Anatoliy Prokhorov is not only the head of Smeshariki project and the chairman of the supervisory board of the Razumniy Internet Foundation, but he is also a culture expert and media researcher. At the “Content 0+” round table organized by the Razumniy Internet Foundation he told about the ways Internet should participate in children’s development.

Suddenly children have become an important part if the society. More and more movies are filmed and more merchandize is produced for the young audience, not mentioning all kinds of computer games. Even business gets oriented towards children. That is why online society has to adapt to the needs of its youngest users.

Prokhorov has mentioned the topic of socialization of modern children, saying that children’s internet is a “streamer of socialization”, meaning the process of involvement of children into the adult life. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was one of the first one to establish the importance of the environment in which one grows up as a defining factor of the difference of culture. Socialization is a key aspect in the development of children. Nowadays the Internet becomes the environment and it is a question what kind of environment it will be. What will “children’s Internet” look like?

Modern people exist in three different environments: physical, social and virtual. And it is vitally important to build an internet environment for children in such a way that intercrossing of these environments would not cause cognitive dissonance. Many parents are afraid of granting access to the web to their children, believing that online reality may become more attractive than the real life. The phenomenon of social networks only fuels these fears: for many pupils internet us limited to social networks. Prokhorov believes that online community can help children to adapt to offline life.

In addition, internet can become an educational environment and the place where children and adults (parents, teachers and educators) may meet each other. In addition to such purely entertaining resources as http://rebzi.ru/ and http://www.tvidi.ru/, many schools, libraries and culture centers have their own websites. Internet also attracts children’s writes who publish their works online.

It is not enough to guard children from undesirable materials. It is important to offer quality and diverse content so that children did not even have the desire to leave it

Prokhorov emphasizes that Internet helps to form a child’s personality, changes the form of modern family life and may help to bring a child back into the family and for many family it is a major problem. Parents often see computers, and particularly the Internet, as an obstacle between them and their children.

The situation can change. For this parents have to stop seeing Internet as a monster which takes childhood away and look at it as an agent and as a friend.

Author: Meline Papikyan

Source: «Razumniy Internet» Foundation