Hooked on the message
When Patty Brits discovered that her daughter, Christelle, was spending weekends fiddling with her cellphone, she wondered what was going on. She soon discovered that Christelle was chatting to her friends on MXit Christelle, who attends a prestigious Afrikaans high school in Pretoria, is studying for her matric exams and her mom has become anxious that she is spending too much time playing with MXit and too little time cramming.
“I am concerned because she is spending a lot of time on the phone when she should be doing projects or studying for her matric,” Brits says. “She can spend entire weekends playing on her phone until late at night. Different children come online at different times and she wants to talk to them all. If she watches TV, or if she baths, her phone is open in front of her or in her hand all the time.”
Christelle admits that the service is addictive but says she has it under control. She says she uses the program for between four and six hours a day — in the mornings, in between classes and after school when she’s not studying.
What’s the attraction for Christelle? “It’s cheap!” she says. “And it’s easy to use and I can talk much more than I could if I were using SMS.”
The only downside, she says, is she has to charge her phone’s battery every day.
Christelle has about 30 people in her MXit contact list. She says they’re all mates from school. Only once did someone she didn’t know add her as a contact. “He was friendly but then he got personal and I deleted him.”
Some children in Christelle’s school use MXit’s chatrooms, though most don’t. Christelle doesn’t see the attraction of talking to people she doesn’t know. “Why would I talk to random people when I could just talk to my friends?”
But she concedes some boys at her school, who stay in the hostel, are addicted to the chatrooms and are sometimes still logged in to MXit at 3am.
This type of addiction, along with perceptions that pornography and explicit language is part of MXit’s offering, had some parents around SA complaining to the media about the company.
MXit MD Herman Heunis admits that the service has become a big concern for schools. He has held talks with a number of principals to try to find a solution.
He says MXit has gone to great lengths to ensure that the service is not a hotbed of filth. “The majority of our chatrooms have profanity filters.” He has threatened to sue certain publications for airing allegations that MXit is a source of porn.
The FM — which has been testing the product for a month — has found no evidence of any adult material on MXit, though a few of the chatrooms don’t censor profanities. Person-to-person communication is also not filtered. Heunis points out that doing so would be the same as trying to censor everyday conversation.
The main problem with MXit seems to be related to addiction. But, asks Heunis, “are they addicted to the tool or are they addicted to communication? That’s the point. If I have a girlfriend and I am 17 years old and this is the only way I can speak to her, am I addicted to MXit or am I addicted to her?”
Part of the problem is that parents don’t understand the technology and what their children are doing with it.
“Even we who work in technology sometimes battle to keep up,” Heunis says. “Children are extremely tech-savvy.”
Cellular service providers are receiving hundreds of calls every day from parents demanding that their children’s access to MXit be barred. The service providers comply by severing access to all Internet services from their children’s phones.
In extreme cases, some schools have also banned the use of cellphones during school hours after children were found chatting in class on MXit, their cellphones hidden under their desks. Some apparently even use the service to cheat in tests and exams.
Teachers confiscate cellphones but parents often complain and the schools are forced to return them.
Heunis implores parents to play a firmer role in ensuring their children don’t abuse MXit. Taking away their cellphone is not an option as they need it for security. But parents should enforce limits on its use.
“I’m a parent. If my child is spending six hours a day on MXit, something is wrong. How can you allow that? It’s like allowing your child to watch TV for 12 hours a day and not do any sport.”
Inet-Bridge
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