Xbox Risks?

Social media and the various components and vehicles that come with it are, arguably, causing mental and physical health problems in the younger generations. This article is not intended to be a metaphorical soapbox for the author to stand upon and ramble about how technology is getting out of control but it is here to suggest that there might just be a balance between technology and nature that limits the damage that’s done.

You don’t have to travel back all that far in time to find people that do not know what an Xbox or mobile phone is and managed to entertain themselves and indeed survive, meet up with friends and family without the use of technology. It really was astonishing. The development of technology such as mobile phones and the internet has been so dramatic that it seems that the youth generation – those born in this millennium and the last five years of the last – are the ones who rely on this technology to a greater extent and this means that they feel the harm as well as the benefits.

News has broken today of a young man who sadly died earlier this year of SADS (Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome) which essentially means that the boy had a heart attack. The tragedy happened while he was playing on his Xbox and it cannot be sad that the computer game was directly the problem, the amount of stimulus offered by the game is credited with causing ‘over-excitement’. This incident is isolated and it is understood that the young man suffered from other medical conditions too but the fact is that it is just the most recent incident. Previously it has been known for young children to experience deep vein thrombosis due to excessive time spent knelt down playing on a games console.

There are all sorts of reasons that these things happen and there is no individual person or company that can be blamed for these incidents, they just happen and often that is the case with accidents. However, there is an argument for individuals and perhaps their parents taking note that there are harmful repercussions that come from all of this technology and to be honest least of all is the physical health risks because they are minute; moreover are the social skills or lack thereof. This paradoxical world where there is a constant demand to appear social but not actually be social means when we, as humans, are thrust into a social situation that demands the use of motor skills exceeding that of opposable thumbs, we cannot react appropriately. The world is becoming virtual and humans incapable of functioning in it.

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