In Indonesia, in February 2011, Police arrested a 19 year old housewife for running a prostitution ring on facebook. Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald.

Dr. James Fletcher, outspoken St. Lucia minister said Small Island states need to keep breast with technology in order to begin address the issues that they will bring. Photo: Carmelita Jameison/VINO

Dr. James Fletcher, who is St. Lucia’s Minister for Public Service, Sustainable Development, Energy, Science and Technology, was at the time delivering the keynote address at the opening of the Islands of the World Conference XII on May 29, 2012, at the Eileen Parsons Auditorium where he spoke extensively and very candidly on the topic of Education, Youth and Society within Small Islands.

The very outspoken Caribbean minister said those who will be viewed as illiterate today are those persons who are stuck in their ways and do not understand to “learn, unlearn some learn and re-learn them.”

Among the many issues that Dr. Fletcher confronted in his presentation was the issue of Facebook and whether or not it is a threat to social cohesion and sustainability.

“Reasons I am bringing out these facts, while you may not be as tuned in to Youtube or as tuned into Facebook, but the younger generation is, their whole lives are on Youtube and Facebook.”

Quoting information sourced from Karl Fisch’s “Shift Happens”, the St. Lucian Minister disclosed that in today’s society, 294 billion email messages are sent per day, of which many are spam and viruses; there are 2.1 billion internet users, 45 percent of those internet users are under age 25; 48 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute, and some 100 billion photos were on Facebook by mid-2011.

Further statistics, he quoted, have revealed that 845 million people in the world are using Facebook and an amazing 10.5 billion minutes are being spent on Facebook every day.

“If Facebook was a country, only India and China will be more populated, Facebook is actually the most populated virtual country in the world.”

and sustainability and pointed out that he has been following the trend on Facebook.

Interestingly, in 2009, Facebook was sighted as the reason for one out of every five divorces in the United Kingdom and in 2010 that number increased to one out of every three. “What God has put together, Facebook is now putting asunder”.

However, he said there is also another sinister side to Facebook, where he learnt of a site on Facebook called “St. Lucia’s sex-hook up, find a sex partner, one night stand, short term or long term”. He said the site has some 20,000 members of mainly young people who are communicating with each other and using Facebook for such purposes and the conversations are quite provocative. He said there has been a big furore in St. Lucia to take the site down and ban it.

For Dr. Fletcher, he said the message to be sent is “responsible use” and it is the role for teachers and parents as educators to educate children about the good and bad in every bit of technology.

“If you have to survive in this environment, based on globalisation and islands adapting to change, the change is taking place at such a rapid rate that we have to keep abreast with it.”

He said policy makers need to put their focus in the right places, in areas that will help their countries to confront the issues of globalisation.

Those areas he said include investment in early childhood education, revamp of the education system, develop an evidence based culture, revisit levels of investment in the social sectors, more targeted investment in youth development where government has to pay more attention to the social sectors, revamp the juvenile justice system, engage in more frank discussions with the young people, and formulate a strategy to address influence of negative popular culture.