10 year old Pixie Curtis is an Australian entrepreneur with two profit-making businesses and is said to be retiring as a millionaire by the time she is 15. On the other hand, the youngsters who created apps like Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals have been arrested by police. Latin word for finger and toe is digitus, which transformed into digitalis and around 15th century the word digital came into being. But its wider meaning is in reference to signals or data which are expressed as a series of digits 0 and 1. Digital is about dealing with extremes, may be at extremes – and it warrants handling with care, esp for Gen Alpha.
Being an adolescent in the digital age has its risks and rewards. An alarmed, pandemic-struck world could prevent educational collapses mainly because of the online learning arrangements. But with this, parents, tutors and educational institutions have also unlocked a new dimension of cyber exposure for young learners, barely knowing what impressions it can carve, on behaviours and perspectives. Parents of these times who have handled the global panic colossally, are hard pressed to deal with the fact that the more time young ones spend on digital gadgets, lot more is also getting funnelled to non-educational engagement.
Digital-native kids are facing far greater risks due to the changing technology that is well adapted by them, but not that swiftly by parents and elderly folks. Many apps, software, online tools, and games are becoming increasingly popular among teens luring them to start businesses, buy cryptocurrencies, indulge in data-mining, and investments. Many such applications would request private data access or even money for items that are “important” to them during those digital engagements.
It is being widely acknowledged that there is sharp declines in life satisfaction amongst older adolescents who use social media passively, as in by just viewing others’ photos, as compared to those posting their own content. Many studies and surveys have revealed that psychosocial problems like depression, isolation, bodily disorders, stress, anxiety, self-esteem complex, are becoming incessantly common, due to education becoming e-education. Further, increased usage of Virtual Reality(VR) systems have an ability to create immersive and overpowering experience which, in most cases, are too strong for the teenage mind to differ between two realities – real and surreal. There are games that make these kids feel as if they are physically present on top of a very tall building and need to walk on a thin plank to get to another rooftop, others put them in a role of a fighter, a hero even, but would require them to slice off the limbs of enemies, not on a flat screen, but in a realistic sense. Many children are spending hours on games like ‘PUB-G’, ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Final Fantasy’, wonderstruck by the grandeur, action, killing and danger. Gaming apps like ‘Blue Whale’ and ‘Pokemon Go’ have resulted in suicides and other untoward incidents.
With cellphones and gadgets becoming ubiquitous, including now on the study tables, a great parental intervention is of prime importance to keep a tab of activities and handling matter at source. The problem needs much more than just IT guidelines, that APPs and Games need to allow only selective online purchases, or cyber laws and nugatory reporting frameworks. This hitherto unknown stressful situations for kids is nothing less than a worldwide IT and mental health emergency.
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