The Internet has brought a great many advantages to our daily way of life – but also some challenges.
I recently had a thought about electricity bills and decided to go online and look at mine.
I was shocked to see such a large amount due but then I noticed I had not paid the bill for five months. Oops!
This is due to now getting the bills by email instead of through the post.
When I got a paper bill I put it on my desk to remember to pay it and it would sit there until I did.
Now I get email bills they are not in front of me but somewhere deep in my Outlook inbox, and that is one small disadvantage.
It’s not the same with my phone bill, yes I get it electronically but if I forget to pay it Batelco cuts me off, then I pay it quickly.
However, in general shopping online is a massive advantage.
In the past if you wanted an electronic appliance or something for the boat you had to trail round the shops or chandlers usually with little success, and if you did find it, it would be quite expensive.
Now you can type it into Google or Amazon and find it at a great price and with a couple of clicks have it ordered and shipped straight to you.
I recently wanted a couple of solar battery chargers for the boat and could only find very big and very expensive ones in Bahrain. But I easily found them on Amazon for BD8 each and they arrived within the week.
But the Internet also has problems when you are talking about children.
We have all given our children phones with data packages and so they have the whole world at their fingertips.
When I was a child access to what was happening in the world was restricted to TV news and newspapers and even then only what my parents allowed me to see.
If I had a question about something I had the Children’s Brittanica Encyclopaedia to look it up, and if it wasn’t there then it wasn’t worth knowing.
Now our children have the whole of human knowledge available through Google and Wikipedia and we have no opportunity to censor what they are reading.
At least in Bahrain inappropriate sites are barred, so they cannot get to most of them.
But then I heard my son telling his mate how to install a VPN app to get round these bans.
They are so tech savvy!
The only control I have is that my children know that as a computer programmer I can see all their history, yes even the stuff they think they have deleted, and so they know not to view inappropriate matter.
I worry though about their friends who maybe have parents who do not know how to check their browsing. What are they looking at?
In general though our children do not turn into raving axe murderers but as Manchester found out last week it only takes one.
Jackie@JBeedie.com