Hanging by a thread

I am most definitely Not a child of the Internet age, I missed out by a couple of years. Our school had computers, and we were required to do an ICT course but that mainly centred on using Word, Excel and the Like. We weren’t taught anything about the Internet ( I could be blanking a few lectures of the dangers but what teenager wants to listen to that)

Computer courses weren’t really offered to us. We managed to pick up enough skills to do basic things and that was it. I still remember getting my first laptop and home Internet connection at 16, I spent the first night talking in all the AOL chat rooms to hundreds of strangers.

To be fair me skills have never really progressed, despite the opportunity to do so, as I’ve never really been interested. An unfortunate side effect of my condition that if it doesn’t interest me I’m unlikely to retain much of the information.

Both my Children are of the Internet age, as is typical the next generation being more technologically savvy than the one before. I dread to think the trouble I would have gotten myself into if I had access to the things they do. But it’s hard to fully understand the dangers as the rules and laws are constantly playing catch up to the skills of those who use them for nefarious purposes.

I’ve always thought knowledge is our most powerful tool and yet so many seem to want to curb our access to it, to control what we know and what we think. I’ve always chosen the path of honesty, teaching my children about any topic they ask about, although this can sometimes require making information age appropriate, I’ve never considered that knowledge is bad. And can’t understand why people would.

How can you expect your children to make the “right” decision if they don’t understand the consequences of their actions? Yet it would seem I’m in the minority and even persecuted for encouraging my children’s curiosity about the world we live in.

Surely how we use the knowledge we have is more important than what knowledge we have?