53 GENIUS INTERVIEW Adam Alter
FEED: Do you see screen use as having a substantial impact on society in general? ADAM ALTER: The jury’s out on this question. It’s still too early to know what a child reared on screens will look like as a teen, an adult, a parent, a worker, a retiree and so on. Smartphones haven’t been around long enough for us to have tracked the lives of the original screen generation. The first iPhone was released in 2007, so the very oldest kids in this generation are still teens. If you ask parents and teachers, they’ll tell you that screens are significant liabilities in the classroom and at home. It’s far more difficult to engage children in reading, communicating and slower pursuits when they have the option of returning to a screen, which bombards them with entertainment that asks almost nothing of them. If you were a child and you could choose between reward after
They can be used to deliver educational games, video chats with loved ones who are far away, and valuable news and information. Or they can be used to deliver disinformation, the black holes that are social media platforms and video games that consume hours of our lives. The average person will spend around 15 years of their life staring at a phone. The thing about screens is that, once they contain irresistible content, they’ll ensnare almost anyone. That’s what’s so powerful about this landscape. You don’t need an ‘addictive personality’ to spend hours in front of a smartphone. Whereas some forms of addiction affect only small fringes of the population, screens have captured almost all of us. That doesn’t mean we’re all in grave medical danger as we might be if we were addicted to heroin, but it does mean that we’re losing years of our lives to experiences that make us less happy, leave us socially disconnected and induce considerable regret.
SOME OF THESE BEHAVIOURAL ADDICTIONS HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR DECADES, BUT MOST ARE VERY, VERY NEW
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