Addicted to screens HT 13.05.2022

 

Addicted to screens

Part 1

How long do you spend online every day? Is this increasing at the moment? And when you’re online, what do you do there - chat with friends, listen to music, watch videos, play games, send messages? Can you do them all at the same time? The internet is transforming our society, too. It has a huge impact on culture, politics and business.

Now there are ‘screenagers’ who live most of their lives in the virtual world. Some people spend more time online than with their families!

And this is the country where people are connected more than anywhere else in the world: South Korea. Here you can access the internet very easily, and it’s really fast. You can download files ten times quicker here than in most countries in the world. Even young children of three to five years old use the internet and spend eight hours a week online.

Then there are teenagers using the internet for eighteen hours a day. Experts say that if you take away the internet from these teens, they start to feel anxious and unhappy. So, is Korea creating a nation of screen addicts? And will your country be like this in just two or three years’ time?

Part 2

But is internet addiction a bad thing? Think for a moment about the information that you receive on screens. It’s certainly not like reading a book. Now we receive information via connections or hyperlinks. We just click on the link or touch the screen and something new appears.

And what about the videos of pets you watch on YouTube? You think it’s funny or superficial, but this is part of a big online conversation. You can watch the angry cat and then create your own clip or meme with a different cat. Sharing these photos and videos is more important than the content itself. It allows us to communicate with people in a more creative way. So, do smartphones make us smarter or less smart? Let’s return to Korea for an answer. There’s good news: Korea is the most connected country in the world, but it is also number one for education. It is regularly top of the world’s education league tables.

The reason may be that from an early age, Korean children are proficient at working together on the internet to solve problems.