Youth and the Internet

The internet is one of the fastest growing technologies ever seen. In 2002,around nine percent of people worldwide were using the internet. Ten years later, in 2012, thirty-three percent of the worlds population was using the internet, just over two billion people. Compared to forty-six minutes a day in 2002, people now spend an average of four hours on the internet every day. The internet's widespread use and the large role it now plays in everyday life means that nowadays, it has a much greater effect on people. Youth specifically are affected greatly by the internet as they spend large amounts of their time on the internet, much more than their adult counterparts. To successfully analyze these effects, three causes of those effects will be looked at. These causes are new teaching methods in schools, cyberbullying, and Clearly, youth worldwide are greatly affected by the internet.

New Teaching Methods

First, the internet is creating new ways for young students to learn online. In one study was found that eighty-one percent of teenagers studied reported having one or more personal media devices, eighty-seven percent used the Internet, and fifty-one percent reported going online every day(Considine, 2009, 473). This data portrays current youth as extremely engaged in internet communications technology and gives convincing evidence that their use of telecommunications is far greater than other generations. Due to this, things related to the internet, and the effective use of it are now needed to capture teens attention. To start, the philosophy for learning using technology is not to simply do the same things but using newer technology, rather the idea is to use technology in innovative ways to get ideas across to students ...

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