Internet plays a huge role in our daily life. When we are woken up by our mobile phones, instead of an old-fashioned alarm clock, the first thing we do is check every social media application. We check what’s new on the feeds of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. After that, we check our mailbox and answer any Whatsapp messages we received during the night. When this is all done, we are quite awake enough to get out of bed. During breakfast, we check our e-mail again. Actually, this goes on for the rest of the day. It’s in our system, part of our daily routine. We can’t live without it. A lot of people complain about a busy life, a lack of privacy, having to be online and reachable 24/7. But when someone would ask you to take your phone for a day and answer all your calls and messages, not many would say yes.. because we are addicted.
This development is not only of our generation, it is even worse in the next generations. People of our age have experienced what it was to live without a smartphone and all these social media channels. Apple released their first Iphone in 2007. This gave an impulse to other brands. Since then a mobile phone with fast internet was not only for the wealthy businessmen, but also for the ‘regular consumer’. Access to internet became a crucial characteristic of a good telephone (United Consumers, 2016). This means that children aged 9 and younger have grown up in and environment where the constant use of smartphones is more than normal. The fact that children start using technological devices and internet at a younger age. At their 6th birthday, they get a game console as a present, at their 9th birthday they already get a smartphone, when they go to the secondary school they get a laptop. But from the age of 2, they already use the IPad of their parents, to play games and watch movies.
In summer, in work in a restaurant. Last summer, a family with 3 small children, in the age of 2-4, came for dinner at our restaurant. These children all had an IPad in front of them. From the moment they arrived until the moment they left, they were watching movies. Their parents were talking to each other and did not really pay attention to the kids. It seemed like they enjoyed the fact that the children were amused by the technological device and that they were silent. Similar to this family, I saw so many. To my opinion, this is not the idea of going out for dinner with your family. This should be a social activity as a group. These children didn’t participate in the social happening at all. If you don’t put a certain limit on the use of all these devices for your children, there will be a certain lack of social and emotional development. Of course, there are a lot of advantages such as online learning for children in a playful way. But a lot of them are addicted to internet from a very young age, and an activity as playing outside like children used to do, years ago, is not entertaining enough. This sometimes scares me, especially because internet is becoming a bigger part of our lives.
What do you think?
References
United Consumers (2016), https://www.unitedconsumers.com/gsm/ontstaan-mobiele-telefoon/index.jsp, 22-10-2016
