In a 1934 essay entitled ‘A foretaste of TV’, Rudolph Arheim, a stalwart of cinematic studies, predicted that television would turn people into pathetic hermits squatting in their rooms.
According to two popular internet-use myths everyone is watching porn online while cyberspace is overpopulated with system bullies- Fr Joe Borg
Arheim’s negative comments present just one facet of the reaction of people to the invention of a new medium. Some consider it as something horrible while others consider the innovation as a wonderful event.
Indeed, in 1962, Marshall McLuhan considered television and other electronic media as the possible creators of a global village. Visionaries like McLuhan predicted electronic interdependence instead of hermitic isolation.
The internet has been, similarly, praised and cursed. On one hand, T. Dijkshoorn and B. Loth (2000) held that the internet chokes creativity, kills organisations and leads to financial catastrophe; while on the other, Manuel Castells, the most cited communication scholar, describes the internet as a communication medium that allows, for the first time the communication of many to many while heralding a Network Society with a new economy, new businesses, and new social and cultural forms.
Others see lonesome geeks as the natural children of the invention.
These different appreciations could eventually be translated into policies. It is essential that such policies are not based on myths or nightmare scenarios but on realities. Only serious research provides us with such realities.
During a seminar on safer internet organised by the Malta Communications Authority last Thursday, I spoke about the EU Kids Online pan-European research project which is an attempt in this direction. During 2010, 25,000 children and parents from 25 different European countries were interviewed to find out about the internet world of nine- to 16-year-old children and their parents. The study managed to confound a number of popularly held myths.
Research showed that the popular belief that children are know-it-all digital natives is an exaggeration. For example, only 28 per cent of the nine to 16-year-olds said they can change their filter preferences. This exuberant talk of glorified digital natives can obfuscate children’s need for support in developing digital skills.
Such support is of paramount importance as the use of the internet by children is on the rise. They access it in their bedrooms, at friends’ homes, and increasingly through smartphones and hand-held devices. Putting the PC in the living room can be of help but it is much better for parents to talk to their children about their internet use or share an online activity with them. Most children appreciate this help, so much so that 70 per cent of children stated that what their parents do in relation to their internet use is helpful.
According to two popular internet-use myths, everyone is watching porn online while cyberspace is overpopulated with system bullies.
This research showed that 14 per cent of children surveyed have seen sexual images online. Exposure to sexual content online is highest in Nordic countries and in some eastern European countries while it is lower in southern Europe and Catholic countries. Only six per cent said they have been bullied online; far less than the number of children who say they are bullied offline. However, bullying is a matter of concern as it upsets children more than sexual images or messages.
Much can and should be done by many to change into opportunities the risks encountered by kids while online. A country’s socio-economic stratification, regulatory framework, technological infrastructure and educational system do make a difference. It is not true that the efforts of parents and children are enough.
The industry spreads this myth to absolve itself of all responsibility. It has been doing this since the days of silent movies.
Another myth spread by the industry is that digital literacy is enough and we do not need media education. The former is mainly a skill enabling people to use the new media. Being able to handle the hardware and software is not enough to empower media users.
Media education, on the other hand, helps users make a critical assessment of the media and their content. It helps users assess the content as a construct of a particular societal and organisational context.
The Church in Malta has been on the vanguard of this development since 1981. After a long period of neglect, the Church is now re-embarking on a project that should give the subject a new lease of life in its schools.
One hopes the educational authorities responsible for updating our national curriculum will complement this positive move. The drafts presented for consultation unfortunately privilege digital literacy at the expense of media education. One hopes that following the consultation process this will be rectified and media education will be given its deservedly important place within the curriculum, and more importantly, in the classrooms.
• Our undergraduates have fought hard for and won for themselves, and for future generations, a fundamental human right: drinking during exams. Now they are fighting for another basic human right: chatting on Facebook and surfing the internet during lectures while getting paid by the taxpayer. What will be our University students’ next battle? One wonders. I wish them well.
• “Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now.
“Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm of the world, you have different classes… (In the world) you’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn.
“We’re going to hit it, and when we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be poor, that are going to be impacted. It’s the same with Titanic.”
James Cameron, director of the film Titanic (1997), during a National Geographic Channel programme.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt