An entire generation, the Millennials, have been born into a world where access to the internet is taken as the norm.
According to data released by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU), of the 830 million young people online worldwide, as many as 320 million, or 39%, are in China and India.
Unsurprisingly, in a world in which everyone seems to have a tablet or a smartphone or a laptop or access to the internet, the ICT data shows that youth (15-24 years old) are at the forefront of Internet adoption. One in 3 Internet users worldwide is a child.
According to a Webwise report in 2017, children in urban India within the age group of nine to seventeen spend about 4 hours a day on the internet mostly through mobile phones.
As the mother of a college-aged son, I have seen how technology can be beneficial and educational. My son has used technology to connect with friends and family, researched which colleges offer courses he is interested in studying and so on.
But, then there’s always the flipside. Black Mirror has shown it to us in its full dystopic glory. We read horror stories of catfishing, strangers reaching out to youngsters online, know of dangerous information floating around on the internet. The question, therefore, arises that, in an increasingly connected world how do we ensure that our children create and connect in a safe environment?
People are understandably concerned about how technology affects attention spans and relationships, as well as how it affects children in the long run. These are critical questions and we have been working with researchers to best understand the effect of mobile technology and social media on kids and teens, as well as how to support them as they practically grow up on the internet.
According to research, it really comes down to how you use technology. It has been found that when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information, essentially reading but not interacting with people, they do report feeling worse afterward.
In a study from UC San Diego and Yale, it was found that those who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey.
Although the causes aren’t clear, researchers hypothesise that reading about others online might lead to negative social comparison — often more so than offline, because unlike in the real world, people’s depiction of their lives online are often more curated and flattering.
On the other hand, actively interacting with friends and family and colleagues is linked to improvements in well-being. A study we conducted with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression, and loneliness.
The positive effects were even stronger when people chatted with their close friends online. Other peer-reviewed longitudinal research and experiments have found similar positive benefits between well-being and active engagement on social media.
An experiment at Cornell found stressed college students who were randomly assigned to scroll through their own social media profiles for five minutes, experienced boosts in self-affirmation compared to students who looked at a stranger’s profile. Researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing about past meaningful interactions — seeing photos, past posts.
Yet, the bottom line as our research and other academic literature has shown is that that it’s about how you use the internet that matters when it comes to your well-being.
We as parents and teachers cannot be oblivious to the advantages of the internet. Take, for example, Dabri village, which lies almost 200 kilometres from Ranchi. Thanks to the internet, local community members have been trained under a Training of Trainers programme and help run digital literacy programmes for youth and school children. The youngsters in the village are using their knowledge of the Internet to become youth entrepreneurs.
What we need to do is create safe share spaces at home for healthy parent-child relationships, and monitor and control internet usage. Today, there are tools parents and youngsters can turn to.
Facebook’s Safety Center, Bullying Prevention Hub, and Parent's Portal offer guidance for parents, teens, educators and law enforcement officials to start a conversation about online safety. The Centre for Social Research is part of our Safety Advisory Board through which we collaborate regularly with safety advocates, mental health professionals, and other experts to ensure our online community has the most relevant online safety information.
In Mumbai, Facebook groups such as Mumbai Moms are working on and off the virtual world to raise millennials safely in a more and more connected reality.
The need of the hour is for parents to keep open the channels of communication so children use social media only to connect or create with others and to learn – but not as a substitute for real-life interactions.
We know people are concerned about how technology affects our attention spans and relationships, and the effect on children in the long run. Which is why we recently pledged $1 million toward research to understand the relationship between media technologies, youth development, and well-being.
Investments have been made to better understand digital distraction and the factors that can pull people away from important face-to-face interactions. We don’t have all the answers, yet given the prominent role social media now plays in many people’s lives, it is important to have these conversations to better understand the whole spectrum of issues.
We need to adapt with the internet, and both educators and parents need to use technology effectively to raise millennials better. At the end of the day, our children need to make the most of the opportunity provided by the internet to create and connect and share information - but in a safe manner. A better internet frankly, starts and ends with us.
(Ankhi Das is the Director of Public Policy for Facebook in India and South & Central Asia. Views expressed above is her own)