Information and communications technology (ICT) is the cause of today’s social ills.

There is a girl who loves to post her beautiful and sweet faces online because she likes when
someone flattered her. But the sky is not always clear and the cloud is not always gloomy, one
stranger took her pictures and crops her charming faces and pastes it on a pornography pictures.
Due to the depression cause by the embarrassment that she felt, she takes a simplest way to run
away from this problem which is by committing a suicide. From this story, we knew that this is the
effect of misusing the internet. Now days, we are living with a life where information and
communication technology, ICT is a necessary. It is now becoming the first component in almost
each and every single activity. However, we should realise that ICT provides tons of network that
gives the permission to accessing anything without any law regarding the use of internet may be
poisoning the youth and slowly corrupting them. I agree that ICT is the cause of today’s social ills
because it may cause addiction, obsession and depression mostly towards the teenagers.

Firstly, ICT can cause addiction to anyone with no age, gender or race. Accessibility that
unlimited for 24 hours a day for the internet turns many people become an addict. For example,
addiction towards online games that causes death. There are several cases in China and South Korea
where young parent busy playing online games until they neglected their new born baby. They did
not feed the baby for a day and lead the baby to death. Besides, ICT causes pornographic addict with
endless access to all sort of pornographic materials and uncontrolled websites. Even young kids
could access this websites with just ticking a certain box to indicate their age. Other than that, with
ICT, gambling is happening with no time. Online gambling makes gambling become easier to those
who are living far from the gambling venues thus it creates more gambling addicts. So, it is obvious
that ICT gives away addiction and this leads to social ills.

Secondly, ICT causes obsession toward celebrities, any kind of entertainer, sportsmen and
public figure. Before ICT was concurred the worldwide, we read about celebrities only in newspaper
or magazine compared to this day where ICT provides more sources. This became worse when ICT
permits and even encourage stalking. Social network like Twitter promotes stalking because a user
can ‘follow’ anyone that they want. Before this, stalking is not announced and not publicly done
because a stalker needs to physically follow a celebrity but now, anyone can stalk anybody, not just
celebrity. In the other hand, lots of people had turned themselves to a fashion victim. Any trend is a
worldwide with ICT, so that causes an obsession to get more outlets even the fashion might not
suitable with the cultural values or weather. Besides, fan forum and groups are created to encourage
obsession where all obsessed fan gather. For example, the teen’s obsession now days toward Justin
Bieber. They spending a lot of money to buy the ‘Beliebers’ merchandise. This causes social ills
because in times, the fanatics might do something illegal such as stealing and cheating to get what
they want. They might neglect their responsibilities in order to fulfil their obsession. It is clear that
ICT provides obsessive behaviour and becoming the reasons to social ills.

Thirdly, ICT do leads to depression. ICT makes people depress by make them feel inferior
and insecure. When some people share their amazing life online, some might jealous, feeling sad
and self-pity to themselves. They might try to overcome their depression by taking drugs, vandalism,
self-harming, starves themselves just to forget their inferiority. Besides, some might suffer from low
self-esteem because nobody likes their post on social media. Before ICT, some might feel that
sometime, but now days, the evidence is for other to see causes greater depression for someone.
Other than that, cyber bullying cause the greater impact in someone’s life because the school bullies
continued even after school hour. Cyber bulling not only happens among the students, it can also
happens even among office worker. This kind of bully is not physical but mostly emotional and
virtual. Rumours are spread much faster and reach more people using ICT makes the victims resort ti
self-destructive behaviour such as hurting them-self. Self-harming is not only about cutting, it can be
starving themselves and cause them to anorexic or bulimic. The worst scenario is when the victims
start to committing a suicide, which there is a lot of cases due to cyber bullying. Cyber bullying
leaves harsh remarks with no time limits. This is the evidence that ICT cause to depression and leasd
to social ills.

In a nutshell, ICT might be the major reasons of today’s social ills. ICT may cause addiction,
obsession and depression that eventually lead to social ills. Undeniable, ICT have its own positive
impact, but we have to be careful with this negatives impacts too. We must make sure that the
negative effect will not overcome the positive effect. Social ills are the public’s concern and we
should take our part to prevent these problems.

Dear Miss Fathiah,

I’m very sorry for the late. I missed the due date and sorry again for the ‘ala kadar’ work. I
hope you have a very nice holiday and selamat hari raya. All good come from Allah and all bad come
from me. Assalamualaikum.