Impact of digital age on youth value formation
As someone who spends a lot, and I mean A LOT, of time staring at a computer screen, it’s quite interesting to see the change in what youth consider valuable or important. While obviously there are still plenty of young people who are seeking an actual career, I have noticed a tendency to throw the idea of being an influencer and making so-called easy money from the internet. I will say though I have nothing against influencers, at least against the passionate ones, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, and that poses a problem.
What causes
this confusion, in my opinion, is the lack of critical thinking or, at this
point, how hard it is to acquire it. Considering the amount of information at
our hands reach, which sometimes isn’t checked and is more likely rumors or
just false information, it requires a lot of understanding to separate the
useful from the useless. If we turned back time 10 or 20 years, family was
probably the biggest influencer when it comes to forming youth values; sadly,
that is becoming less of a thing. Since influencing requires you to know how to
help, and that is hard when there are a lot of unknown variables. My generation
already takes a lot of information from the internet, and even we don’t always
proofread it and spread it among others, but when it comes to parents of
today's youth, technology is something that is quite hard to grasp for most of
them. You may say, So, what? We can deal with it on our own, maybe, but can we?
When I was younger and got confused about something, I could ask my parents for
advice, but how are today's youth supposed to do that if their parents also
don’t have enough experience in it? That’s how constantly changing values
surfaced like never before. Obviously that’s nothing new, even before people
managed to change in what they believe in and how they live their lives, but
this is a little bit worse, at least I think so.
Being unable to create strong moral values in the early stages of your life makes the rest of your life a little bit of a mess. Something like honesty seems hard to consider good, since the internet has a lot of cases where someone is gaining fame or money and is dishonest; intelligence is also something that is going down the ‘not necessary’ road since, again, there are a lot of examples where knowledge didn’t equal a good life. Mainly these perspectives challenge the idea of hard work, since with all the examples of people living well while doing just random, sometimes even crazy, activities, it seems a lot better than spending time learning in school or university.
All in all, this
opinion is mostly focused on the possible bad effect of technology on youth
values, but it’s not all bad. Even the bad can be fixed if we understand that
while the source of influence might be changing, the fundamental values
shouldn’t. While we cannot stop or fix the internet we can try to embrace the
most important values such as hard work, intelligence, honesty and empathy.
Aivaras Grigas
Great insights! The digital age actually makes it harder to find solid values. But I agree, the foundation of the most significant values for us must be honesty, empathy, intelligence, and of course hard work because without it, it is impossible to achieve anything in life. Great blog !
ReplyDeleteThere is a really huge switch in youth values caused by the digital age, and it can be scary at times when you think about it. I think that change in values is inevitable , but it's important to draw your own conclusions and not follow blindly the people you see on the internet.
ReplyDeleteAccurate observations! I feel that nowadays we even have too many influencers and not every of them is worth following because the values they convey to their audience are not appropriate. I think that we can learn the best values from our surroundings, family and friends and not trust what we see on the Internet.
ReplyDeleteThere is the good old phrase - "Don't believe everything you see on the internet". You need to distinguish the real and fake content on the internet, and that requires critical thinking, which we lack more and more as time goes by (which is sad). I also think that the change of values with changing world is inevitable, but for the fundamental values to still be there, the parents of a child should do the job of instilling these values into them from a young age. That's how you raise a person with values and morals. Well done!:)
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