TED RöNESANS COLLEGE / 9-E
Digital Citizenship
Lara DERİN
158
Digital citizenship refers to the ability to engage positively , critically and competently in the digital environment . This formation can inform people about a lot of things like how to use social media properly , become aware of internet safety , make people think twice before sharing their personal information , how to become more responsible social media users , cybersecurity and so on . There ’ s no best way to teach digital citizenship at schools . Also there ’ s no direct lesson about being a digital citizen at least in Turkey . No matter how much you ’ re taught about digital citizenship , if you don ’ t want to be a digital citizen then these lessons would make no sense . So , instead of lessons , teachers use a different style to teach which is ‘’ putting some rules ’’. Teachers put some rules while we ’ re working on our projects or research homework like ‘ obligation of putting the references that we used under our project ’ or ‘ prohibition of copying & pasting ’. Furthermore , there ’ s one more term which is related to digital citizenship : digital citizen . So , who is a digital citizen ? Digital citizen is a person using information technology in order to engage in society , politics and government .
Everyone should ask themselves ‘ Am I a good digital citizen ?’. We should be because I think if everyone were to become a digital citizen , then the reliability would reinforce every single social media / internet user . If I ask myself this question , my answer would probably be ‘’ yes ’’. I believe that I always use the internet according to the rules . I never share my personal information on social media , never use unknown or untrustworthy websites , in my homework I always mention the references I have taken and so on . Nevertheless , there ’ re so many people who don ’ t care about digital citizenship , especially in this century . We have to be careful with those people because if we aren ’ t , then they can hack our social media accounts , Gmail addresses or even our credit cards and steal our money . Based on this information , we can clearly observe that digital citizenship is definitely not a harmful thing . So , what about the effects of it ? Do people care about it ? If not , why ? Since the improvements made in the digital world , people have started not to care and use the possibilities of a wide internet network . Because the possibilities are too many and the number of users is also very high , governments cannot control this situation . And these people who use the internet for bad purposes , know that it ’ s hard to catch them and keep doing it . As a result of this situation , a lot of wrong information is spreading all around the internet network and most of the people believe that information or details on websites because it ’ s easy to believe everything we see on the internet is accurate and when we use this information , we don ’ t even think that there is a possibility of us ever using wrong information . Consequently , digital citizenship is a really advantageous thing , and everyone needs to become a digital citizen in order to create an ethical internet usage and mutual trust .