Mind you: we adults also shake Instagram as idiots, and we also had moments when we found ourselves looking at nothing about Tiktok, or fixing a thirty second clip of a guy who slices soap or another who dances in the Bronx with a Hello Kitty sweatshirt. Nonetheless, however stoned we can have become, our brain was formed in an era in which the books existed, boredom was contemplated and the maximum digital dependence at hand was snake on the Nokia 3310.
I myself am amazed every time, I spent my life reading books and writing mine and today I find myself more and more often to scale the stories of people I don’t care about, without even knowing how I ended up inside, and only at a certain point I wonder: but what the hell am I looking at? In the meantime, perhaps an hour passed, during which I could have done anything. I don’t say it to make nostalgic or the passatist, on the contrary: I grew up with computers, I had the internet as soon as possible, and before even the first computers, the first video games, because in the 1980s all this had just begun, and I never stopped playing.
However it was another matter. There was no form of passive and omnipresent and transversal dependence that starts at six years and empty you before even filling you. Yes, at six. In fact, according to an investigation led by the psychiatrist Sergio De Filippis and presented just in these days, 43% of Italian teenagers between 12 and 17 years old use the smartphone for more than five hours a day, and 33% suffer from insomnia, while 58% report frequent episodes of anxiety. The beauty is that only 17% of parents notice it (perhaps because they are too busy sending gifs to the school groups of the school or to shake them too).
The most disturbing thing does not concern only adolescence itself, even what comes first: the age between 6 and 9 years old, the most vulnerable, because it exposes a brain that is still plastic and incomplete to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure circuit, the nucleus accumberry, which is turned on by the screens before the child is able to manage it. It is like serving alcohol to a liver still in the process of training (among other things, the risk for the consumption of alcohol between very young people, but this is another story) has also increased with a colored interface and sound feedback every three seconds.
There is more: if we add eight hours of sleep (perhaps), six (minimum) of school, five of smartphones, the time to eat, breathe … you understand that there is no more room for anything else. The risk? That of building guys who think they have deep relationships and in reality only live social ephemeral layers, hop-scotch trees and think that life is a like (a bit like it happens in different episodes of Black Mirror, a series that seems less and less dystopian, in fact they no longer know what to invent). 58% report anxious symptoms, however what emerges is a new form of insulation masked by hyperconnection and long to go, in that age group, this can only generate emotional disorders, relational fragility, empathic deficits, and a sociality reduced to self -representation.
The Minister of Education Valditara proposed to ban the use of cell phones even in superiors. I agree, for the rest of the time, however, the task belongs to families, of any kind they are. Otherwise we are no longer forming brains: we are training them from addiction since childhood, with the excuse that “so much they grow in it”. At least we grew up outside and then we let ourselves be invaded (from modernity, freedom, from the West, from modernity, and also by technology, which however has never been so passive). These are already colonized to us, with the feed instead of consciousness and never a book in hand. Someone will say: but first the children left in front of the television. Apart from that the time for TV was counted by the parents, but if we really wanted to be asocial at least we watched TVs with a narrative structure, imagination, or fabulous animated cartoons, not a drug in which they shake idiotic that are the most idiots earn the more on the views of other idiots (to become it there is always time, in short).
Here too, far from me every moralism: it is not that Italian adults read novels, we are last in Europe for reading books and newspapers (regardless of the dependence of digital and passive
In the training age), however at least we had the opportunity to learn how to do it, today’s guys not. Here it is not their fault: it is that we left them alone with a feed instead of childhood and adolescence.