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Smoking on Your Phone

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 15/02/18 18:00
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On the 9th January, The Times published an article about young children’s addiction to the Apple iPhone. Two of the major shareholders of Apple stock had published an open letter to Apple compelling them to fund research and expertise into the effects that iPhones are having on young children.

There is a growing and significant body of evidence that suggests the use of mobile phones and tablets (and in particular social media) is causing damage to young people in the form of depression and increased suicides.

The mechanism of how this happens is already understood via the dopamine complex and its addictive nature; in fact, this is why even when we knew that smoking was a terrible thing, we didn’t sell cigarettes to under 16’s.

It’s also why we don’t encourage the use of alcohol, prescription pain killer or sleeping pills to young people.

It took us a long time to get our head around the effects of smoking. From the early stages where smoking was encouraged by a doctor to ‘clear the chest’ to the later stages with the battles from the major smoking corporates and evidence deniers such as the Pro Smoking Groups.

Some years after the removable of smoking from public places, first in Scotland and then in England, it seems almost laughable that we did not seem to see the damage that was caused and how acceptable it became. You only have to go on holiday to somewhere where smoking in public is still embraced to realise how ridiculous we all were.

Why is it then we cannot connect the dots with relation to the use of electronic super computers, social media and, in particular, children?

Perhaps it’s because we became addicted first.

We were then addicted to our devices and those of us who had children needed time to luxuriate in that addiction therefore allowing our children to become addicted gave us the peace and quiet and time to do that.

Raising children is time consuming but raising children and continuing to stimulate them and feed their requirement for knowledge is utterly exhausting. It’s so much easier to give them a device and convince yourself that it’s an ‘educational app’.

For the past 10 years I have been a governor of a primary school and then at a secondary school, I have seen first-hand the damage that social media and electronic addiction is causing in young children (it seems to me particularly young girls). I appreciate this may seem utterly ironic as it often does when I write about this subject because people may be reading this via Twitter or Facebook.

It is my hope though that anybody who wants to read these words regularly would sign up and get it in their inbox, that way they would be able to schedule when they read it at a time that suits them and not be interrupted time and time again.

There is no doubt in my mind, and if we survive as a race, that we will look back on this ‘social media revolution’ and laugh at how ridiculous we were and how we damaged our children.

 

Blog post number: 1554

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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