In South Africa, most people have heard of the extremely popular home-grown sms and mobile chat service known as MXit, and if you haven’t by now and you’re a parent (no not of a Yorkshire terrier called ‘Scotty’), then this post is particularly aimed at you.

As MXit continues to grow and prosper and feature in the local press, so too has it started to run into various social problems which have seen it develop a rather infamous reputation amongst the police and parents of teenagers. Unlike a desktop computer connected to the Internet where a whole manner of solutions exist to control or limit a child’s online usage, parents and guardians have very little control when it comes to a personal mobile phone and are often even more ignorant of its capabilities.

For partly this reason, and because of the ability to remain totally anonymous, MXit has become a haven for psychopaths and paedophiles, who are always on the lookout for better ways of targeting unsuspecting victims, especially when 45% of the users fall within the 12-17 age group according to MXit founder creative director Alex Meiring.

In a story that appeared today in the Daily News entitled ‘MXit is great, but don’t be fooled’, the story of a 12-year-old boy who was psychologically scarred by his encounter with a sexual predator alludes to a larger debate around issues surrounding digital culture and hyperreality. But whose responsibility is it to protect children from the nasty underbelly of society and is the existence of sexual predators in chat rooms posing as 13-year-olds the only cause for concern?

To their credit, MXit have agreed to cooperate with police and have helped track down perpetrators who have committed crimes through their network. They have also implemented a number of features to try and make the chat rooms a safer place for teens and have also published a parental advisory for concerned parents. Is this enough? Probably not, but it never is in a digital environment where the boundaries become blurred between the real and the unreal and trust becomes something constructed with something that resembles a Magic 8-Ball.

I happen to know first-hand the antisocial effect of MXit on my girlfriend’s 17-year-old sister who becomes anxious whenever her cellphone leaves her side and even wakes up in the middle of the night to see who is ‘online’ in case she’s missing something big. Do I blame MXit? Of course not, because I don’t believe you should pin a social problem on a technology when education and responsibility should begin at home.

I get very irritated when I hear about parents leaving their kids to their own devices and showing no interest in their social (or unsocial) lives and then flipping their lids and blaming someone or something else when they find out that their little Johnny has developed a ‘problem’ or has been taken advantage of. In fact, what’s stopping schools from introducing ‘Digital Responsibility’ classes or educating learners about the implications of being a teenager in a post-modern society? Perhaps it’s because they would have to accept some form of responsibility and drop things like Physical Education from the curriculum! the tragedy.