the gains the internet provides instead of exploiting it for negative purposes. It is disheartening to note that some youngsters go to the cybercafe do what they called, "overnight browsing", surfing through pornographic sites that can hardly add value to their lives except leaving them morally bankrupt and accentuating their debased passion. Also of concern is the rate at which cybercrimes are being perpetrated among youngsters. Some youths hack into people's data and try to dupe them through the spreading of fabulous but sinister messages. Though the internet has the advantage of providing a platform for socialization, interaction of the adolescents with people with different culture may cause accepting the culture of other societies which may be taboo to the society in which he/she lives. This will create identity confusion among the youngsters. Medically, experts said those who surf internet for more than four hours a day could be clinically ill and need medical treatment; the internet addict will be regarded the same way as alcoholics and gamblers. Given the tendencies that youngsters could misuse the internet, some cybercafe operators where a good number of the youths go to surf internet, have decided to put in place some measures to guard against such misuse. Manager of Vision Cybercafe, John Onyebuchi said, as a way of checkmating internet abuse among users, the management of the cafe usually place conspicuous notices within the cafe's premises warning users against surfing pornographic sites and other fraudulent activities. He advised youths and all internet users to concentrate on how to use the internet for beneficial purposes, adding that the internet has both the positive and negative aspect. On his part, Pele Seson, Manager of Cetlix Systems Computer Training and Cybercafe said, they have cafe attendants who monitor internet users to ensure they don't misuse it. He noted that the internet remains the largest reservoir of information resources and urged youngsters to take the advantage in carrying out academic research that will help their careers instead of wasting their time surfing worthless things. Internet no doubt, remains a veritable source of information gathering and sharing but users should leverage more on the gains than the pains. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]