Near global gloom and despondency, not to mention weeping and gnashing of teeth last week, when Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and a slew of other time and energy wasting websites failed and addicts everywhere went into meltdown.
Had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloped through the land, there couldn’t have been greater consternation and panic.
My heart sinks when, at a meal out in company, everyone’s mobile phone is placed next to their cutlery and, within minutes, one emits a shrill discordant ringtone. The query is voiced, “D’you mind if I take this?” – a purely rhetorical request. One of these days I’m going to say very pointedly, “YES, I DO!” Not that they’d heed me, so compulsively are they in thrall to the blasted thing they’ve already left their seat and are halfway to the door to swap inconsequentialities with the caller. Some don’t even bother to leave the table, so the rest of us must remain silent.
Like Pavlov’s dogs conditioned to certain stimuli, others cannot resist the authoritative ‘ping’ of an incoming text message, but must respond immediately. And don’t start me about the vulgarity of photographing one’s restaurant meal. These are the new and ubiquitous social irritants.
I am an unapologetic, technophobic Luddite. I do carry a mobile phone, purely as a safety device in case I have a heart attack or a car crash. However, there’s no point in ringing me because the instrument is irretrievably buried in the turgid depths of my overstuffed handbag and more than likely dead as mutton. Please don’t wear out your index finger texting me either, because (a) I won’t look at it nor (b) reply. There’s a perfectly serviceable landline with an answering machine at home should your business be important or urgent.
How anxious am I to scroll through an endless and stultifying series of photographs of other people’s weddings, babies, pets or gardens? You may choose to browse upon unfounded rumour or puerile humour. I have not the remotest interest in conspiracy theories, bad jokes, dogs doing tricks or toddlers falling over, and I resent the assumption that I must be instantly accessible for Fear of Missing Out.
Like every good thing ever invented for the benefit of mankind, the unscrupulous, the subversive and the downright wicked seek to exploit it. Alarm bells ring when I see a primary school playground with half the pupils standing, heads bowed over mini-screens; a child’s bedroom crammed with technology but no books; precocious little girls striking ‘glamour’ poses in photographs. Children are like blotting paper. They absorb what they see and hear and seek to emulate it. Handing them an instrument that, like Pandora’s box, opens the floodgates to a dangerously attractive but morally unregulated world full of inappropriate knowledge they’re not mature enough to cope with, is putting adult burdens on young shoulders that amounts to the theft and corruption of innocence.
We’re already reaping the tragic harvest of our liberal and over-indulgent parenting – sub-teens with body-image problems, premature sexualisation, self-harm, mental health worries, gender-identity issues and teen suicide. Was there ever a more vulnerable generation? Almost-unwittingly, we’ve colluded in the conditioning (or rather, ‘grooming’) of our own young. We’ve given in to the pester power of peer pressure, (“but everybody has this, does that, wears these”) without considering age-appropriateness. In an increasingly dangerous moral climate, we leave them unlimited, unsupervised screen time and unmonitored friendships, then wonder why some of them go off the rails.
Maybe it’s because we wore our own youth like a straitjacket in an era of unquestioning compliance, when we held authority and our elders in obedient respect and our nascent struggles against the system were promptly squashed.
Every generation deplores the one that follows it. The spoilt, ungrateful, self-absorbed, disrespectful young are eternally going to hell in a handcart. Parenting today faces new challenges on top of the old. The generation gap yawns as widely as it ever did. As one wit put it: “It’s hard to know exactly when one generation ends and the next one begins, but it’s somewhere around nine o’clock at night….''
