What will it take to get us off our phones?

croll-free September is drawing to a close and it’s looking like the 65 per cent of Brits who assured the Royal Society for Public Health that they “would consider participating in the campaign” to stop or cut down on their use of social media had a better idea – namely, to stick their heads as far down the black ihole as humanly possible, and keep them there indefinitely.

There’s a word for something you end up doing when you’ve vowed not to: addiction. And people have been tossing it around proudly on Twitter this week (well, it wasn’t going to be IRL, was it?) as they debate Apple’s new IOS 12 “nanny” feature. Designed to track in explicit detail how long a user spends on each of their phone apps – and how much time is squandered scanning social media – the function then sends a “screen-time report” to users and abusers every Monday morning.

“I’m the first to admit I’m a phone addict,” wrote Hatty Collier, posting a graph that broke down the 18 hours and 33 minutes spent sucking on the glass teat the previous week. “Also you can tell I had no plans this weekend!” “Thoroughly embarrassed,” countered @cortneyelmquist at her nine hour and seven minute total. “This almost makes me sick,” added Adelaid_h. “36 hours I have spent on my phone since updating to IOS 12.”

I doubt anyone was either embarrassed or sickened. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Screen Time’s report has become the new social media humblebrag – never mind that it’s about as interesting as the collected fag butts of a 40-a-day smoker, or the pyramid of crumpled beer cans amassed by a drunk. Only you’ll never see those things because smokers and alcoholics tend to be genuinely ashamed of their addictions: they’ve seen incontrovertible evidence of how noxious they can be – they know it’s not funny. But we’re still too new to screens to take their implications on our health seriously. So we shrug off statistics, like the ones health body ukactive released on Sunday, detailing the 12 hours a week the average adult spends watching on-demand TV, the 17 hours we devote to our smartphone and the 90 minutes of moderate exercise we manage to squeeze in between box sets and sending complete strangers data analysis graphs of our pathetic excuse for a life. And we ignore that vital life principle, opportunity cost: while you’re doing one thing, you’re not doing another.

We also choose to ignore what studies are starting to tell us about the effects of too much screen time on our kids – the insomnia, learning difficulties and lack of sociability it promotes – in favour of ambiguous and far less guilt-inducing “can be”

thinking. And yes, of course, screens “can be” educational: if your child’s learning a second language on Duolingo or honing their maths skills on the Khan Academy Kids app. But they’re not, are they? Not to mention the dangers that lurk on those screens, which The Daily Telegraph is seeking to overhaul in its Duty of Care campaign, pushing for there to be legal requirements for digital firms to safeguard children’s well-being.

Back in 2012, I remember the head of top New York school Avenues – set to open in London – proudly telling me there wasn’t a pad and pencil in sight in their classrooms. But with one mother I know now likening her son’s school giving him homework to do on the computer to “sending him home with a pack of cigarettes”, and experts warning that these magical miracle tools that were going to revolutionise learning may not be quite as helpful as once thought, there has been a definite shift in attitude. Something one Dr Patricia Davies of the University of Wolverhampton was able to say with some certainty was that “it was easy for children to become disengaged and disinterested in classes that did not involve ipad use”. Funny that.

Bearing in mind that executives at Malboro were said to have stopped using their own products years before the rest of the world was made aware of the health risks of cigarettes, and that Silicon Valley parents are now raising their kids tech-free, perhaps the only facts we should be paying attention to are these: Bill Gates implemented a cap on his daughter’s screen time back in 2007, Steve Jobs always limited how much technology his kids used at home, and Apple boss Tim Cook has admitted to banning his nephew from using social media.

The hypocrisy of this angered me in the past. But if the new Screen Time feature is Apple’s equivalent to the Government health warning on cigarettes and an uncynical move on the part of tech giants to take greater responsibility for the products they’re putting out there, we could do worse than take on a little responsibility of our own.

We shrug off the fact the average adult spends 17 hours a week on their phone