By Charles McNealy
From an early age, children are taught not to talk to strangers. This develops a narrative in the mind of a child that all unfamiliar people are kidnappers and murders. Fear builds in their minds around the concept of strangers and the consequences of talking with one. Now let’s take this concept and apply it to the internet. How can children find solace and comfort in this new digital world without the fear of all these unknown people? Cernikova, Smahel, and Wright investigated children’s mental health in correlation to their experiences and awareness of the internet.
Little research has been done on how children see their mental health and how the internet impacts it. To address this, the researchers studied the common physical and mental concerns when going online. These concerns include:
- Being kidnapped/murdered
- Going blind
- Vivid images or hallucinations (cognitive salience)
- Committing suicide
- Headaches
- Increase in aggression
- Tiredness/sleeping issues.
These are the major experiences and awareness’s that children reported from a study of children from the ages nine to sixteen, across nine countries in Europe (N=368). These ideals are also broadcasted from real world sources. Magazines publish articles, friends share stories, and parents spread the safety narrative. Media sources introduce an element of hyper awareness when navigating the internet. This is built off extreme events and rare occurrences. Children reported that they had experienced physical symptoms of too much online time. Commonly, people feel once you get a headache or your eyes feel sore, that it is time to get off the internet. Poor eating habits and increased aggression were also reported by children. A lack of digital literacy, or general frustration with the internet, results in something getting hit.
They also found an awareness of the possible effects of the internet. Common themes of this awareness are games leading to violence or death and being kidnapped by strangers. Many children spoke of these in terms of other children, exempting themselves from the possibility. Some children acknowledged the changing nature of the internet based on their own experiences. These accounts acknowledged the common concerns but are based solely off their own beliefs.
Two theories offer possible insight into how children are affected by the internet and the media’s impact.
- The Media Panic Theory, an overreaching concept of reporting only amplified and dramatic stories. On a medium such as the internet, flashy and fast stories are all the rage. These can easily spread and be accepted as normal occurrences when in reality they are sparse.
- The Third-Person Effect, the concept of underestimating the potential of the internet. The internet at its core is a platform for the masses, yet it can be easily forgotten that millions of people use it every day. This effect accounts for the misunderstanding of how fast the internet spreads news and how effective it is at delivering said news.
These two theories may account for the role media has on children’s awareness in regard to the internet. Cernikova, Smahel, and Wright concluded that technologies impact on children could potentially be manipulated by the media. The speed of news on the internet can make this difficult to verify. Considering this along with the media panic theory as well as the third-person effect, extreme cases can spread and influencing millions on the normality of the internet.
Cernikova, M., Smahel, D., & Wright, M. F. (2018). Children’s Experiences and Awareness about Impact of Digital Media on Health. Health Communication, 33(6), 664–673. https://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2137/10.1080/10410236.2017.1298197