Yet another report about the dangers of technology that will only make things worse
Spanish newspaper El País this week ran a story about a 250 page report by a supposed committee of experts commissioned by the Spanish government (link in Spanish) on the use of technology by minors. The report, which included some 107 measures, all aimed at restricting online access and smartphone use, is further proof of the inability of so many societies to understand new technology. One look at the list of people on the committee makes it clear that the government knew what it wanted to hear. The fifty experts are like the monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey confronted with the black monolith.
The premise of the report is perfectly valid: smartphones are potentially dangerous, particularly so for minors because unscrupulous companies use them to generate addiction. We’ve known this for a long time; the evidence is irrefutable.
The Spanish taxpayer didn’t need to fund a committee of fifty experts to tell us that or to propose solutions that have already failed, that have been failing for more than a decade, and that are also responsible for the fact that we now have a generation that has no idea of the dangers they are exposing themselves to having passed through an education system that refused to teach them about those dangers. We don’t need a herd mentality from our experts…
