The pandemic has made us all into some kind of junky, according to The Guardian newspaper in its interview with the chief of Stanford University’s dual diagnosis addiction clinic, Dr Anna Lembke. She propounds that “our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit…we’re seeing a huge explosion in the numbers of people struggling with minor addictions,”. Tiktok clips can go on and on, and automatically load onto your feed, which makes the possibility of turning this off and doing something else more unlikely for the viewer. Sadly by constantly turning to the smartphone (part of an obsession with instant gratification) we are effectively living in what is termed our “limbic brain”, therefore processing the experience as an emotions, rather than in our pre-frontal cortex, which deals with future planning and problem-solving and is important for personality development. If this is the reaction of a mature adult we need to imagine the effect that a mobile phone with access to unlimited internet sites of all kinds – not to mention social media – a Gogo can have on a child. If, as a society, we do not take steps to manage what a child views and when we could be bringing up children with a serious potential addiction problem. Much has been written on the subject and some of the issues were highlighted in the film, The Social Dilemma. What we have done at Escudo Web is to develop a phone that when linked to a parental device gives the management of access to the internet (and setting black lists in the filter) and all apps on the phone in the hands of the parent on their own device with an app. We have commercialised this in Europe with Blabloo and in Asia with the Geniora phone. We can protect children from this addiction and teach them to use technology responsibly.
#phoneaddiction