Fahad Alhajri 1
Fahad Alhajri
Dr.Lee
English 113 A
3 November 2015
Wasting Time
The internet is a technological platform on which one can get almost any information
they are looking for. The internet is very helpful and it provides information that would
otherwise not be readily available to people. It helps students in their school studies, helps
researchers with their work, and is a source of entertainment. There are many sites with video
games, music videos, movies, blogs with funny stories and almost all information anyone wants.
In spite of its many benefits, the internet has many negatives too. When misused it can have
many adverse effects on children and all human beings at large. Therefore parents should take
care of their children from using internet by making limits of using it and monitor them to avoid
internet dangers, and adults should limit themselves too from how much time they spend on the
internet.
Many people are very fond of their electronic gadgets like phones, tablets and laptops.
The internet is very easy to navigate so anybody including children uses it. It has all types of fun
and interesting things for kids that keep them always wanting to be on the internet. They spend
time too much time on their gadgets surfing the internet and end up wasting too much of their
time. Students and children love things like social media and internet games, music videos,
comedies, movies, funny clips and reality shows. (Hugges, 2001) They are always wasting their
study time on those unimportant things on the internet. This affects their studies negatively they
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end up failing their exams and thus even wasting their tutors time. Parents should be actively
involved in regulating how much time their kids spend using the internet instead of studying.
They should limit that time to less time and ensure they are using the internet for useful things.
People never really know when to stop or where to draw their internet usage limits. This
is because the internet can be very addictive. The more one stays on the internet, the more they
want to continue doing that. They do not realize how much time has passed by, or what other
things they should be doing other than being on the internet. They can be addicted to anything
from social media, to gaming or even gambling sites. This internet addiction causes
psychological, physical and social health risks. Long hours of surfing may cause headaches,
backaches and even eye problems. Internet addiction also makes the addicts anti-social. There is
no face to face communication of people on the internet. People chat with each other every day
through social media but when they meet they act like strangers because they don’t know how to
socialize face to face. They lose touch with their friends and families and prefer to be alone.
They never want to go out to exercise or do outdoor activities. This affects their health
negatively, and in some instances causes depression. Internet should be used with some limits
every day. (Groscop, 2013).
With a click of a button, one can have access to all kinds of material on the internet. This
is a danger that faces our children and teenagers. They easily access pornographic and obscene
materials that their parents would not want them to access. Parents should be careful of their
children to ensure that their kids do not watch TV programs that are not good for them. (Sam,
2012) What they forget is that this material is readily available on the internet and the children
can view it whenever they want. There are no filters or restriction to the pages the child can see
or open. Parents should always supervise their children on how they use the internet because
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such things corrupt the child’s morals and waste their time and without proper measures it can
cause a lot of harm.
Social media sites are very popular nowadays with children and teenagers. Cyber
bullying ranges from sending hateful messages on social media to children, spreading lies about
them online, issuing threats and even making fun of their online profiles. (Kam, 2013) There are
bad people out there whose purpose is to waste time treating others badly for their own evil
pleasures. Unfortunately the internet has no filters to protect the children. It is not easy to catch
the people doing this and stop them since they are not physically there. This cyber bullying
affects the child psychologically. They lose their self-esteem and are embarrassed to go out there
and face people. There have been cases of children who have tried and even gone ahead and
committed suicide as a result of being bullied on the internet. It leads to a lot of bad effect to a
point that only sessions of counselling would help that child. This ends up being very expensive
to the parents paying for it and also it wastes a lot of time for both the child and parent. The child
takes a long time before they can go back to their studying. On the other hand, some children are
the ones that become the bullies and spread these hateful trends as a form of a game, not
knowing how negatively they affect their friends. They waste their precious time making fun of
others in hateful ways. Some end up getting caught and being punished by the society, which
makes them, do things like community service that leads to wasting their study time.
