You might get confused with the wordings I put there as the
title of the article. It's pretty simple. Why we want to digitize everything
around us? One can say that is for making our work much easier or some might
say to connect with everything so fast. There are so many answers can be out
there for this question.
But it’s true and I also admit that with this digital evolution
people do get connected much further and also it has become a bridge to the
people who live far away from their loved ones and not only that, it has become
a media to reconnect with your childhood friends that you haven’t been touched
with so long.
I’m writing this article not to highlight the benefits of
the digitization. It’s a known fact that it has provided so many
opportunities to the community, the society. Even though this evolution started
to happen few decades ago, the effect on it transferred to Sri Lanka in a
slowly manner. But right now the youth generation in Sri Lanka is very much
digitally literate I must say. I admit that there’s an inequity but with the
rapid growth of digital infrastructures and technology solutions it will cover
up most of the parts in the country.
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The young generation is so much into it but what about the
parents? Are they digitally literate as same as their children? This is where
the issue begins. Even millennial parents are not that much into this digital transformation.
So with that it will create a huge gap between the parent and the kid. Even
this gap can be created in a family where the kid is much more educated than
his or her parents. Because the kid thinks that since his or her parents are
not educated enough they have no idea about what he and she has gone through or
else they think about it as a humiliation.
Same thing happens with the kids who have digital illiterate
parents. Even though their parents are educated now most of the kids think that
they are just a bunch of stupid people who have no idea about what exactly
happening around the world because they are not active in web surface. So even
when they are educate enough they think that their parents don’t know what
these kids are going through.
With this mindset it is kind of difficult to tackle some
social matters of these young people. With their digital life they lose one of
the best human qualities which is empathy. I don’t agree to the fact that being digitize will destroy the human qualities, but without proper guidance that
can easily be happened. People do live in a virtual world and they really love
to live inside that because they can behave whatever the way they want as they
ever dream of. Everything is possible there. Even you can virtually kill a
person. And since you are directly working with a machine to communicate with
another human being, you have no idea what that person really think and feel
about you sometimes. So these young minds lose the human touch little by little
and when they hit by a huge emotional attack they just get confused. They don’t
know what they should do and for them, it’s really hard to handle. And at the
same time they think they are the only living creatures in this world who has
gone through such an experience. They don’t really have a good friend to talk
to even though they have thousands and thousands of friends in their Facebook,
Twitter or whatsoever social media network. Even they are reluctant to express
what they feel to their parents because they think they don’t have such an
exposure about life since they have no idea about the world like these kids do have.
They measure that with the digital literacy rate of their parents.
This is something which can be a direct impact to higher
suicide rate in Sri Lanka. Young minds get depressed and then they jumped in to
quick easy decisions since they cannot handle complex feelings they have. Even
they are not seeking help from their parents and parents even don’t know how to
help them since they also kind of in a situation where they cannot figure out
how they can get close their kid as the way kid want. So this barrier has to be
eliminated.
One of the best things we can do is to educate parents on how they should deal with digital literate kids. And also if we can pitch parents segment at the same time we educate kids about these technologies then that would be a win-win situation. There are so many initiatives happening around the country to educate kids on coding, robotics, IoTs and lot more and this really a good thing. And also it’s glad to see such initiatives has become popular in the country. But at the same time if we can address this issue we have between parents and kids then I do believe we can create a future workforce who will not only be intelligent but a strong workforce emotionally as well as spiritually rich.
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