On Friday Norton released it’s Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009. Predictably, Facebook and YouTube were among the top 3. What I found a little unsettling, was that the #4 and #5 most searched for terms were “sex” and “porn”.
Now, I know that teens will be curious about those subjects and that’s normal. If you scroll to the bottom of the Norton page, it lists the searches by age categories. “Porn”, was the fourth most popular search performed by kids 7 and under! That has me worried if parents know what their kids are doing while they’re online, and if they know how to enable “Parental Controls” for when their children are online.
The title sounds like something you would expect to see as a video game title. I all fact, it may well be a video game. But, I can assure you that the term you will see more and more frequently in the coming years. I believe, as well as many others, the next world war will be a waged on the internet. Unknowingly, you may even participate in it. This is mainly due to the way the internet is being used as it is now.
The internet as it is today, is being used in ways it was never designed to be used. It used to be a medium for the sharing of information. For universities, medical institutions, and governmental use. Now, people use it from paying their phone bill online, to negotiating million dollar deals. Cheap worldwide communication has a price. Unfortunately, the base it’s being built upon is old, out dated, and needs to be replaced. This flaw is a prime example why people’s attitudes to towards their online activities needs to change.
We’ve come to depend on the internet for a lot of we take for granted in our daily lives. What happens when that connectivity is lost? Canada’s CBC put out a video last year (little over 43 minutes long, but but definitely worth watching) that talks about some of the repercussions of how quickly a country can be cut off from the world, and how easily it can happen. (available to Canadian readers only, sorry)
Wired Science put out a video last year as well, about how an entire country was brought to it’s knees in a few days as a political backlash.
In my opinion, I think we should be more than cautious when we become dependant on the internet for communication, for school, and for work. If an entire country, although small, was cut off from the rest of the world like that in a matter of a few days. What happens if it’s planned for years? What happens if Canada become a target? The United States? How are you prepared if it happens?