The year was 2011. We had a \u201ccomputer lab\u201d period twice every week for 45 minutes each. Our excitement at being able to surf the internet for those two periods and sneakily check Bollywood gossip when the teacher was looking away is now part of a bygone era of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The internet used to be a place. A place where we visited. Even a decade ago, it was a designated space where people logged in to complete their projects or other work-related tasks, maybe watch Youtube videos or play games for a while, and then move on with the rest of their day. There was a clear boundary separating the internet from the \u201creal world,\u201d like our computer labs in school, spaces we entered briefly and exited as soon as the period ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over time, that boundary has dissolved. The door has vanished, the lines have blurred, and we no longer just visit the internet, we live there. How we consume the internet has changed and so has how much (mis)information we consume. We no longer have to wait to scroll through something we are curious about, but how do we know what we are seeing is real? How do we know what we are reading is not something the algorithm is feeding us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us go back to the computer lab in my school again. One such computer lab period when a classmate of mine was caught trying to look up what \u201csex\u201d meant by a teacher, her parents were called, and she was suspended. No explanation. No conversation as to why a Class 8 girl was so curious about it and what she wanted to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my neighbourhood in the same year, a friend of mine was slapped when he tried to look up why women bleed every month. Again, same story in loop. No explanation was given, no conversation was had about what he wanted to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Times have changed and we have come a long way in terms of access to information. Young people curious about anything can now just look it up on the smartphones they carry around and escape the wrath of being caught by teachers in school computer labs and parents back home on their desktops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But why are young people still hiding from adults to seek such information online even before asking adults? Most of us know that they might not even be getting the right information, or are often receiving distorted views on sexual health through people who might not be licensed to talk about such issues online. This can adversely affect young people\u2019s perspectives about sexuality and relationships. Why are we then still ashamed to talk about these issues with our teens?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The stigma and shame around sexual and reproductive health prevents adults from having real conversations and the same stigma pushes young people to seek information online without knowing what the guardrails are or what the best way is to seek such information online. Being chronically online after all often doesn\u2019t always equate with being digitally literate, especially in a country like India where \u201csexuality education\u201d are the forbidden words one must not utter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What we often fail to understand as adults is that access to online information does not always signify access to accurate information. This is the gap into which young people might often fall if our first response is to impose restrictions veiled as protection rather than having honest conversations with them about the things that they are curious about, be it something as sensitive and complicated as sexual and reproductive rights or something as simple as them wanting to join a dance class they saw online. The SCREEN (Student Cyber Resilience Education and Empowerment Nationwide) survey report<\/a> launched by Young Leaders for Active Citizenship (YLAC)<\/a> earlier this year has highlighted that the most common parental mediation approach is restriction. Over half of respondents (57.8%) for a survey which we ran with young people stated that their parents ask them not to use the internet most of the time. In this survey we had 4000 respondents aged 13 to 30 years from across 20 states, with the majority of responses coming from rural Rajasthan and Delhi NCR. The report touches upon several significant aspects of young people\u2019s online lives ranging from access and usage patterns to gendered angles of how young people were feeling online and what affected them the most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mainstreaming sexuality education might still be a long journey in itself when we haven\u2019t even gotten comfortable with discussing body-image issues and guiding young people to feel comfortable in their own skin. More often than not, negative social comparison emerges as the most commonly reported problematic digital experiences among young Indians. Our research reveals that over 30% of the people aged between 13 to 30 report comparing their life or body to others online and feeling worse as a result. Nearly one in four young people report content-related distress, reflecting everyday pressures like social comparison, exclusion, or performance expectations online. This shows that digital wellbeing isn\u2019t shaped only by extreme incidents, but also by subtle, cumulative experiences, highlighting how young people experience, internalise, and navigate the online world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s interesting to observe is that despite going through such experiences online, young people don\u2019t often turn to their teachers or parents for support. In fact, in the conversations which I have had with most young people during our field visits to schools also brought to light the fact that students hardly treated their parents or teachers as the primary sources of support if something went wrong in their digital lives, or if they wanted any information about anything they were curious about but thought their elders might not approve of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the question which we need to address then becomes not just \u201cHow do we keep our teens safe online?\u201d but \u201cWhat kind of digital world do we want to build for them and what role do we each play in shaping it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some of us, the internet might still be a place we remember visiting and also leaving at designated places which is why our first thought often becomes about safety and how to reduce the time one spends on the internet. However, most young people growing up today have never known a world without the internet. They have grown up on the internet and grown with it. For them, the internet isn\u2019t a separate space or a tool; it is embedded into how they form relationships, express themselves, access information, and understand the world around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building a trust-based relationship with young people to understand how they are using technology is necessary if we are to truly understand what they are seeking online. For both parents and educators, there needs to be a shift from surveillance to trust. Over-monitoring can often lead to secrecy, whereas open, non-judgmental environments make it easier for young people to reach out when something goes wrong. For parents, this can look like co-learning, taking an interest in the platforms, creators, and spaces young people engage with. For educators, it means embedding digital wellbeing into everyday classroom conversations, rather than treating it as a one-off topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also another aspect that parents and educators can think about which is normalising the idea that young people can come across information and content that might not be appropriate for them. The solution then is to not strip them of their right to access the internet but rather to make them aware that everything that they see might not be meant for them, and everything that they engage with may not be in their best interests. Framing these moments not as a reason for yet another punishment, but as an opportunity to learn and unlearn can bring them closer to enhancing their digital wellbeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Acknowledgement:<\/strong> Putting my writings out there has never come easily to me, but the unconditional support and sharp minds of Himani Chouhan, Shubhra Jha, Jayashankar Vengathattil, Venika Menon, and Anvita Parmar made this piece possible.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image by Lu\u00eds Perdig\u00e3o<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We no longer just visit the internet, we live there. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":621,"featured_media":29592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5450,8],"tags":[503,5180,5531,5497,5533,5498,5532,5535,3921,4304,35,408,5534,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-29591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-information-and-sexuality","8":"category-voices","9":"tag-body-image","10":"tag-digital-literacy","11":"tag-digital-wellbeing","12":"tag-information-and-sexuality","13":"tag-internet-and-young-people","14":"tag-misinformation","15":"tag-parents-and-adolescents","16":"tag-screen-survey","17":"tag-sexual-and-reproductive-health","18":"tag-sexuality-educators","19":"tag-social-media","20":"tag-srhr","21":"tag-trust-and-communication","22":"tag-young-people"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29593,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29591\/revisions\/29593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}