How was school today? "Boring!"

Jenny McCartney writes in Spectator,

...There is one group of parents, however, who restrict their children’s use of technology ruthlessly, so keenly are they aware of its potential for distraction and damage. They are the titans of tech, the very people whose job it is to develop and popularise these devices in the first place. Bill Gates, the principal founder of Microsoft, has said he banned his three children from owning a mobile phone until they were 14, excluded ‘tech’ from meal times and restricted its use before bed. His wife Melinda, a former Microsoft executive, said last year that if she could rewind the clock she would have held out further against smartphones: ‘I probably would have waited longer before putting a computer in my children’s pockets.’

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook — who left the company in 2005 — said last year that he had become ‘something of a conscientious objector’ against social platforms. The original thought process behind social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, he said, was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.’ The aim, Parker said, was to create ‘a social validation feedback loop’ that ‘exploits a vulnerability in human psychology’.

...The great and terrifying feat of the internet, delivered through its portable devices, is that it has virtually eliminated boredom. Through it you can access a taste of almost everything, from all over the world — music, history, news, politics, pornography, films, facts, lies and arguments. Many things flow from this digital cornucopia, including fascination, education, self-affirmation, delusion, competitiveness, insecurity, anxiety, outrage, vitriol, insomnia and depression, but rarely boredom. Yet for children it is boredom, not necessity, which has so often been the mother of invention.

...In the US, Dr Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has dubbed the post-millennial generation (those born between 1995 and 2012) ‘iGen’ because they will be the first to have spent their entire adolescence with smartphones. In about 2010 or 2011, Twenge says, she first started to notice striking changes in teenage behaviour: they were going out and getting together with friends less often, while more reported feeling ‘left out’ and claiming that they didn’t enjoy life.

Read more here.