Have you, the mums and dads, aunties or uncles or even grandparents of today’s children noticed the ant-like attention spans of young children, particularly children who spend a lot of time on the net? And have you also noticed how low their attention span is – for around half an hour to an hour – after they have been on the net? That it seems to take them time to “recover” from the screen gazing, and communication via screen gazing which is becoming as normal a part of their day-to-day lives as our chats once were with the village grocer? That, even more worryingly, in terms of much needed real time communication skills, children today communicate with a screen far more easily than they can with other people?

And are we in Malta, being very proud of doing quite well relative to our European neighbours in the IT readiness stakes, questioning any of this at all?

Or are we prepared, much as we stupidly did with politics and religion in the past, to blindly accept everything about the net as good, and to relegate those who question its over-use to second class or not-as-modern citizens. I suppose it’s another testament to our weak-minded education system, which rewards learning by rote instead of independent thinking and questioning, that we do not question. We moan, sure, but question very little.

Everything we partake of, we partake of club-like. Our religion, our participation at Eurovision, our affinity with reds or blues. Now we can at least even be green, and not only red or blue, but it is the same kind of green that makes us unthinking blues and reds. All loyal, non-questioning, everything about us is right, everything about the others is totally wrong.

A new book out in June, written by one of the former kings of IT, will question learning via the net, will address the self-interestedness and vanity behind much of blogging, and will query how much of a favour we are doing our children. I wonder how well that book will be received here or read with any interest. Just as we close our eyes and ears to what our European neighbours tell us about divorce and abortion, are we prepared to sacrifice ourselves on an IT altar, much as we have done on the altars of religion and politics in the past?

I read recently that 12 out of 13 of the University of London’s IT graduates who obtain a first class degree are Maltese. This is a tremendous achievement. Nobody wants to do without IT but it is merely a tool, one of many essential tools and we are doing our children a great disservice if our education for them is divided between learning and repeating, and using essentially one tool: net use. Where will the ideas come from? How will future politicians think? Some think it can’t get worse than it is but it can.

IT is a good tool, a useful skill but it is limited. IT people often find problems communicating, can often have terrible social lives, and interestingly enough, are apparently the largest group to populate internet chat sites, dating agencies etcetera, perhaps because they cannot meet people in any other way. I don’t think the net is a bad way to meet people, far from it. But it is significant that this group, with their addiction to the transient, overpopulate these kinds of sites.

Now we don’t even need to phone the usual way. We can Skype. And it can be, despite its obvious benefits, very, very dangerous. Skype has 200 million users worldwide and has become a new and very comfortable base for paedophiles. Children who, say, use a Yahoo chat-room come across clear warnings when they register, and their membership is controlled. Skype on the other hand can be downloaded in just a matter of minutes and anyone can phone anyone else, and does. The UK Sunday Times did a short two-week investigation on Skype. Their reporters pretended to be two children aged 10 and 14. They were bombarded with calls from men all over Britain who would try to arrange to meet them to groom them for sex. I know of parents here too who thought their kids were safely chatting on MSN only to hear a man’s voice in their living room, which turned out to be a Skype caller who can come into any of your children’s calls at any time.

Michele Eliott, director of Kidscape, the UK’s child protection group said: “The Sunday Times has not only discovered a loophole, it has uncovered where the paedophiles are going when they are blocked at other places. What’s Skype going to do about it?”

It is scary how little we know, how quickly our kids can upload anything and how prepared and vigilant we must be, and the government should be preparing us to be on all matters relating to the internet. Not only in terms of how to counter overuse, but also because paedophiles do exist on the net.

But we do need to hold our internet horses with our children a little bit, to ensure not only that their internet use is safe, but also that it is not actually harmful to their brain and its still tender development. Trouble is we are all stressed and busy. Stressed trying to earn enough to cope with all the demands of today’s kids, their iPods, their Nintendoes, their Play-

stations, their MP3 players and much else. Tired taking them everywhere, tired of trying to have a social life around their over-full lives. When they spend a few hours on the computer it’s a welcome relief. It is a break.

But it is not all harmless chatting. It is not all, all that good for them. As a nation that purports to love its children we must start questioning at least where all this internet usage is getting us, how we can enjoy it but control it, how we can encourage our children to question it too as they should be questioning everything, how we can nurture our children to be a better generation than we were, taking the good from the net but not making it our third mantra, after politics and religion; mantras which have been, and sadly still are, so destructive of our development as a thinking and innovative nation.

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