Young people are addicted to a virtual world that is designed to keep them hooked with little care for collateral damage.
A year ago I walked into my kitchen to find half a dozen teenagers there, each one engrossed with their own private screen in silence. I realised it had been months since I’d seen a teenager without a computer or smartphone in their hand. I decided there and then to make a film on the subject, the beginning of a year-long journey that took me from the fibre-optic cables in the sewers of London to spending endless, unedifying hours in bedrooms of teenage boys as they watched porn.
Nearly every girl I met talked of the social pressure: the demand to be constantly in touch; the problems of “unfriending”; being in the gaze of people they have barely met; the anxieties about their image; and the horror of looking in while being left out – for them much more pressing than what one girl dubbed “the parental obsession with groomers and porn”.
What surprised me was the anger of many teenagers who, in turn, felt abandoned by parents whose own eyes were fixed on electronic devices.
More shocking still was the sight of an entire industry systematically pulling young people into their glittering and beguiling world – with little care for the collateral damage. Luis Von Ahn, inventor of Captcha and reCaptcha (the brilliant if irritating security system where you type letters into a box to prove you are human), says “anyone doing anything on the web professionally is constantly refining their site to keep the user using”. He readily admits that the industry knowingly designs to addict, but he puts his faith in the fact that the people at the heart of the industry are good people with good values. I am not so sure.
The devices that our kids use are shipped from the factory with every possible audio, visual or vibration alert switched on. Each new app, website, tweet and message adds another layer of intrusion – each intrusion is cynically designed to get a response, and each response creates an appetite for another intrusion.