On the evening of September 1st this year, I attended the first parents' meeting at my child's new school. At the meeting, the head teacher particularly emphasized that children should not be allowed to surf the Internet from Monday to Friday, and it would be best if adults could accompany them online during the weekends. I believe that this requirement put forth by the teacher is correct. It's not a bad thing for children to want to go online or know how to use the Internet; the key is that adults should accompany and supervise them, and not let the children go online alone.
During this summer vacation, I once saw several half-grown children in my rural hometown picking peppers from their own gardens and selling them in town, then using the money to go online. There are quite a few children in the rural areas of Guangxi who secretly go online without telling their families. The operation of rural internet cafes is extremely irregular (thus some people call them "black internet cafes"), allowing children to go online without any supervision from guardians. This is a very serious issue because among the minors in rural areas who go online, many are left-behind children far away from their parents. Their grandparents basically do not use the internet, and some don't even know what the network is. Thus, in rural areas, the norms for internet use and the moral, ethical, and legal standards in the virtual world of the internet are almost non-existent. If going online can also be considered a form of "cultural construction," then in this aspect, the cultural construction in rural areas can be said to be completed by undiscerning little kids with no adult participation. The rural network culture built under such primitive conditions is bound to be chaotic, distorted, and grotesque, and its influence on this generation of people in the countryside can be said to be extremely harmful.
As a middle school teacher, since I started teaching, I have always paid close attention to the issue of minors going online. Years of observation have made me realize: the internet is also an important educational platform, and this platform urgently needs to be occupied by teachers. However, most older education workers are relatively unfamiliar with the new phenomenon of the internet, and various levels of education administrative departments have not given forward-looking instructions regarding internet culture construction. Therefore, many schools tend to adopt a "block" approach in preventing students from going online in disorder, often issuing orders prohibiting students from going out to use the internet, while ignoring the occupation of the internet platform and the standardization construction of minors' internet usage order. But when mobile phones can also access the internet, many primary and secondary schools find it impossible to block. In the Tieba forums of several high schools in Guangxi that I closely follow, some posts made by mobile phone users are vulgar beyond description, which is another urgent proof that the internet world needs regulation. For this reason, I have written articles in print media urging educators to occupy the internet platform as much as possible and build a positive and healthy campus network culture, welcoming minors to go online with a healthy, orderly, and standardized network. Although my words carry little weight and the appeal has not yet attracted the attention of relevant local departments, at least guiding my own child to use the internet in a standardized way is within my ability, and in this aspect, I have indeed substantially achieved making the child use the internet in a standardized manner.
My son is six years old this year and is in the first grade, but his "internet age" has already exceeded three years. I feel that instead of letting the child explore the beauty and risks of the internet himself, it might be better to directly tell him: the internet is beautiful. When my son was two years old, I started taking him online, teaching him how to download and play cartoons. At three years old, the little guy became fond of photography. I uploaded some of the better pictures he took online, and he was delighted to see the praise from netizens about these pictures. Later, one of them was published alongside one of my essays in the city newspaper, and I used the royalties to buy a Transformers DVD that he liked. At four years old, the little guy taught himself to start playing online games. I required that his total daily game time should not exceed one hour. This summer, the little guy began to clamor about learning how to type, saying he wanted to write a letter to Jumping Dragon from CCTV's Children's Channel. So, I taught him the Wubi input method. Currently, he can only type his name and the name of his school, and he does so by rote memorization of the keyboard, but he is very excited about the prospect of communicating with Jumping Dragon online.
To be honest, I don't know what kind of netizen this little guy will become in the future, but at least before his mind matures, his internet activities are standardized and civilized. We should try our best to include children's internet activities in a guided and supervised normalization track as early as possible.
Everyone knows that he withdrew from the entertainment industry in 2001, and I myself don't know the reason why, but everyone has their most basic right - to do what they want and is legally allowed. In 2003, he made a comeback. His persistence and dedication have achieved his musical dreams.
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