Teens on the net: how safe?
ANUPAMA KUMAR
Orkut, MySpace and Friendster are increasingly becoming a major part of our lives, with more and more people signing up for these social networking sites — Orkut, for example, has over 43 million members.
These sites have been hailed as a remarkable invention, as they permit people not only to keep in touch with old friends from school and college but also to make new friends and meet people of common interests. YouTube and similar sites enable sharing of videos, and thousands of sites host blogs and similar means to express creativity.
It cannot be denied that these social networking websites do have their good points. Recently, for example, a heart patient was able to raise money for his surgery through these very sites. In addition, these online communities provide opportunities to raise awareness on various social issues and encourage public participation — UNICEF Voices of Youth and Greenpeace Cyberactivists are two excellent examples.
Disastrous effects
Yet, these communities do have several disastrous effects on society, particularly on teenagers.
Teens generally use these online friend communities as a means to make friends and be perceived as "cool." Part of the problem is the social isolation many latchkey kids experience, forcing them to resort to the internet for friends. Unfortunately, however, the world of Orkut and Hi5 is far removed from reality.
Consider, for example, the fact that profiles on online friend communities are visible to the public. This means that, on an average, a reasonably active profile is viewed by around 50 people every day, most invisible to the owner. In addition, many teens innocently give out personal details to complete strangers over the internet.
This problem is only aggravated by the ease with which fake identities are created — estimates are that around 45 per cent of IDs on any online community are false. In one experiment, a journalist posed as a 13-year-old girl on Bebo and was given access to the profiles of several teenage girls. The worst part of this is that, in addition to causing a loss of privacy, these fake identities are often used as a launch pad for the more severe online crimes of cyber stalking, cyber bullying, and online financial fraud.
One of the best documented problems associated with the internet is the huge amount of explicit content. A recent study has revealed that one in three internet-using children is exposed to unwanted sexual material, and one in seven is sexually solicited.
Another study by Computing Which? has uncovered an alarming amount of pornographic material on the popular social networking sites MySpace, Bebo and Orkut, and that words such as "Barbie" or "Furby" were used to entice children. Furthermore, many online predators actually promise rewards in return for exposure on the internet.
Cyber bullying
There is also the issue of cyber bullying, and, in more extreme cases, cyber stalking. Cases of teens forced to undergo psychological therapy after denigrating, hateful, obscene remarks were made on public forums are becoming increasingly common.
The Star Wars Kid of 2003 suffered immense embarrassment when footage he had innocently uploaded was downloaded and modified extensively. Cyber stalking can involve, in addition to obscene mails and incessant phone calls, actual physical stalking.
The presence of hate communities is another issue. The "I Hate India" community on Orkut forced India to issue a notice to Google for promoting hatred. Several communities promote, inter alia, racism, anti-Semitism and communal feelings.
While we may claim that online social communities promote friendship, the truth is that they actually limit relationships — distance, the ease with which lies are told and the lack of person-to-person interaction make the building of real, healthy relationships difficult, and can even cause social adjustment issues in young people. Besides, there has been a shocking rise in the number of teens with posture and lifestyle related disorders as a result of long hours in front of the monitor.
Social networking websites may "flatten" the world, as Thomas Friedman says, but it is imperative that we take notice of the fact that their misuse can prove disastrous for the health and sanity of our teens.
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