I write this having just put my daughter (Olivia, 5) to bed after reading her a bedtime story. It’s one of the perks of being a parent and one of the rare times in the day where both of you feel totally free from distraction. The format of the reading is often the same. First she reads to me one of her books procured from the school library. She is a library monitor (I have no idea what this role entails) and claims to have the pick of the books to bring home. Yet despite this we always tend to get books that cover two main topics; Witches and animals. Occasionally she will bring home a Star Wars book which contains detailed drawings of the Millennium Falcon and a family tree of the Skywalker family. Not exactly ideal for night time reading.

Modern teaching focusses on using phonics to teach children to read. They sound out the words and say them out loud. It’s very effective, although Liv tends to shout these out which makes you feel like you are being read to by a town crier or an evangelical minister from the Deep South giving a sermon. Still, its brilliant and you can see the pleasure she gets from being able to read a book herself.

Olivia is part of “Generation – Z” a group of children brought up entirely immersed in technology. They are often nicknamed “digital natives” as it’s a part of their life from birth. Many of this generation will have careers related to the digital world. They are also one of the generations most influenced by advertising; whether it is spewed onto their Facebook timelines, adverts on you tube or clogging up their email accounts. I have watched my daughter when she picks up a mobile phone and it’s amazing. She enters the key code, fires up the Cbeebies app and gets cracking on a game, not before switching it to airplane mode so she’s not interrupted by an incoming call. When she comes into the living room to watch television she’ll often ask if I can “switch it to channel 603 (Boomerang) please daddy, Scooby Doo is on” “Ok darling, I think it’s just about to finish”, “Ah, okay, put 618 on then Daddy, that’s Boomerang+1!” It’s like living with the head of digital programming.

It’s all on demand and they are in complete control. I still don’t think she fully appreciates the power of being able to pause live television. When I was a kid that would have blown my mind, it would have been like wizardry. I overheard my daughter telling her friend, “it’s okay; I’ll watch that on Iplayer!” I had to plan to watch television, meals had to be rescheduled, social events had to be cancelled and yes, I could have recorded it on the video, but I was often out and I wasn’t going to trust my mother with the task of having to record it for me. I’m not saying she struggles with technology, but let’s just say that still to this day on her coffee table there is a thing called “the idiot book” which my dad has written for her. Spiral bound, written in large fonts, it contains step by step instructions for operation of household appliances, from toasters through to televisions. I’m not saying she didn’t try, she did, but more often than not the tape would run out fifteen minutes from the end or she had recorded a late night Channel 4 news special instead.

Look, I’m not a Luddite, I love technology. As a stand-up comic it’s part of the business now to have a social media profile, website, show reel. Although often I’ll just use it to try and get free stuff from companies or tweet along humorous, but ultimately worthless comments about “The Apprentice” “The Bake Off” or my new favourite “The Great Pottery Throwdown” (honest, its brilliant and I’m getting a potter’s wheel in the shed). However I do think we are losing something in this technological age.

As a consequence of spending more and more time in our digital worlds we neglect the simple pleasure of conversation. My wife and I will often spend many quality hours together, snuggled on the sofa, each of us looking at our own phones, just browsing through Facebook to see how other people are living their lives. I think there is a certain amount of pressure associated with social media. I often feel, and this may be because I am an insecure funny man, an urge to upload happy family pictures, status updates about perfect day trips and stuff my daughter has said that could melt even the coldest of hearts. There is an element of competiveness to convey that life through a social media profile. In many ways it has replaced the phone call or the catch up down the pub. For comedians the lure of Facebook is just too great, not only do we often get work through it, but it’s that feeling of having an audience, a platform to entertain from. I often wonder how long it will be until a comic tries a joke on stage and when it gets no response says “Oh Come on, that got 58 likes on Facebook!”

There are many articles online which talk about the dangers for Olivia’s generation of the lack of actual physical interaction with other humans. The digital world is comfortable, you set the limits and if you are shy it can be a fantastic way of discovering who you are and friends who feel the same way. I’ve not been a parent long, I am away a lot, mainly weekends, and my wife is the one who steers the ship most of the time, but we are both concerned about the world my daughter is growing up in. She is still too little at the moment to be fully embraced by that digital universe, but it won’t be long. She will probably grow up with a shorter attention span but an ability to truly multitask. Using a tablet or phone whilst watching television will be second nature, but getting a conversation out of her will be practically impossible; I’d probably have to tweet her using the #speaktoyourfamily.

I often think it must have been so hard for my mum and dad without all this technology and social media to distract them, back then you had to actually interact with your kids. Don’t get me wrong I totally understand the lure of giving your kid a mobile phone or ipad to keep them occupied. Before children the important things about choosing a restaurant to eat in where things like; is the food good, what’s the atmosphere like, do they have a good wine cellar. After you have kids, the only pre-requisite is that they give out crayons and a colouring sheet….and that’s just to keep me occupied!

