Barbara Anderson

The economics of care

The way mobile screens have captured our time is already an addiction that is hard to get out of.

By Barbara Anderson

This holiday season I was fortunate to welcome many family members at home.

The moments longed for years (pandemic through), the long pending chats, the need to tell each other about our lives were replaced by cell phone screens: a permanent ring of a phone announcing every second a new message from someone on Whatsapp, teenagers sending photos and replicating memes, adults scrolling on a small glass with a lot of glitter and everyone showing what is happening or what they are receiving at that instant.

One only has to look at the photos of the dinners to find more than half of them barely looking up from their cell phones glued to their hands.

We do not share so many moments together but a lot of instant consumption content, thousands of micro stories of little value and little capacity to stay in our memory always decorated by catchy background music.

No one gets out of bed, off the table without the phone in their hand.

TikTok and adolescent mental health: A ticking time bomb in our homes

The main problem lies in the fact that TikTok creates a digital environment where teenagers are exposed to a mix of social pressure, misleading content and dangerous challenges.

The economic indicators of cybersecurity, what has been their impact and evolution over the last decade?

Cybercrime has established itself as a lucrative global industry, with costs to world economies reaching approximately $600 billion, or about 0.8% of global GDP.

Thinking up or thinking down

I was fascinated to read the comments, my animal side moved by the gut and the emotional charge they held, and my journalistic side that believed that maybe there, in the comments, I would find a clue to something else, a piece of the story that had not been written.

Read next