I still remember the time my family got our first computer. I was in kindergarten school, and at that period my mom had just started her studies at a university. Of course, I have seen computers before, with their big screens that were like a box, but we never had one in the house before. When I asked her what we do with it, she replied that if you type something, it will show you pictures of that item. She was basically describing Google search as the sole function of it. So that was my impression of it. I just learned how to turn it on, open Internet Explorer, and then type words like “tree” or “landscape”, and I was just scrolling through the pictures.
It took a couple of years until I got into elementary school and started having computer lessons to understand what its function really is and get familiar with other applications rather than the Internet. At that time, before class started, we used to go online and play games for a few minutes before the teacher entered the classroom. And then I started having this habit at home as well. A lazy afternoon, or at a family gathering when the grown-ups were chatting in the living room, I would sneak into the bedroom and play games online. Silly games, like dressing up a doll or making virtual sandwiches. Up until that point, I wasn’t really enjoying the use of it, and it was easy for me to go for days without turning it on.
At some point, I realised that I could create CDs with my music, and that was a huge thing for me. I was spending hours downloading songs and then transferring them to a CD to play in the car. Of course, because I was self-taught, a lot of times it didn’t work as planned, and the CDs didn’t play, or I was stopping the process in the middle by mistake, and then I had to create another one from scratch. Then I learned about YouTube, what a revelation! We spend hours with my sister on YouTube, copying the dance moves from music videos and singing lyrics from songs. I thought that it was just a music platform for a long time.
Everything changed when I went to high school around 2012, and the talk about social media emerged. Everyone had a Facebook profile at the time, and Instagram had started to get the hype. It was a difficult discussion with my parents to persuade them to create a Facebook profile, and that I would be responsible and cautious online. They didn’t allow me, but that didn’t stop me. I knew that there wasn’t a way to find out since they weren’t users themselves. I created a profile, and I was out in the deep. I didn’t follow any of the warnings about not having “friends” people that I don’t know, and now that I am thinking about it, it was pure luck that I didn’t get involved in any serious incident. At that time, it was harder to check your child’s activity online. Probably only through the History tab. It is hopeful that nowadays there are several ways to secure a child’s presence and exposure online, but I guess its harder to do due to the usual early familiarisation that comes in this Digital Age. I am glad that I wasn’t born in it, and it was something I was discovering in my own way. However, I can’t help but just pause and think about the differences with Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the way they are surrounded from such an early age, not only by digital technology but also by AI-driven technologies, and the impact that this may have on children’s development and protection.
Recent Comments