YOUTH ONLINE BEHAVIOURAL CHALLENGE: Where did we Loose Them?
By Prof. Dr. Halimu Shauri
Email, thecoastnewspaper@gmail.com
There are allegations, insinuations, and innuendos globally suggesting that online youth behaviour is unbecoming, probably uncouth, and against traditional beliefs, values, and practices. Scanning social media platforms, one may claim to have proof.
From X, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Tik Tok and Telegram, any social analyst can pick the misbehaviours such as immorality, disrespect to institutions, the elderly and leadership, bullying, character assassination,.abuse, conflicts, violence, misdemeanours, and criminality. In a nutshell,
“Social media misbehaviour is a whole package of irresponsibility of the physical world transferred and amplified into a virtual world ghost”
While in the physical world, we have structures, traditional, informal, and formal to tame misbehaviour, it seems,
“The world was ill prepared to develop structures fit to tame social media misbehavior.”
Probably, the belief was that the physical structures were enough to also deal with virtual misbehaviour. Alas! Albert Einstein said:
“Insanity is doing things the same way and expects different results”
We must realise that good behaviour is a socialisation outcome. Socialisation has five key agents: the family, peers, religion, education, and media.
However, we seem to have lost our youth alongside the socialisation pathway. While many people are blaming the family for the youth social media misbehavior, they are missing the point. If we have the resolve to modify youth social media behaviour from irresponsible to responsible posts, then
“we need to integrate a Whole-of-Socialization [WoS] approach into the virtual world.”
But, we must agree first that family lost the youth to peers due to the complex nature of modern family and the socialisation process itself. The peers also lost them to the educational institutions, who lost them to religion. While religious institutions were the sole hopeful agents of socialisation for the youth, they threw the towel due to their involvement in politics to the media.
While traditional media, novels, magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, video, had mechanisms to sensors responsibly what to be shared to the public, the entry of unguarded Internet and social media spoilt the behavior molding party and responsible socialisation process. Indeed,
” The uncensored social media has now become the Whole Socialization Framework including the family, peers, school, church and itself into one huge irresponsible socializer”
Be it as it may, family alone can not tame youth misbehavior. If we are genuinely looking to restore youth responsible behavior the answer is in engaging and remodeling all socialization agents and in forming online social control structures to take charge of the reserialization of our youth to become responsible social media users. This is the calculated risk.
By Prof. Dr. Halimu Shauri
Dean & Consultant Sociologist
Pwani University