Tech Addiction Breeds Narcissism

Millions of Americans are now more concerned with their "online presence" than their real world one.

We are becoming a nation of narcissists — one technological addiction after another.

Unsurprisingly, parents have become the chief enablers of this trend. A whopping 85% of themallow their children under six years of age to access and use technology, and the amount of time American children eight years of age and younger spend in front of mobile screens tripledbetween 2013 and 2017.

And like a hand in a glove, much of what these children access with that technology is social media. Social media that “has taken neoliberalism’s self-centered mantra and pumped it full of cocaine-laced steroids,” asserts columnist Aleks Eror, who adds that it has also “bloated humanity’s capacity for self-obsession to new extremes.”

It has also driven hypocrisy to new extremes. Many tech titans who enriched themselves getting other peoples’ children to embrace their hardware and software took a decidedly low-tech approach with their own children. Microsoft’s Bill Gates even prohibited his three children from owning a cell phone until they were 14.

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