‘Let’s sex chat’ those were the words the fifteen
year old law undergraduate typed into the blackberry bold 5 device she held in
her hand on that fateful night.
‘Okay. Send me your nude pics’ the guy on the other
end of the line, probably a thousand miles away, replied.
‘Okay’, she typed in and that spelled Rita’s doom.
This is only one of the instances of the many
problems caused by social networks on our campuses today. In an age driven
ultimately by technology and social media, the youth and teenage population are
not left out in the frenzy. In fact, it seems they are at the crux of it all.
Youth are affected the most by social networks,
whether positively or negatively, and yet the older population seems to have
discovered this only a moment too late.
The campus is another world of its own; a world
where the student is left on his or her own with practically no restraint
whatsoever, hence he or she is free to engage in whatsoever he or she chooses
since one is expected to act maturely once on campus. This freedom has overtime
resulted in almost 30 percent of campus girls dropping out of school due to
unwanted pregnancies, drug use, rape or some sexually transmitted disease and
an almost equal percentage of boys being rusticated for cultism, armed robbery
and the likes and some even losing their lives to these vices.
The easy access to internet facilities nowadays from
mobile phones to iphones, to e-readers and modem devices to wireless devices
have made the World Wide Web one very accessible world of its own. The unending debate about whether the
internet is a blessing or a curse has been on for a long time now, with
different people giving different opinion. Certainly, the internet is a
blessing of this technology age that has come to stay, however the use of it
has definitely been abused.
The social media was originally intended to enable
proper interaction between the global community, making the world a smaller
place than it originally is. However, the social media has been used to
perpetrate a lot of crime from advanced fee fraud to hacking of various sites.
Also, there has been the promotion of sex crimes as well as sexual perversions
on the net. The rise of sex chatting and sex chat rooms as well as pornography
and erotic sites have prevailed over the net, where young campus students are
drawn to various sexual perversions, spending a major chunk of their time on
the internet. The recent trend of campus students uploading nude videos and
nude pictures on youtube, facebook and twitter for no reason at all. Others are
drawn into the snare of transferring their nude pictures unsuspectingly to boys
who proceed to expose them on the social media.
The morality rate of the world is falling at a very
fast pace, if there is any morality left at all. As a result, the youth
population is drawn easily into the morality problem since the average youth
seeks excitement and anything dangerous seems exciting to the youth or the
campus student.
Is there a solution to this problem the social media
has created for the society, where young adults are growing up to be perverted
and crime-stricken adults? The solution lies in the hands of the youth who are
still with some morals in them. The solution lies with the social media itself,
since the youths are so stuck on it, it might as well be a means to save them.
The news media should also be on the constant watch, a watchdog always cautioning
the youths of our society. I understand that the current human rights cry and
the mantra ‘we have the right to our choices’ has changed a lot, but we can
still keep our heads from swirling even in the widening gyre, while things are
falling apart, at least we could still honour our African heritage.
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