(Frindly Screens)
What benefits do new technologies bring to our teens?
Internet offers great possibilities of access to audiovisual information, to diverse knowledge, to collaborative learning, to communicate with close friends but also with people from other cultures ...
The mobile phone allows them to have greater autonomy and organize their relationships and activities more agile.
Videogames can develop many capacities: psychomotor coordination, spatial orientation, space-time coordination ...
What risks can occur?
We can establish a classification called ANC (Abusive, Normal and Criminal):
- Abusive use, which can sometimes constitute dependence,
It has two types of consequences:
* Physical disorders: obesity, lack of development of psychomotor functions, musculoskeletal disorders, visual problems due to accumulation of effort ...
* Psychological disorders, extreme isolation, deficient development of social skills, deformed vision of reality, dependence ...
- Criminal Use refers to the occasions in which an action punishable by law is carried out. It can be something as simple as slandering someone or threatening their privacy by posting a message, a photograph or a video on a web page.
- Normal Use, where there is no underlying defect in the intention (criminal) or amount of use (abusive). We can talk about the three "C's" (Content, Contact and Commerce)
* Risks for Content, both illegal (apologia for xenophobia, child pornography ...) and legal ("miracle diets", pornography, gore pages, manufacture of explosives ...).
* Risks by Contact, both with people we do not know and can be sexual predators or pedophiles as well as by known people who haunt us (cyberbullying)
* Risks by Commerce, where you can be the victim of a scam when you buy on a certain website or auction page, when responding to an ad from an individual ...
Source: Article for the City Council magazine of Ordizia "Seme-Alabak", written by Jorge Flores Fernández (April 2018)