Digital Technology

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, much of what I thought I would be saying that was original tonight has already been covered in the brief way we have charged around this debate. The noble Lord on the Front Bench seems to be indicating he has a similar problem. The one thing we can be sure about in the new digital world is that it has changed everything, and it has changed it faster than any of us has ever imagined possible, even 15 years ago. The whole level of interaction in a personal way has changed: people no longer natter obsessively on phones; they now exchange e-mails obsessively. As my noble friend Lord Lucas has said, the great demon that was television—indeed, independent television with adverts, which was the great bugbear of my youth—has now been accepted and gone beyond.

However, the noble Baroness and I did a little bit of digging online to discover a speech she made about a year ago which covered similar ground. In it, she pointed out that certain types of activity that offered immediate satisfaction from certain types of video game—particularly done for very long periods of time—affect the way our brains develop. That is not a big surprise to anybody who thinks about it for a second, because the way you use your head changes the way your body operates and learned responses go into muscle and brain. It is just there; it is not a big surprise. Anybody who has ever played a sport knows that you can change the way your reflex patterns go from the way you interact with people.

The problem here is that this may be something which cuts out other types of human interaction. I believe that was roughly what the noble Baroness was coming out with. Again, this is not a surprise. The question is—and my noble friend Lord Lucas pointed out the dangers—how worried should we be? How worried should we be about what it cuts down or what it takes away from us? The interaction is something we must be looking at. The issue of autism flies around anything that goes online now and there is a suggestion that we should worry, but we do not really know. That is one of the issues that come out here.

What are we going to do about it? I am afraid that the Government have either got to do the research themselves or encourage others to discover what is happening here. We are effectively putting out feet into a new pool. The change in activity and the volume of time spent is the great problem; it is not the fact that you actually play a game and destroy the aliens or the advancing hoards from some Narnia coming out from your screen. It is a problem if you spend hours and hours at a very young age doing that. That is the difference. Obsessive behaviour has consequences.

I do not knock the digital: I would not be able to write at all without digital help because I am severely dyslexic, so it has been a huge bonus to me in certain ways, and to many other people. Unless we can actually get at what is happening and take a realistic view of it, we are going to have some problems here. One thing we can be sure of is that new technology will encourage the fear-mongers and the panic buttons to be pressed and the wrong information will come out. We have to encourage people to look at this in a realistic and sensible way. Without that, interesting as the noble Baroness’s thesis is, as much attention will be focused on people who are saying, “I spend 43 hours a week online playing one game and it doesn’t do me any harm and, by the way, what month is it?” We have to have some interaction and study between those who use this and those who do not. Without this, we will merely carry on swapping opinions and not knowledge.