I get annoyed when school teachers, who are generally among the more clueless people out there, give children wise advice about the dangers of the Internet, basically “don’t go there, because bad people with white vans offering free candy, and hackers and stuff”.
You know what’s the worst thing that can happen to your kids online? Other kids. And not just any kids, but the kids from their school.
You know what the greatest danger is? Oh, it must be the bullying and shit, right? Wrong. It’s spending 10 hours every day on gossip and talks so stupid I’m simply unable to fabricate examples of, because my brain refuses to go there. Yes, there really are kids who spend most of their awake time on Snapchat and Facebook, exchanging trivial messages with other kids, probably because they are afraid of being out of the loop, which usually means being the one who’s picked at.
Now imagine what the kid’s mind will look like if all he or she is doing is exchanging idiotic messages with other kids who don’t really know shit about anything? And that’s at the time when they should be reading books, or listening to adults who would teach them things. The most dangerous thing about socializing with other kids is that the options available are “get along with everyone, especially the leading kid in the group, or be singled out for attack”. That’s how you get street gangs later. In my time (because I’m fucking old) it used to be called “bad company”, because it was recognized that it rubs off on you and you get pulled in to whatever your peers are doing, and it’s usually not training for the math competition.
If kids managed to spend 10 hours a day reading books and practicing math and coding, they’d get to be super smart. But if they spend 10 hours a day hanging out with other kids (online or IRL), they will get to be stupid and evil, because that’s what it amounts to: they try to find each other’s weakness so that they can bully and attack others, which gives them the sense of empowerment, and they try to get other kids to like them, because it gives them the sense of worth. Another problem is that they attack anything that’s different from them in any ways, because different means their choices and qualities aren’t the only option, and there’s a vast fear of choice, because choice means you can choose wrong. So, they pretend there are no choices by choosing conformity. They choose to look the same, act the same, think the same and feel the same, and if some among them is smart or virtuous enough to understand that this is a very stupid form of self-deception, he or she is singled out for attack, mostly to scare others into even greater conformity.
Another thing that bothers me with the social media is that it’s a case of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Essentially, if you hang out with other kids online, and you are all pathetic conformists, you get to like worthless shit and have your worthless shit liked, and you waste your time collecting likes and being the same as everybody else while you should be building up your personality and learning useful things. As you neglect your real life, you get increasingly less emotional reward points from your real life, because it’s increasingly fucked up and hopeless due to neglect, and you have no other choice but to keep investing in the creation of the fake online presence where you post yucky artificial shit that’s designed to be liked by worthless people such as yourself. And increasingly, the voices of reason that scream at you that the emperor is naked are dismissed as trolling and abuse, so that you can descend deeper into the Shelob’s lair. Stay assured, however, that if you stay the course, you will turn into nothing way before any actual monster puts you out of your misery.