By Caroline Binley

Opinion Editor

Anyone who’s lived in the age of the internet has been warned about its dangers.

No, I’m not talking about creepy old men who live in their basements and dream about offering us candy, or anything remotely close to that. I mean the dangers we pose to ourselves once we get trapped in the internet’s webs (yes, I did just make an awful interwebz pun, deal with it).

Once we start using the internet, we’re all bound to turn into fat, lazy couch potatoes who can’t do anything about our problems other than google them. We’ll ruin our eyesight and our minds, and we’ll forget the outside world in favor of doing absolutely nothing all day, right?

Well, no. There are tiny bits of merit to those claims — my eyesight is awful, and I do waste a lot of time — but a lot of people (well, bitter old people with unhealthy attachments to the idea of books being made of paper) ignore the good that the internet has to offer.

First of all, wasting time isn’t a crime in itself. If I wasn’t spending time here, I’d just be off doing something else, like drawing or reading. Out of the choices at hand, everyone acts like books and art are so much better options. Why? Not because they’re more interesting or better for your eyesight or even — dare I say it — more educational. No, they just don’t involve technology.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with books, or board games, or whatever else we’re supposed to do that doesn’t involve electricity, but there’s nothing wrong with things that are more technologically advanced either.

The internet can still be used for good things. We can read on it, we can make friends on it (I swear, they won’t be stalkers), and YouTube’s probably more helpful than most of my actual teachers.

Whether we mean to find these opportunities or not, the internet presents us with constant chances to learn. Not all of it is useful or meaningful, but it’s there. We learn things on our cell phones or laptops that we would never know from other experiences. Even good old fashion books can’t always compare to the amount of knowledge we absorb from clicking away.

Of course, everything is better in moderation, but there are much worse things that kids could get too much of than time in front of a computer screen.