Should Students get limited access to the Internet?
The Internet is one of the prime needs of today’s world. The Internet is where we can find information about everything under the sky. It is the most needed thing around the globe. Businessmen, teachers, traders, students, everyone is dependent on the internet for their work. No matter if you are a middle-class person or a millionaire, all you need is the internet, sometimes for your work and sometimes for entertainment.
If we talk about students, there are many uses of the internet in a student’s life. e-tutorials, college projects, exam preparations any many more activities can be done on the internet which can help students in their studies. But the fact that excess of anything can be harmful is applicable here also.
Here we will discuss why students should get limited access to the internet and talk about the harms associated with the overuse of the internet by the students.
Effects on their Mentality and Family Life
This is the most serious problem among students today. They spend the maximum part of their day on the internet and hardly have any interactions with their family members. This leads to weak family bonds. The students who spend most of the time surfing the internet end up with an unhealthy body due to lack of physical exercise, low grades in academics because they just keep on surfing useless things, and a distance from family members because they don’t have time to sit with family and talk.
Students ignore their health, wealth, social, and personal life. The only thing they bother about is being online. We can see the examples of students getting mentally and physically disturbed due to internet addiction, for example, in 2018, a girl from Vietnam was addicted to Facebook and ended up in a mental hospital. Now she is under treatment. Another case happened in Taiwan where a student died because he played an online game continuously for 2 days without eating anything. There are endless cases like this happening with students due to the excess of the internet which reminds us how important it is to limit internet access for the students.
Adult Websites, Pornography
Students need to focus on their studies and not pay attention to useless and bad things. But on the internet, they can easily get introduced to porn websites. These kinds of websites are available in large numbers. There can be a chance that students can reach these sites accidentally and get addicted later. As students are not mature enough to understand everything, they can be a threat to the girls around them. The students who are introduced to pornography at an early age can commit crimes and rapes. There are many cases where we can see the evidence of these kinds of crimes by the school or college students just because they get addicted to these bad websites. The sexual predators are chasing young school boys and girls and pretend to have the same hobbies and finally lure them into the world of pornography. There are many cases of lost and exploited young students due to these predators. These crimes are another reason to limit Internet access for students.
Physical Harms
The overuse of the internet is physical harm for students. Students are the future of this world and they must stay healthy to focus on their studies and become responsible citizens on this earth. With the excess of the internet, we can see many students spending hours in front of their computer screens. They keep on playing online games and chatting on social sites. this leads to their back pain, muscle weakness, eye problems, and many other posture-related issues. All these physical issues directly affect their studies and make them lazy. The Internet is a web where students easily get addicted and make their life hell.
The Social Life is Effected
A student needs to have a social life, make friends, and have face-to-face interactions but due to the overuse of the internet, these interactions have been lost somewhere. The Internet is famous for meeting new people and making new friends but they have nothing to do with the people around us. Students get addicted to messaging and virtual communications rather than going out and meeting friends. This affects their social life and they no longer find it comfortable to have face to face interactions. The students are lacking communication skills and going away from their relationships and all the blame is on the excess of the internet. If we observe, we can find endless such cases near us where students are risking their future. It is important to limit internet access for the students to save their social life also.
Cheating
The students getting excess of the internet can lead to cheating. The fact that the internet has all the information can be used negatively by the students. They use search engines for finding the answers to their question during tests which lead to false results. Many schools have banned the use of mobile phones and the internet inside the school so that students can focus on their classes rather than surfing. This also disables students to achieve better grades with their hard work. The reduction in internet use can lead to awareness among students and prevent the cheating problem.
Cheating is not only about cheating in examinations but there are many cases where students are hacking the school websites and changing the grades and altering the student’s information. They hack their school websites to know the assignments and find their answers. In 2017, there was a case where a former student hacked his alma mater and changed his grades. The student was arrested but this is the time to think about what leads to all this?
Fraud
Dangerous games like Blue Whale, Momo, etc are also part of the internet. They target students and young children to lure them to do useless tasks and kill themselves in the end. They do friendship with the students and after getting all the information and understanding their weaknesses, attack them emotionally, and blackmail them.
In the year 2017-18, there were countless cases where students committed suicide due to Blue Whale and Momo. These kinds of websites are a threat to today’s youth. the students are more prone to exploitation and luring which makes the internet a very unsafe place for them.