Many potential question marks surround online safety. But there exist increasingly sophisticated ways to prepare children for what’s out there
ince its launch, the internet has come with baggage. Fearmongering has been deployed on a constant basis by governments, media orgs,
puzzle for the older generations to be afraid of. In actuality, the fear of the internet is more than justified. The web (particularly the dark web) is proliferated with child pornography, fraudulent schemes, cyberbullying, extremist propaganda as well as misogynistic, homophobic and racist movements. Need I go on? Of course, it’s a sure statement that the positives that come in tandem with the online landscape outweigh the bad. Truthfully, society as we know it today couldn’t function without the web, having been shaped into its current model by it. Excluding the obvious pros surrounding the knowledge, communication and financial gain it offers; one of the sole reasons the world was able to withstand a global pandemic was thanks to remote working – something that wouldn’t exist without the internet. However, the safety concerns are ever-present – and continue to snowball as online existence becomes crucial to human development. That’s also paired with the fact the news media is burgeoned with public congressional reviews, scandals and court cases featuring those at the top of the online food chain. We had Mark
schools and parents. As a result, the world wide web has been seen from the beginning as a frightening new global enigma; it was (and still is) considered an infinite abyss of knowledge, with an unlimited level of access and a capacity to breach privacy on both micro and macro scales. Looking at the landscape in 2023, a lot of that fear has diverted its course towards the metaverse, another digital
Words by Verity Butler
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