Need or Addiction? The Terrifying Side of Technology for Kids

Need or Addiction? The Terrifying Side of Technology for Kids

In the past decade, technology has incorporated itself into our lives in an irreversible way.

Things that kids did not have access to before be very easily available to them now. This rapid development leaves room for a lot of thought and criticism in the minds of adults regarding how it impacts children – is technology changing us for the better?
At the age when kids’ minds are in their developmental stage and everything they hear and see sticks with them for the rest of their lives, technology now has more control over them than possibly even their own parents. This means it has a much greater hand in molding their personalities for the future. There is a lot of debate about whether or not that is a bad thing, so let’s look at it from a critic’s point of view. How is technology bad for kids?

Isolation becomes easier

The latest generation finds it quite a difficult task to socialize as it is – and technology makes it worse. It gives them opportunities to socialize without even having to leave their room, which means that the false sense of being social fulfils all their social needs without letting them develop actual, real-life social skills. This is terrifying for the following reasons:

  • People will soon forget how to talk to each other without the presence of a phone or some other technological device that allows them to connect.
  • Texting is the most common form of communication. This means that conveying tone becomes more and more difficult, making interactions very robotic, aside from what is conveyed by emojis.

Health risks

For every 100 hours you spend talking on the phone, you increase the risk of brain cancer. Think about how many times we spend on our phones every single day. Not only does it cause us long-term internal damage, but also external damage like eyesight problems. Radiations from your phone can impact your hearing as well as your ability to think, if you’re exposed to it for too long. As kids get exposed to technology at a very young age, the addiction is carried with them for decades, constantly affecting them both physically and mentally.

Accidents

It says a lot about phone addiction that every city has its own law about using phones while driving. A lot of activities people do outside, even pedestrians using their phone whilst crossing a busy street, can be life threatening. A lot of children are seen doing this, even while riding their bikes on the streets. This is a cause for a lot of accidents, making technology life threatening for its users.

  • The addiction causes kids to take their phones everywhere. They can’t let go of them even when charging, which often results in batteries heating up and exploding in their faces.
  • This also makes young people not pay heed to safety, as they tend to pay no attention to their surroundings when they are using gadgets.

Laziness

Technology gives students an opportunity to make everything easier. Research isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Instead of reading a book or going to the library for a school project, they prefer to look everything up online, or even hire professionals from hire a ghostwriter to do the job for them. This means that they are voluntarily depriving themselves a lot of information that they could get from different assignments which could potentially help them out in the future.

Information is no longer safe

Since everything is digital now, almost all our information can be found in our phones. This means that anyone with enough experience can hack into our system to obtain valuable information. This is scary for a lot of reasons, because a younger audience can easily be manipulated. Information is manipulated to threaten children into doing what hackers want, or worse. This is something they cannot defend themselves against due to lack of knowledge.

  • In recent years, suicide games have become quite popular where a group of people manipulates kids to give out their information and then drives them to committing suicide.
  • No personal information, including pictures and location is safe.

Memory worsens by the day

When you have everything at the tip of your fingers at all times, you have almost no reason to remember things. This is further supported by the fact that people don’t even remember birthdays or phone numbers like they used to before. Your phone does all of that for you, so why would you go the extra mile? This is becoming a serious problem, if enough time passes, our brains might get accustomed to this lack of knowledge and go into a backward state.

Psychological impact – phantom vibrations

Phantom Vibration Syndrome

Yes, this is an actual thing. Phantom vibrations are a false belief that your phone is ringing or has received a notification, even though it has not. This is one of the most terrifying impacts of technology because it shows how deeply it has impacted our minds – this is a form of hallucination that only gets worse with the increase in your technology usage.

Limited career paths

Because machines have begun to take a lot of our jobs by replacing manual labor, a lot of children might not be able to do what they wanted to when they grow up. This limits the options they have to select from when deciding their career, and as time passes and technology advances, we are able to do less and less by ourselves.

Posted by Dr. Afras

Dr. Afras
Dr. Afras has a PHD from England with a great love for writing and providing consultancy for people who need writing help. He is doing dissertation proposal writing ever since the age of 21 and has also been a lecturer at different universities throughout his career.

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