Smart phone plague that turns us into lonely misfits

NHS psychiatrist Max Pemberton may make you rethink your life

AFeW weeks ago I met a friend for a birthday tea in a swanky london hotel. I arrived early, but sat happily looking at the plush decor and listening to the pianist playing as I waited. It was all so peaceful and beautiful.

Then I spotted a family of six — four children and two adults — sitting in silence. Their heads down, every one of them was glued to their mobile phone, completely oblivious to their surroundings and each other. They didn’t exchange a single word.

When the tiers of sandwiches, scones and cakes arrived, I expected them at least to look up and say something to each other.

Instead, three of them started taking pictures and then went back to their phones, presumably to post the images on social media, while the others absentmindedly reached out and took something to eat, barely acknowledging one another.

It left me feeling incredibly sad. Surely the point of shared experiences is sharing them with the people closest to us, not a group of random people on Twitter?

We are constantly told how social media is a force for good — disseminating knowledge and empowering and connecting people. But there are negative aspects, not least the way it can become so all engrossing it interferes with our most important relationships. THIS

was a problem identified by a school in Middlesbrough that has banned mobiles from its school gates: it’s become all too common a sight for children to run up to their parents at the end of the day only to be ignored because the adult is preoccupied with their phone.

So a sign has gone up telling parents to ‘Greet your child with a smile, not a mobile’. It beggars belief this needs to be said.

We should also be concerned about the potential risk to mental health. A study this week showed social media can increase loneliness. It can also make people envious — we see a stream of carefully manipulated and selected aspects of someone’s life and assume it to be true. But it’s not. It’s an edited version of reality.

Social networking sites such as Facebook risk impoverishing us because the interactions they offer us are not real, yet can easily be mistaken for being so.

They are appealing because they are quick and require little effort, but these are the very things that strip them of lasting value.

Real interaction with real people can be messy, complicated and time consuming: far easier to post a stream of witty one-liners where you can weigh up your success in life in how many ‘likes’ you get.

people then post incessantly because it allows them to feel in control of a story about themselves and fosters a sense of self-validation. From a neurological aspect, the rush of dopamine that this releases in the brain makes us want to do it more and more.

It’s not simply children being sucked in — many parents are just as bad. Where I work we have a family therapy unit and part of the treatment involves improving family communication. This includes eating a meal together.

Mobiles are banned. Children initially complain, but tend to comply. It’s the parents who break this rule. ‘I need to check my emails for work,’ they protest, failing to see the poor role models they are providing for their children, who don’t differentiate between checking work emails and checking Facebook.

All this reminds me of a story by e. M. Forster called The Machine Stops. Reading it 100 years after it was published, your are struck by his eerie prescience.

The story is set in a future world dominated by technology. Humans live in tiny, individual pods below ground, communicating through an instant messaging and video-conferencing service.

personal interaction has become redundant and the only activity is discussing ideas over this apparatus. Their physical needs are met by the system and over time they forget it is they who created the machine to serve them, become subservient to it and begin worshipping it.

It becomes apparent the machine is stopping. Humanity, though, has lost connection with the natural world and each other, and with the machine’s crash comes the end of civilisation.

Forster’s underlying message is of chilling relevance to society today: it is direct experience and engagement in the world and real interaction that is of value.

It’s not technology that endangers humanity, but our reliance on it and inability to modulate its control over their lives.

Surely we are missing out on a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human if we can’t even be bothered to talk to our family sitting next to us.