The Window to Hell: Children and the Internet

In the windows of the internet all the horrors of the world can be revealed.

In 1805 Ludwig Van Beethoven, the great composer, was looking out of the window from his apartment in Vienna Austria when he saw a sight that broke his heart.

In the street soldiers of the French army were marching up the road, rifles over their shoulders with attached bayonets like the thousand spikes of a huge porcupine. The month before Napoleon Bonaparte had routed both the Austrian and the Russian armies while their Emperors looked on in amazement.

Beethoven who had once, dedicated one of his greatest symphonies to Napoleon, thinking him a liberator of the common man, now saw him for what he was, a savage dictator.

As long as there have been windows people have been looking out of them and seeing horrible things. In recent times the people of Kyiv in Ukraine and the people of Gaza look out of their windows to see their people mutilated by bombs and their buildings destroyed.

For thousands of years, people have been looking out of their windows to see terrible events. In Herculaneum during the Roman Empire, the people of the city could see the ash and dust of Mt. Vesuvius billowing down the mountainside to engulf and smother them.

Millions of people have been looking out of their windows for many centuries seeing things they wish they had never witnessed.

Given the choice, what family would voluntarily install in their house, the windows of Gaza or the windows of Herculaneum so that all of them, children included, could see the horrors of violent conflict, the bloody results of natural catastrophe.

And yet all around us, in every house and every family, such windows are installed. These windows show much more than just the results of catastrophic events. They are the windows of Fellini’s Satyricon, a movie of graphic sexual excess, or Suspiria, the story of horrible witches that smash windows as people look out dragging them into the darkness and tearing them apart.

We choose to install these windows obliging our children to look out at the terrible world beyond, freely, and available day and night at any time over the twenty-four-hour period.

We expose them to much more than this; weird repetitive music, violent games employing high-powered weapons, and hideously disturbed people urging them to kill themselves.

Sometimes the disturbed people are familiar to them, bullies from school or covens of their classmates humiliating them and excluding them while telling them to cut themselves.  In years past we could never imagine such things would be tolerated. Now they are commonplace.

Cellular phones, iPads, and hand-held computer devices do much more harm than merely exposing children to unacceptable things. They not only indoctrinate the young to see perverse pornography as normal so that now 25 % of all child sexual abuse is perpetrated by children under the age of 18, but the young are also brainwashed to see the world as one filled with conspiracies, devoid of science without careful reflection.

It is as though their brains have become dumping grounds for explanations of the world that are absurd and implausible and, often, inherently self-contradictory.

Every household now has a number of these “windows” and throughout the day at every spare moment, adults and children stare fixedly at them so that they totally replace private discourse but, not just in the home, also on buses, trains, and even cafes where tables are surrounded by the young holding them like sacred breviaries.

When out in public with their children, parents will thrust a handheld device onto their children insisting they look at the instrument rather than make a noise or ask questions. And what are the children staring at? Is it violent or perverse? The parents neither know nor care so long as their children stop talking to them.

What has this done to the minds of the young who have now become inseparable from their private windows? Once upon a time, information came to them quietly and steadily in the form of books.

Each child, in reading, had to use their imagination to make sense of the world of words and convert them into images and stories.  The exercise of having to do this, using books and the printed pages they turned silently in their rooms at night or in classrooms while teachers oversaw a process of education, led to the growth of their minds and fed their imaginations.

As they grew older the books became more detailed, more learned, and complicated, and, as they did, so did the minds of the children who read them.

Now information comes to the child’s mind hyper-charged and unregulated. There is no guidance and there is no way to separate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, good from evil.

 Images are presented rapidly to the eye sometimes accompanied by loud discordant music. Violent games in which the viewer manipulates rifles or canon that blow lifelike figures apart are interspersed with movies of sexual acts often bizarre and unnatural involving scantily clad or naked figures performing perverse acts of sex which, in the real world, would be illegal.

These things do not stimulate the imagination, they destroy it and confirm the saying, “Nothing is left to the imagination”.

Society before the internet never envisaged what was to come and how much damage would be inflicted on children. Had families been warned about these windows of horror their children would carry around with them, they would have done everything to prevent it but slowly and insidiously these windows have crept into our lives and taken over almost everything we do.

Corrupt and greedy people who have made themselves rich from these devices offered them as a new world of convenience and personal education. Instead, they have swamped the world with environmentally destructive consumerism and destroyed education in the young who can no longer read or add up.

Now the same people who chained us to handheld devices are going one step further to inflict artificial intelligence (AI) on society and schools are the first place its ill effects will be felt.

Children are stupidly informed that they will be able to use AI to sensibly enhance their schoolwork. This will mean that teachers will be presented with perfectly written assignments by students unable to comprehend what they have written.

There is pushback now against all this and, as usual, it comes from more enlightened societies of Europe, the French and the Scandinavians.

  Based on doctors' advice, the center-right government wants to reduce the amount of time students spend in front of screens and bring textbooks back into the classroom.

 This is a report from Le Monde, a periodical of Paris, from May 2023 but is now being replicated in every major newspaper in the world.

The Swedish Minister of Education Lotta Edholm

expressed her annoyance at the "uncritical attitude that casually considers digitalization to be positive, regardless of content," leading to the "sidelining" of the textbook, which she said had "advantages that no tablet can replace."

More and more research is showing that mobile devices are not simply interfering with the emotional development and education of children, they are actively damaging their brains.

One such example is reported in Medicine-net by Dr. Jasmine Shaikh where a review of the evidence by the lead author refers to more and more studies showing adverse effects on the brain and mental health of young children caused by digital devices.

Not only this but in parts of Asia excessive computer use and excessive amounts of in-door time are causing very high rates of myopia in children.

Overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder with Hyperactivity (ADHD) is now known to be attributable to excessive use of mobile devices as reported this year by the Cleveland Clinic, in America reviewing many other studies and reporting their own research.

Knowing all this, seeing it all around us, why are we not closing these “windows” and taking them out of our houses and out of the hands of the children exposed to them?  After all, evidence of damage, psychological, moral, and even neurological seems overwhelming.   

As with most modern human activity motives can be reduced to money and laziness, the need for convenience, convenience in shopping, accessing videos, and communication.  Large corporations make billions of dollars from selling these devices and push strongly against any kind of restriction. In our determination to rely on our mobile devices to talk to each other, to meet up, to write to each other, to watch videos, play games, we have sacrificed our children and damaged them physically and psychologically.

There are many examples in society of things that are patently harmful to human beings and our environment that we refuse to abandon despite this. Examples are endless such as body-contact sports, kickboxing, formula 8 car racing, cats, plastic, sugar, and so on. It is no wonder that we seem to have an endless capacity to ignore the dangers of harmful things in daily life, but we should at least expect, when it comes to our children, and their education, we would draw a line somewhere.