A few weeks ago I met a friend for a birthday tea in a swanky London hotel. I arrived early, but sat happily looking at the plush decor and listening to the pianist playing as I waited. It was all so peaceful and beautiful.
Then I spotted a family of six — four children and two adults — sitting in silence. Their heads down, every one of them was glued to their mobile phone, completely oblivious to their surroundings and each other. They didn’t exchange a single word.
When the tiers of sandwiches, scones and cakes arrived, I expected them at least to look up and say something to each other.
We are constantly told how social media is a force for good — disseminating knowledge and empowering and connecting people. But there are negative aspects
Instead, three of them started taking pictures and then went back to their phones, presumably to post the images on social media, while the others absentmindedly reached out and took something to eat, barely acknowledging one another.
It left me feeling incredibly sad. Surely the point of shared experiences is sharing them with the people closest to us, not a group of random people on Twitter?
We are constantly told how social media is a force for good — disseminating knowledge and empowering and connecting people. But there are negative aspects, not least the way it can become so all engrossing it interferes with our most important relationships.
This was a problem identified by a school in Middlesbrough that has banned mobiles from its school gates: it’s become all too common a sight for children to run up to their parents at the end of the day only to be ignored because the adult is preoccupied with their phone.
So a sign has gone up telling parents to ‘Greet your child with a smile, not a mobile’. It beggars belief this needs to be said.
We should also be concerned about the potential risk to mental health. A study this week showed social media can increase loneliness. It can also make people envious — we see a stream of carefully manipulated and selected aspects of someone’s life and assume it to be true. But it’s not. It’s an edited version of reality.
Social networking sites such as Facebook risk impoverishing us because the interactions they offer us are not real, yet can easily be mistaken for being so.
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They are appealing because they are quick and require little effort, but these are the very things that strip them of lasting value.
Real interaction with real people can be messy, complicated and time consuming: far easier to post a stream of witty one-liners where you can weigh up your success in life in how many ‘likes’ you get.
People then post incessantly because it allows them to feel in control of a story about themselves and fosters a sense of self-validation. From a neurological aspect, the rush of dopamine that this releases in the brain makes us want to do it more and more.
It’s not simply children being sucked in — many parents are just as bad. Where I work we have a family therapy unit and part of the treatment involves improving family communication. This includes eating a meal together.
A study this week showed social media can increase loneliness. It can also make people envious — we see a stream of carefully manipulated and selected aspects of someone’s life and assume it to be true
Mobiles are banned. Children initially complain, but tend to comply. It’s the parents who break this rule. ‘I need to check my emails for work,’ they protest, failing to see the poor role models they are providing for their children, who don’t differentiate between checking work emails and checking Facebook.
All this reminds me of a story by E. M. Forster called The Machine Stops. Reading it 100 years after it was published, your are struck by his eerie prescience.
The story is set in a future world dominated by technology. Humans live in tiny, individual pods below ground, communicating through an instant messaging and video-conferencing service.
Personal interaction has become redundant and the only activity is discussing ideas over this apparatus. Their physical needs are met by the system and over time they forget it is they who created the machine to serve them, become subservient to it and begin worshipping it.
It becomes apparent the machine is stopping. Humanity, though, has lost connection with the natural world and each other, and with the machine’s crash comes the end of civilisation.
Forster’s underlying message is of chilling relevance to society today: it is direct experience and engagement in the world and real interaction that is of value.
It’s not technology that endangers humanity, but our reliance on it and inability to modulate its control over their lives.
Surely we are missing out on a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human if we can’t even be bothered to talk to our family sitting next to us.
Even prisoners eat better than patients
Hospital food is shockingly poor, as anyone who has watched patients being fed will know
Hospital food is shockingly poor, as anyone who has watched patients being fed will know. It’s a cop out to blame the fact it’s institutional food.
A few years ago I worked in a prison, and let me tell you the food the prisoners were served was far better than the awful gloop we dish out to patients in the NHS.
Now author and chef Prue Leith has spoken out about ‘inedible’ food being served to patients — she’s hardly the first and you would think after so many years of criticism that hospital cooks would have been embarrassed into improving their dishes.
Well no, for the simple reason cooks are a rare commodity in hospitals and this is the root of the problem.
The responsibility for providing hospital food has been increasingly outsourced to catering companies. This means meals are mass-produced off-site and transported into hospital where these ‘cook-chill’ dishes are reheated or, more ominously, ‘regenerated’, Doctor Who-style, using self-contained high-pressure steamers.
In a number of new hospitals built under private finance initiatives, such is the reliance on this type of food that there are no kitchens. This is in contract to many prisons, which prepare fresh food in proper kitchens.
This is all being done in the name of ‘efficiency’, but it’s a false economy: patients who are undernourished because they aren’t eating or the food is poor quality take longer to get better. It enrages me because it disproportionately affects the most vulnerable people in society — the elderly, those with mental health problems or learning disabilities who are more likely to be in hospital longer and who often don’t have lots of visitors bringing in extra food.
There is a simple solution: reinstate hospital kitchens and staff them with trained cooks. It can be done — Great Ormond Street employs chefs who cut up vegetables and make meals. They’re nutritious and tasty.
In Cornwall, NHS trusts buy from local, sustainable sources. I hope Prue keeps up her campaign.
A new leaf for tobacco giant?
It’s not often that a company announces it wants its products taxed more. Yet this is precisely what tobacco giant Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, did this week
It’s not often that a company announces it wants its products taxed more. Yet this is precisely what tobacco giant Philip Morris did this week ahead of the Budget.
In a submission to the Chancellor Philip Hammond, it lobbied for an increase in the tax on cigarettes in a bid to out-price people so they quit.
So should we be applauding Philip Morris or viewing it with suspicion?
For some time, the company has been speaking about wanting a ‘smoke-free future’ and after years of development, it launched a product — Iqos — that heats the tobacco rather than burns it and is thought to be less harmful than normal cigarettes.
It knows it’s only a matter of time before countries start banning cigarettes, so a cynic might say this is a smart business move. Perhaps. But I’m prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.
I like to think people working in tobacco companies are like us — with friends and families — and they don’t want to be part of something that kills and disables millions every year.
And even if it is a canny shift in business model, motivated by revenue as much as ethics, does it really matter if it means that the blight of cigarettes is removed and replaced with something safer?
But I’ll be interested to see how the company behaves in poor countries where cigarettes are still hugely profitable and show no sign of abating. This is a real litmus test to how dedicated it is to seeing a smoke-free world.
In 2002, a large study linked it with breast cancer and strokes, and the scare stories that followed have cast a long shadow over the management of the menopause
When it comes to hormone replacement therapy (HRT), I think women have been badly let down by medicine.
In 2002, a large study linked it with breast cancer and strokes, and the scare stories that followed have cast a long shadow over the management of the menopause.
Yet this study has since been heavily criticised — not least because it was based on women who had already gone through the menopause — and considered to have caused unnecessary alarm. And this means many women have missed out on the real, tangible benefits of HRT that have been repeatedly proved. This week we saw another such study that showed it can reduce the risk of early death by as much as 30 per cent.
But HRT is still viewed with incredible caution and suspicion by GPs, many of whom are nervous about prescribing it.
Of course, it’s not right for everyone. It’s not recommended for women who have had a recent heart attack, have liver problems or who have breast cancer. But for millions of others, it is suitable and can bring real benefits. Providing I was suitable for it, if I were a woman of a certain age, there’s no doubt that I’d take it.