Consumer of Information and News

As a consumer of information and news, how did the world shaped me? Everyone grows up having freedom and restrictions and having to abide certain rules and regulations whether is it from family, religion, society and what not.

Most kids I know grew up watching children shows like Barney the purple dinosaur, Teletubbies, Sesame Street and what not. I on the other just watched cartoon shows like Kim Possible and Totally Spies and other shows and anime on Disney Channel and Animax. I didn’t even know what Barney is until I was the age of 16 and it is no joke. I was actually allowed to watch anything I want because my parents is seldom home to monitor what I watch on the television and worse they don’t even know what I did during the day when they aren’t home.

At the age of 9 I already have my very own desktop PC and a mobile phone. Back then, having a mobile phone at that age is quite pointless. All I ever do with it was call up my parents to pick me up after tuition classes and extra curriculum activities in school. None of my friends had the pleasure of owning a mobile phone for me to send them text messages. The games in the mobile phone was not even interesting enough for me to play after trying it the first time.

I’m not so sure that I got my own desktop PC when I was 9. Maybe it was before that but my point is that I’ve been exposed to the net since I was young. It is because that my parents hardly ever allow me to go out whether is it to hang out with my friends or just going to the playground. Other than going to school and tuition, all I ever do is stay home to do whatever I want.

My father is a white-collar worker, therefore he only knows how to use software such as Microsoft Office and other similar software for work purposes and Internet Explorer to check his mail and to search for information online. My mother on the other hand, is totally computer illiterate. They hardly even know what is an anti virus for them to set up a parental filter to filter my siblings and I from the net and therefore having no control whatsoever on the sites that we have access to and the games we play on the computer , online or offline. Not that I had the intention to visit sites that was inappropriate for kids my age but sometimes we have no control over things such as the pop-up sites and the links that redirects to some other sites.

In a way, up till the middle of secondary school, I had been somewhat of an anti-social kid until my parents finally gave me a little more freedom to hang out with my friends. However, the advantage from it is that I’m a little more computer literate compared to a lot of people and one can really learn a bunch from online games.