4.11.

2013

Computer Games and the Internet Have a Negative Impact on Young People

Benjamin Ajanovi

Computer Games and the Internet Have a Negative Impact on Young People The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. (Computer processor speed increases at factor of two per year) Certainly over short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not increase. Over long term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. Gordon E. Moore In 1972 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney published Pong, first game for masses. It was run on 2 bit processor and graphics display. That means there were only 2 colors, black and white. Since then game consoles have steadily developed. In 1983 Nintendo, Japanese entratainment company, published Nintendo Entretainment System (NES). It used 8-bit processor and could display 256 different colors. In 1994 Sony PlayStation 1 was released. It was first 32-bit full 3D capable game console. It could show 4.3 billion colors. Since PlayStation 1, games have been developped at steadily increasing rate without major jumps. In 1969 one of the most important breakthroughs in twentieth century happened. Professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Such a small step for a byte, such a huge leap for humanity. Using dial-up network graduate students from Duke University Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea of USENET. Even though these services were quite useful Internet was just in its infancy. Inspired by ARPANET, in 1973 and 1974 Ethernet standard was developed. In order to connect all these standards DARPA funded a project. The result was Internet protocol suite also known as TCP/IP. First TCP/IP device was built at CERN. Because it was used to route internet it was called router. With it it was easy to connect multiple networks together. So the era of Internet began. Because of the development of those technologies, today, people spend whole days with devices which resemble computers. Most of us are always with our smartphones. Some of us spend their time browsing web and social media news feeds while other play video games. Market studies done by eMarketer show that average Joe spends around 3 hours per day browsing the web or social networks and around 1 hour per day playing video games. If we limit the subjects of research from people between 13 and 65 years to people between 13 and 25 results are astonishing. Young people tend to spend around 3 hours playing video games and around 4 hours of active browsing and 7 hours of browsing in total. (Passive browsing is one which is performed during other activities e.g. checking e-mail) Internet truly is an important part in lives of modern day people. We are hugely influenced by Internet and video games. Even though that can be a good thing, many people believe that use of Internet and video games has negative impact on children and young adults. Time is relative. Yes, Einstein originally intended it as a funding principle of Theory of relativity, but it can also be used as foundation for browsing internet and playing video games. Not once have I turned on my computer to check something out for five minutes and finished with it 4 hours later. Time perception, field of study within psychology, named this effect the Kappa effect. By definition the Kappa effect is a form of temporal illusion verifiably by experiment, wherein the temporal duration between a sequence of consecutive stimuli is thought to be relatively longer or shorter than its actual elapsed time, due to the spatial/auditory separation between each consecutive stimuli. If we spend our time browsing the web without actually actively acquiring new knowledge our brain is going to, instead of

reading new data, just pull out old data and adjust its content to the one which matches our sense input (vision). (Same effect happens when we quickly look from left to right. Brain actually doesn't look while we move our eyes. It just simulates what we would have seen if it was looking from past images which we saw earlier.) That causes spatial and auditory and visual separation between stimuli of our brain and thus causes the Kappa effect. Mixed with iresposibility the Kappa effect is a huge Time Thief* (* the word marked with asterix is not in any way related to BBC nor any of its time traveling Sci-fi shows). Eye for an eye, headshot for a headshot, or something like that. Video games of today are getting more and more violent. Because of the increase in graphics processing video game producers are capable of portraying death in such realism that it sometimes confuses people. They don't know if they are watching movie or video game* (Battlefield 3 Trailer). To make things even worse people tend to emotionally invest in characters. Some psychologists believe that this can cause mixing of real world and game world. They think that people transfer their game personality into the real world. So if they are playing violent video games they will, for certain period after playing, have different personality. Their personality will look more similar to the characters. This might be really dangerous for younger audience. While young adults are capable of realizing the context in which violence is portrayed and take it as a warning not to do that, young children might start to imitate their favorite character. Thus instead of learning to avoid ending up as Carl CJ Johnson, they might join a gang. One of the most famous stereotype of a video gamer is man with social interaction problems. Spending too much time browsing and playing video games causes lack of social, face to face contact which causes one kind of social interaction problems. Some psychologists also think that presenting video game players a problem and then showing them that the only solution for it is through violence causes the other social interaction problem. They start to believe that and try to solve most of their problems through violence. One of the worst effect of video games and Internet, probably caused by Time Theft, is academic weakening. Kids and Young Adults don't spend as much time studying as they would without Internet. That directly affects their academic performance. Some even tend to skip classes or not do their homework because of video games. On the other hand Internet and video games, if properly used can have great a effect. While Internet slowes some young adults down in academic sense, it can also provide academic boost for others. Internet websites with exclusive, high-quality educative content are more and more common. In 1999 MIT has published online all of its classes and textbooks by creating MIT OpenCourseWare. Many of the Ivy League universities have followed their footsteps and ten years later they formed edx.org. A website where an individual can, free of charge, attend any of the courses that these universities offer. I have used it multiple times and it was really helpful. Even though it is for academic purpose, I tend to get too much into it and forget about school. So instead of learning psychology I learn nuclear physics thus getting an F on Rorschachs test. Even though social networks are a huge waste of time they are at the same time of real help. With them students can create student groups or class groups in which they can offer each other help, share relevant information and prepare for test cheating together. Some of the social networks are specialized for education (such as Edmodo) which enables students easy way to turn in homework. Also Internet can provide us with important content of political nature. Since Internet is not yet censored enough it is possible to easily hear two

sides of the story (and yet Republicans still loose). In my opinion that is the most important part of the Internet, and it must be kept alive. Most of the arguments for the video games causing violence have proved to be fake. Multiple reasarchs have shown that video games do not increase violence in real life. They say that while dealing with frustrations and aggression we can use video games as an outlet. Also many studies have shown that video games boost self confidence. By beating/gaining levels in certain video game player gets feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. These studies were conducted by Dr. Cheryl Olson at Harvard University. 49% of boys and 25% of girls aged 12 to 14 admitted using violent games such as Grand Theft Auto IV as an outlet for anger. 54% of subjects said that they feel satisfaction when reaching new lever while playing leveling based games such as League of Legends or World of Warcraft. In the end there is no unified answer for this problem. Even though Internet has some negative impact on young people, it is the main shaft of the new era. Young people of today are the leaders of tomorrow. If we do something to forbid them Internet we are actually cutting them off of the only honest media. That way we can only create line of obeying, uneducated people who will follow whatever someone tells them without question. Also Internet, for those who decide not to join the Dark Side, can be of great help. Knowledge of the Internet is limitless. Young person can learn anything on Internet, from setting up webcam to building a low orbit satellite and launch missile. On the other side video games are doing more harm than good. Even though they tend to relieve stress and boost confidence, their impact on academic success of individual is too great. To make things worse, it makes people uneducated and confident. Uneducated man who knows he is a fool is not good, but uneducated man who has self confidence in his skills is bad.