I don't get why people are afraid of the internet

 I grew up with the internet and while I didn't always have a computer at home they we did have them at school and we learned to use them. We play games that were created to teach us how to properly type on the keyboard. That's why a lot of us know how to type so well is because we have been learning to do it from a very young age. 

What really helped my typing skills was the fact that right around high school instant messaging and Myspace were a big deal. We weren't spending hours talking on the phone anymore, we were on the computer chatting on messenger or Myspace and that gave me a lot of time to practice my typing without having to take the time to practice my typing. 

Another thing they taught us in school was how to use the internet to find information. All through high school and college we would do research papers/projects that would require us to crack open a book and learn something that wasn't being taught inside the classroom. Almost every time I would get a research assignment they would require us to have 5 sources and 3 had to be books and 2 had to be from online. 

The taught us how to distinguish between credible and not so credible sites for information but they also forced us to use book references as well so that even if we don't have access to the internet we still can find a library. Not going to pretend I read a lot of books because a lot of those books were broken down on the internet into shorter versions of information which was way faster to read. 

I have a love hate relationship with reading. I love learning but I hate reading. I can't focus my attention on a book for too long before I get bored and my mind starts to wander. I've been like that for as long as I can remember but if I am hearing the information or it won't take me longer than about 20-30 minutes to read at a time then I am okay, but when you start telling me to read entire books that take days sometimes weeks to read, I just don't have it in me so the internet was a real help in my education because instead of doing all the reading I would use the research techniques they taught me to find credible sources on books and find the material I needed to use for the research. 

Sometimes I would find a website that would have excerpts from books that I could just pop into a research paper and sometimes I had to find the excerpts first to build it around the research paper so that it would make sense. The point is that I used the internet to find credible information and I got pretty good at it too. 

Nowadays looking shit up is second nature to me. If it sounds like bullshit my phone isn't ever too far from me to where I can't look it up and find out whether someone is telling me the truth or if they are full of shit, so it's really odd to me to see how many people just don't know things or are oblivious to copious amounts of information that are out there. 

I figure that it's mostly because of all the fear around the internet that keeps people using it as much as I do. I get the idea that there are bad people out there but there are no more bad people on the internet than there are in the world and that doesn't keep people from going to a new restaurant or attending college so why are people so afraid to explore the internet? Why are people so quick to say that you can't believe everything you read on the internet when you prove that something they said it wrong? 

The internet isn't different than anything other communication system humanity has created. People want the internet to be different but it's not. Before the internet and social media kids were hanging out shooting basketball after school and parents would go to friends houses on Friday night to watch TV and gossip. They would get babysitters and make a whole kid free event of it. 

They would sit down and watch one of the 3 channels they had, eat dinner and discuss the topics of the town and things they had just seen on the news. They would go home and spread whatever information they discussed to their other friends on Sunday night at church and then again on Monday at work. Our social structure and the basis for sharing opinions and facts was based on us being physically present to hear and then share the information. 

Print media and phones would help that spread information faster but it wasn't until people started watching more television that the structure would start to change. People would watch the news alone with the family on Monday night, then on Tuesday talk about it with co-workers who may or may not have seen it, then on Friday night they go out to the bar to hangout with friends to talk about it again. 

As more and more people began to watch more television the demand for more information, news and entertainment got bigger people saw this and took full advantage. Before long people are saying that kids are watching too much TV but at that time it's too late because now videogames and the internet are coming and if they are worried about their kids spending too much time watching TV and talking on the phone now wait until they see what's next. 

While video games, telephones, and television were all ascending to their peak usage, the internet was quietly being developed in the background by people who wanted more information and they wanted it with just a click of a button. They knew that computers had tremendous capabilities but what if they could build a system pass information from computers remotely from miles away and once they had they figured out websites were soon to follow. 

The internet was a budding enterprise for anyone with money around the time chatrooms and online games first made an appearance. This would give rise the the world we see today; chatrooms are no social media sites. Websites get millions of views an hour. This have changes and just like back when parents were saying kids are spending too much time playing video games, talking on the phone or watching TV they are now spending too much time on the internet and it's not different than the world we had back then. 

Back then we all had access to the same information the only difference was that our parents took the time to care about the information we had access to. The way I see it nowadays parents want to blame violent video games for their kids being violent rather than admit they had no idea the kid had the game in the first place because they don't pay attention. 

I was watching this documentary the other day and it was called The Social Dilemma, it's on Netflix, and they had these actors that are portraying a family and in one scene the mom tells the family no phones at the table and everyone gets upset. The mom walks around the table with this time release jar and collects all the phones. She sets the timer for an hours and sits down at the table to eat dinner with the family. 

The kids are annoyed and the mom asks what they should talk about and when the husband brings up a political topic the wife immediately dismisses it despite the fact that her son was interested in hearing about it. While this is going on the youngest child gets up and manages to find a hammer to break the jar and retrieve her phone. 

It's this kind of stuff that sends people into a panic because they have made the situation seem far worse than what it is. How many of y'all used to sneak back onto the phone after your parents told you had been on too long? How many of y'all snuck back into the living room after mom and dad went to sleep to watch TV? It's all the same thing the only difference is that all of it compacted into one device. Now kids don't have to disconnect from the internet to leave a voicemail for their friend to call them back only to have to wait until the next day at school to tell them; now kids can watch the video and send it to all of their friends in real-time. 

That's what I mean by the fear associated around the internet keeps people from embracing it. After watching the documentary I could total understand how someone would be paranoid about their internet usage because at some points I even had to question whether I was using it too much or if I was addicted. Then I thought to myself I am using it the way it's meant to be used and that fear went away but for some people it probably wouldn't go away. Some people probably went overboard and started deleting everything and telling their kids they can't get on the internet until they are 45.

I think it's that fear of becoming addicted to the internet, having your information stolen, or not knowing whether something is real or fake and where to get information to know the difference because there are so many people out there just stoking the fire because they had a bad experience or they know someone who said something one time about how this that and the third. 

The internet is a big space just like everyday life and if you protect yourself you can limit your chances of being taken advantage of but that won't stop it from ever happening just like buying a gun doesn't guarantee that you'll never be the victim of a crime. The best way to defend yourself is to learn as much about how social media and the internet works as you can so you can learn the best ways to defend yourself on the internet. You can also learn how to properly use the internet and social media tools to help cut down the time you spend on them. If you feel like you're spending too much time on the apps learn how to turn off the notifications. That will cut down a significant amount of time you spend checking your phone.