High internet 'illiteracy' in Kenya worrying

So much has the Internet technology become part of us that there is talk of a future where artificial intelligence will take over our lives and colonise us. This future is now called 'technological singularity'.

The Internet is perhaps the most formidable information processing system ever invented. Its sheer influence in our lives requires that we equip our children with skills on sieving through the colossal amount of information and sorting it out.

Information sorting skills are made even more urgent by the rise of the social media as the dominant mode of communication.

There is a rising generation that no longer talks or calls. They text and forward images by default through the social media. I fear that future generations will be functionally deaf and mute.

Yet we are not preparing our children to deal with the reality of the Internet and information technology in general. In Africa, we still think it is a new mark of sophistication. Yet it is sweeping the continent like a wave.

In the Internet jungle lurks great danger. The spectre of young minds bombarded with humongous amounts of free, unsorted information is real.

I am un-ware of any school in Kenya offering courses on sorting, analysing and categorising information from the Internet. I mean not just the technical skills on mining out information from the web sites.

Children need skills to enable them to separate what is important and what is not, what is trash and what has substance, sense and nonsense. How to tell fraud, etcetera. As it is now, most of us, adults and children take whatever is from the Internet as gospel truth.

The consequences of swallowing information uncritically are already with us.

I remember a young woman's near heart attack shock after viewing a South African advert showing a young woman being 'grabbed' by a crocodile much to the 'horror' of her friends. The clip was widely circulated through WhatsApp in Kenya.

This was of course a performance to advertise a leather handbag.
I know of someone whose soul is perpetually tormented. He regularly updates himself on end of the world literature. The fellow has the latest information on the Apocalypse.
He is very sane but he knows more about the Judgement Day from Internet sites than the average Joe.

'It is all in the Internet,' he says. He epitomises the young generation. The Internet, rightly so has replaced the newspaper hard copy, radio and TV set, as sources of information, much to the anguish of journalists and media houses.

Old folks relied on simple, trusted but thoroughly vetted sources of information. In the past you knew where to go for the factual information, rumour or guesswork.

During the recent CORD demonstrations, a message was spread in WhatsApp, claiming how someone is 'poisoning only Kikuyus' at a popular middle class nyama choma place along the eastern by pass.

My suggestion that this could be a hoax or business rivalry was quickly dismissed. 'Better be safe than regret later' said a colleague, a PhD holder no less.A friend of mine smashed her microwave oven and condemned it with a shrieking 'shidwe'.

Apparently, she had read something in the Internet associating the gadgets with cancer. Attempts to tell her about things like ionising radiation (that alters the structure of food) and non-ionising radiation (that just heats food, which microwaves use) was blithely dismissed. 'Just read it all in the Internet...' she said.

This world teems with broken hearts and bankrupted people who swallowed everything they read on the Internet.

From the Internet you can get all you want. Good and bad. Julius Yego trained from the Internet. You can learn the basics of jumbo jet piloting through YouTube or how to play a music instrument as I do.

But there is also information on how to make bombs or the best ways to commit suicide. My point is that whatever information one seeks out, it should be the correct information.

There is of course correct but dangerous information especially for children in formative ages. That is a different matter. The problem is that many people are overwhelmed and are not equipped to sort out information. It is even more perilous that everything is now on the fingertips literally, through phones, watches and soon, walls!

There is need to have core courses in the curriculum that equip students on knowing what to eat and what to through away as they say where I come from.

Some countries in the West have courses in primary schools meant to train pupils on how to deal with the advertisements din.

Universities have core courses in sociology and anthropology of the Internet. The objective of these is to teach student to analyse content from the Internet. Students learn about what sites to trust and which not to.