What if children copied our online behaviour?

A Kenyan man has become an overnight villain after a screenshot of his toe-curling, sexually explicit message, which he had sent to a wrong WhatsApp group, went viral. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • More importantly, though, is our online behaviour as parents or guardians worth emulating by our children? Children do not focus on what we say, they focus on what we do.
  • The Internet is an open portal where they can also access our Internet activity by a simple click of a button.

Ari Spool, a writer for Know Your Meme, a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena, says “Death by meme is the worst way to go. Your comical, retweetable downfall is instantly archived for the world's convenient future access.”

Meme (pronounced meem) is an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet.

No doubt everyone on the Kenyan social media scene has heard of Brother Ocholla of the infamous wrongly sent flirtatious WhatsApp message by now. The resulting memes were yesterday a source of great entertainment on Twitter and Facebook.

The popular phrase “The internet never forgets” must ring very true for Brother Ocholla at this very minute. Internet memes leave an imprint in the media through which they disseminate that renders them traceable and analysable.

People have increasingly taken to the Internet and created memes that have escalated into viral forms of cyberbullying. Have we become cyberbullies?

More importantly, though, is our online behaviour as parents or guardians worth emulating by our children? Children do not focus on what we say, they focus on what we do. The Internet is an open portal where they can also access our Internet activity by a simple click of a button.

Among children, boys and girls tend to bully in different ways. Teenage girls are more likely to use exclusion from friendships, rumours and gossip while boys – although they do indulge in these things – are more likely to punch and kick their victims than girls and to use intimidation.

Girls are the main perpetrators of cyberbullying and also on the receiving end of most text message abuse and insulting memes. Girls by nature often share secrets and, when they disagree, they can use the same against each other.

It is therefore imperative that we learn to teach our children the actions and consequences of Internet use by also observing the same.

The writer is the founder of Simba-Safe Kenya, a Personal Safety Education Programme (PSE) for children.