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 Fahad Alhajri 2 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 Fahad Alhajri 3 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 Fahad Alhajri 4 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. Fahad Alhajri 5 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. Fahad Alhajri 6 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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