Many young people share their most personal details on social media. They have devices
that have camera so they spend their time taking pictures at any time and post them online. They
write all sorts of updates without caring that the whole world can see. These may be pictures that
include nudity, drug indulgence, or even criminal activities. (Groscop, 2013) This kind of
exposure on social media may cause them pain later in their lives. When one goes to look for
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jobs, some employers do background checks and internet checks to help them understand what
kind of a person the job seeker is. In such cases most people lose out on great opportunities due
to careless mistakes they did on the internet in their earlier years. The employers find out that the
person wastes too much time on the internet or is into drugs or they are careless and
irresponsible. This makes them not get the jobs. Young people should be careful of the kind of
information they dispense on the internet. In other instances it could be children who have access
to devices with cameras with instant sharing applications. They could unknowingly or knowingly
share embarrassing images that could cause endless damages to their friends or even parents.
When something is posted on the internet, there is no way to reverse that or delete it, it will
always be there somewhere. Once shared, these contents go viral and the effects are very hurtful
and could cause psychological damages to the affected. (Kraunt, Malcolm and Sara, 2006)
All sorts of people are found online. Some are out there to look for easy targets to exploit;
they have a lot of time to waste. The most common ones are sex predators. They go online
looking for unsuspecting young people and children to exploit. They collect details of their
targets like location, name of their schools, their likes and dislikes and ask very personal
questions. The more someone is on the internet, the more likely they are vulnerable to the sexual
predators. Some offer fancy gifts or treats so that their target agrees to meet them. They offer to
pay their targets if they send them naked pictures of themselves. Some of these dangerous
predators end up tracing their targets and harming them physically. (Hugges, 2001) Once a child
or a person comes into contact with these sexual predators, their life changes forever and their
mental health may be affected. Some are not able to tell their experiences to anyone and they
suffer silently within themselves. In the long run, a precious life time is wasted because their
lives become miserable.
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The internet causes children and students to become very lazy people. It reduced the
thinking capacity of people. When they want something they just turn to the internet and find it
even if it was a simple thing that only required common sense. When they have school
assignments from their teachers, they just open the internet and copy down answers from there.
They don’t take time to understand, they just cram what they get on the internet. This is a very
bad habit because it creates a society that has a low thinking capacity, wasting a lot of time on
small issues that would be solved using common sense. (Groscop, 2013) The internet also has
become so popular that children sit on their laptops almost all night chatting, playing games,
watching videos and they end up not sleeping. They develop the condition of insomnia which is
where one lacks sleep. This is a very bad condition because sleeping is important for good
physical and mental health. Without enough sleep these children are less active and they have
bad health. The lots of time they spend seated on their computers makes them very inactive, they
may even become obese because all they do is take unhealthy snacks and sit on their computers
browsing the internet. They prefer to waste their time on the internet than do any kind of exercise
or go out and spend time there. (Tamia, 2013)
In conclusion, the internet is a very helpful tool when used wisely, but it is also a very
dangerous tool when used without the necessary limits. There is a lot of illegal and unacceptable
information available on it. Criminal activities are on the increase throughout the internet. Since
there are not enough regulations put in place for internet by the countries’ laws, all people should
be educated on how to use the internet, especially the parents to save their children from internet
dangers.
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Works Cited
Hugges, Donna Rice. "Internet Dangers - ProtectKids.com - Making the Internet ..." 2001. Web.
2 Dec. 2015.
Kam, Katherine. "4 Dangers of the Internet - WebMD - Better Information ..." WebMD. 2013.
Web. 2 Dec. 2015.
Kraunt, Robert, Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler. "Computers, Phones, and the Internet Oxford Scholarship." 1 Mar. 2006. Web. 2 Dec. 2015. Risks of the Internet Use. (n.d.).
Retrieved November 3, 2015.
Groscop, Viv. "Children and the Internet: A Parent's Guide | Technology ..." 3 Nov. 2013. Web.
2 Dec. 2015.
Tamia, Retno. "Top 10 Negative Effects of Internet Use on Students." 9 Apr. 2013. Web. 2 Dec.
2015.
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