FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Hooked on a good thing

Hooked on a good thing

Fifteen-year-old Marquie Leelatham is a Year 10 Student at Bangkok Patana School and @marquieleelat on Twitter

Heroin addicts, chain smokers and alcoholics seem like ancient artefacts in museums compared to today’s dangerously ill teenagers hooked on the social media. Trolling through your timeline and newsfeed might not give us kids lung cancer or delusional highs, but we’re still addicts. We are clinically infected. 

This monkey has its perks, mind you. Let’s face it, we live in a world that’s plush with technology and throbbing with social media. Even the loneliest nerd has his laptop lapping up someone’s tweets when he’s not mining Wikipedia for the answers to his chemistry homework. And those kids lolling on the lawn outside might be sending him the answers via Facebook. 
Arise from whatever state of denial you’re in and recognise that the social media are now fused into teenage life. They’ve become a sort of Bible we refer to when we’re in hot water and can’t work out the homework riddles. Instead of leafing through torn and frayed books, we flick on our beloved laptops and surf the educational sites on Twitter or maybe hit up that smart friend on Facebook. 
Critics – harsher than me, or perhaps more realistic – will scoff and say that logging on in the name of “homework” usually ends up in an hour of no work, and probably a bunch of failed classes to grapple with over the next term. 
To this I’d probably say that, although procrastination is indeed tempting when you’re lurking on the Web, free knowledge is also there for the grabbing. You don’t actually need to spend a lot of effort to discover what caused World War I. That’s what the educational accounts on Twitter and smart asses on Facebook are for. All you need is an Internet connection and you’re set.
So before you scorn this 21st-century revision in study techniques, before you scold your child for having too many friends on Facebook, take a minute to thank God that your child is addicted to a drug that has more virtues than setbacks. 
I mean, the worst thing this drug can do is to keep your child trolling online for hours. In which case, you know where the power button is, and don’t be afraid to limit the doses. 
But more importantly, don’t be afraid of the drug. Don’t judge it. Just accept it. Cause, hey, these addicts are going to rule the world someday, so don’t antagonise them – you never know when this addiction of theirs is going to cause their sanity to spiral out of control, so you better watch out. 
For this is our future. This is what passes for society.
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