Smartphones making us unsmart?

For young people, smartphones are as bad as the lack oxygen that killed so many children in hospitals in Gorakhpur and Nashik, wrote B Dominic. Smartphones are making people lonely by cutting off social interaction with other human beings, which is "an oxygen of a different kind". Parents in India are terrified of their children falling prey to the Blue Whale Challenge, which sets a series of tasks for teenagers, leading to suicide. A Russian social network on the internet, Vkontakte, has been blocked in India to stop children accessing Blue Whale. Before that there was a drinking challenge in the West, called Neknominate, which also resulted in quite a few deaths. "Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011," wrote JM Twenge. In 2012, possession of smartphones exceeded 50% in the US. On the other hand, "More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today's teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They're are markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking's attendant ills." Paradoxically, even as young people are becoming increasingly isolated due to the internet, all of us losing our anonymity due to the same internet. "It's much harder to be anonymous than it was 20 years ago, at least from the biggest companies and the government," said Prof P Swire. "This is a bad time to be a spy." Big internet firms like Facebook and Google mine data from how we interact and what we search for on the net. Facebook bought up Instagram and WhatsApp, and tried to buy Snapchat, so that it has data on over 2 billion people. While Facebook offered $3 billion to acquire Snapchat, Google offered 10 times more, but both were rebuffed. Algorithms are making us narrow-minded, by trying to predict what we want from our past activity on the net, wrote Prof S Finkelstein. Easy availability of pornography on smartphones maybe responsible for proliferating sexual attacks on children. In the UK, children as young as 5 years of age have been punished at school for sexual misbehavior, including watching pornography. A study found that pornography is desensitising boys to sexual violence. This could have tragic consequences in the future. "As Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said, we need to wean our children off their Play Stations and get them on to the playgrounds," wrote Dominic. The same Prime Minister wants everyone to shop digitally so that he can snoop on us. Which means smartphones. Can you have your cake and eat it?