- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 03:52

Guns, cars, weed, laptops

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH GUNS, CARS, weed, laptops. Each of these commodities is perilous if put into undisciplined, untrained or untutored hands. I myself have been a gun user. The 9mm pistol, the .25 mm rifle for indoor ranges, the .762 mm rifle and the SA80, standard British infantry weapons, and the 80 mm mortar. Each weapon possesses its own attributes. Discipline is key. The incessant murder of innocent citizens, the outrageous murder rates, have created blood-thirsty temperaments in some law-abiding citizens. Stereotypes of people deemed home invaders, or looters and pillagers, abound. Not only is proper screening vital, so too is specialised weapons training before issuance. The car is also a killer machine. Murderous speed kills drivers, passengers and innocent commuters. Our roads and road conditions, particularly in this era of extreme weather events, militate against raw speed. Before the former minister of works upped the speed limit on highways to 100 km per hour, I wrote a commentary giving seven reasons why a conservative limit (80-90 kmph) was preferable. The popular will prevailed. The current carnage on our roads is mainly due to speed. Some people use the weed recreationally and seem to get along fine. But some use the herb for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Even if this is not addiction, it is dependence. A close friend felt so cool on the herb that he graduated coolly into cocaine and a cocktail of narcotics. I have had amusing experiences with some users. You tell them to come for 9 am, they come at noon. You ask them to move a log, they circle it like a gamecock and do no more. Proper training too is required in the use of digital technologies. Just as we have maths literacy (numeracy), or reading literacy, we have digital literacy. Let’s imagine we are the fictional student Zahra, a form one student of the Union-Claxton Bay Secondary School. On her brand-new laptop. What might her digital experience, surfing the World Wide Web for information, education, entertainment, her personal well-being be like? Zahra is asked to write an essay on Claxton Bay. Good luck. Who was Claxton? A soldier, sailor, planter, tinker, spy? When and how did the successive wave of cosmopolitan immigrants arrive in this district? Madyo is the name of an abandoned hinterland settlement at Union Village. Is this name Arahuacan, Taino, East Indian, African? And what about the historical economies? The planters, and the cocoa, coconut, coffee, cotton, straggling trees still surviving in Madyo? The famous Forres Park sugar millers and puncheon rum distillers. Who were the owners? The digital superhighway will be of little help to Zahra. Not all information is available on the superhighway. No one might have researched, recorded or uploaded it on the Web. Information from the metropolis, the "centre" of the world is privileged or paid-for, built into hierarchies by creators from these big tech "centres." Even if historical information on Claxton Bay is at the wee bottom of the Web hierarchy, you need creative and complex skills to find it. Additionally, the Web’s black hole of missing, unknown or sidelined subjects makes it imperative to learn your non-Web research skills. Zahra needs to find information on a most pressing issue. The US/Israel/Iran war. If she types in "Israel-Iran," she comes up against a firewall: BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Reuters, AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera (owned by the ambivalent Arab monarchy of Qatar, a US economic and military partner). Does she know she is facing a Western firewall? And how to get through it? To hear views from non-Western sources? Sources from the non-corporate, non-mainstream media generators in the Global South, the Middle East? Or will she simply copy and prattle the firewall’s views as God-given dictum, fact? Continuously, as Zahra surfs the web, fake news comes at her. A "breaking news" story pops up: "Israeli Prime Minister flees to Greece." Will she repost this link? Compulsively? As many adults do. It is very easy to repost information, true or false, that you find compelling. Does Zahra have the skills to verify this information? Where might one go for trusted facts? Does she know? Can Zahra interpret a video promoting a pill for arthritis, by exploiting the AI-generated voice and the real face of an actual medical expert? Would she be able to separate the face from the bogus ad and product? Does she know that, on certain matters, AI is biased in favour of the nation which created its algorithm? Does she know how to circumvent TikTok, Facebook and Google/Yahoo clickbait, pop-up ads, or combat marketing and sexual predators? And finally, does Zahra know where to get factual, authentic, objective information on the Web? On which YouTube videos? On which open-source codes? Do we need more generations of citizens, well schooled in uncritically clicking, cutting, pasting, sharing fake news; digital mimics, satisfied with half-baked efforts to learn and know? Citizens averse to truth and fact-finding? Citizen-clones, infra-red ghouls of global hegemony? Even adults, professionals, experts are fooled, irretrievably duped by digital media. Putting laptops in the hands of children without training in digital literacy, just as putting guns, cars and weed in the wrong hands is perilous. For optimum benefits, Zahra needs to be digitally literate before entering the treacherous traffic of the digital superhighway. This is the job of the school curriculum, on the initiative of the laptop patron. The post Guns, cars, weed, laptops appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.