The United States has turned into a high-tech country where each second Americans send over 7,500 tweets, upload 1,394 Instagram photos, send 2 million emails, and view over 119,000 YouTube videos. Americans also send 69,000 texts a second – that's over six billion texts every day.
This mind-stretching book is by Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country's foremost addiction experts and Executive Director of the Dunes, one of the world's top rehabs. He explains the psychological, sociological, cultural, and economic impacts of this global tech epidemic involving iPads, tablets, smart phones, and hypnotic games like Minecraft.
Parents with children who are addicted to video games or texting have felt the fear and the frustration of realizing that eventually their son or daughter could become one of those for whom "the digital realm has usurped real-life experiences."
Today, 97 percent of all American children between the ages of 2 and 17 play video games. That's 64 million kids. Kardaras is outraged by those who claim that these technological toys offer harmless entertainment and even deserve a prominent place in the classroom. "Recent brain imaging studies have conclusively shown that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person's developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can."
Video game addiction is a serious matter with disorders ranging from ADHD to anxiety to increased aggression and even to psychosis. It can result in behavioral changes such as hyperarousal, the constant craving for novelty, compromised attentional abilities, increased distractability, and poor impulse control.
Kardaras also covers the link between video games and violence, the isolation and aversion to face-to-face interaction by those addicted to texting, and the reality disconnect experienced by big-time users of the social media. Glow Kids is an important and eye-opening book on the serious repercussions of the epidemic of screen addictions.
