Last week I took part in the programme Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4. You can listen to it here, following this link. (There is a bit of kerfuffle with having to register, if you have not done so already.) The programme was a discussion of that perennial topic: children and the internet. The discussion struck me as somewhat too wide-ranging, but a few points it raised are of interest.
First of all, something that I had not realised until now, internet games are developed in such a way as to be addictive. The more addictive a game is, the more people will want to play it, after all. In other words, the addictive quality of the internet is not accidental: it is something that is deliberately built into its structure. This is an important point. It means that many of our internet choice are driven by our addiction, not our rationality. Given that we are homo sapiens, rational creatures, the internet, by sapping our reason, is also sapping our humanity.
