Our digital darlings need a dose of reality

I BELIEVE it’s called meshing, although as a non-geek (that is, an advanced technophobe) I couldn’t be sure. It’s the process of an individual — your kid, for instance — sitting on a sofa with the telly on, volume up, but he’s not watching it because he has an iPad in one hand and a PSP console thing in the other.

He has earplugs rammed in, to block out the sound of the telly, even though he put it on in the first place. And the laptop, open on the floor, is tinnily, hissily playing a selection from Spotify. The commentary from Fifa 13 blares from the iPad, and there is more white noise coming from something else on the Playstation console.

If you were to MRI the kid’s brain at this stage the neurons would probably resemble either a set of Christmas lights on the verge of explosion, or worse, an area of total darkness, where all brain function has crashed from over-stimulation — and the kid is still just sitting there, automatically moving his hands across the screens the way chickens still run around after they’ve been decapitated.