Despite this I always try and put the phone away during time with the family, although it is hard. My wife will often call me on it with a shout of “phone” it’s a technique similar to that of teaching a child not to pick their nose. I’ve seen some terrible examples of this sort of behaviour though and it does make me question whether we as humans can regulate ourselves with this sort of technology. I think we are all crave attention to a certain degree, we like validation, it makes us feel good. I think this explains the birth of the “Selfie” I have never taken one although I do spend an awful amount of time looking in the mirror and trying to perfect my hair. Just as a side point here, why is it my hair always looks its best just before I am about to go to bed? It’s incredible; it’s as if it takes a whole day to bed in. Sometimes I will be in the bathroom, catch my reflection in the mirror and think, “Wow, it’s a shame to sleep on this, what a waste keeping this from the world” my wife walked in behind me at that point, she’d come in to brush her teeth, even she said I should go out. I’ll often nip down the supermarket just to feel like I have made use of it, thank god for 24hr shopping. Ten years my wife and I have been together now, we met in a nightclub during freshers week at university. You wouldn’t think that would last would you? I remember it well, it was 2.30am, I’d just arrived in the club, I wasn’t planning on going out, but then I saw my hair and thought, let’s do this.

Anyway, back to the point. We were once out for a family meal and we were sat next to another young family on the neighbouring table, a father, mother and their young daughter. The daughter was doing some colouring (as mentioned earlier this is now a must for family dining) and was trying to get the attention of her parents. After several minutes of ignoring her she began to get quite agitated. I looked over and it was at that point I saw both parents on their own phones, flicking through pictures of their child and trying to decide which ones to upload to Facebook. The kid is in front of you, in 3D, in perfect resolution, stop living through that screen and experience life!

I don’t want to come across as condescending here; I am not a perfect parent by any means. There are times when I have given my daughter a device to keep her occupied when out in public, although in hindsight handing her a phone on a Sunday morning walk around a lake, may have been naive. I’m joking of course, but I have done it. How can I compete with a phone, its amazing technology, you’ve got a whole world of cbeebies games and puzzles or your dad waffling on about squirrel habitats and “how much carp is probably in that lake” which would you pick?

Still, sometimes I am stunned by the trajectory technology is taking us in. You can now buy a child’s potty with an Ipad stand (I’ll try and dump a picture on this blog). I mean is this where we are now? A child has to have a screen constantly in front of their face and we won’t give them a breather from it just to take a shit?  The toy boasts “A wipe clean touch screen cover in case of accidents” well thank god for that. Presumably they are concerned that during a particularly explosive case of diarrhoea that the child could spatter your beloved technology like a scene from a slasher film. There is even a potty training app, which you can download (if you pardon the expression).

Recently I went to a concert, a metal concert, a high energy sweatfest at Rock City in Nottingham, to see the fantastic Queens of the Stone Age. They were brilliant, close up, giving their all and it was an amazing night. I was however slightly troubled by the amount of people who were filming the concert and watching it simultaneously through a tiny screen. What is the purpose of this, why would you ever watch this back. You have a brain and a face and you are able to remember, that’s what makes the human being so incredible. You can make memories, associating good times with sounds, smells or defining moments. How can you substitute all that for an experience through a mobile phone. Who is watching this footage back? The sound is terrible and your camera work will be worse than a clip from “you’ve been framed”. It’s baffling. It’s like we have to record things continually, in some sort of virtual scrapbook. Art galleries throw up the worst offenders. Works of art that have taken years to paint, beautiful brush work, incredible feats of skill and dexterity and you’ve reduced it all to the click of a camera phone. It’s like an SAS manoeuvre, “click and move, click and move, now to the café go go!”

I heard recently on Radio 4 (where I get most of my facts) that we have a growing problem with stress and anxiety on our society. More people are on antidepressants and seeking counselling for stress related illnesses. One of the main contributory factors is the dominance of social media. Scroll through your Facebook timeline and you’ll see family bereavements, opinions on world politics, victims of war, often including dead children, stories about cancer and other life threatening diseases. All interspersed with adverts for clothing, movies and pictures of your mate Daves ‘cheese soufflé. We can’t process all this, our brains can’t cope, particularly when we feel like we can’t solve most of these problems. The world is a miserable place; people are dying, what’s the point? and I can’t even make a bloody soufflé!

All this stuff rushes into our lives unchecked and it’s difficult to stem the flow. It’s good to be informed, of course it is, we can’t live like hermits, but I think I have to regulate the frequency I expose my brain to all this information. I am an anxious person, I have had moments of depression in my past and I’m a committed show off with a platform from which to spout my opinions, jokes and ill thought out ideas; it’s a potentially toxic mix.

So where do we go from here? Social media is here to stay and the fact that I am writing all this on my own blog as an irony I am well aware of. Even the older generation, my mum and dad have felt the need to move with times and embrace social media. My dad has been on Facebook for nearly a year now, admittedly in all that time he has only “liked Lidl”, but it’s a start. I know that I need to ration my use of it, like drinking and eating, moderation is the key. My wife and I have employed a “one screen rule” in the front room. If the television is on, get off your phone, you can’t do both. We have also decided to leave the phones out of the bedroom. It’s hard to maintain a level of romance in a relationship when one of you has their face lit up like a shit ET in the candlelight, “sorry love I’ll be right with you, I just have to have a look at what Twitter is saying about tonight’s pottery showdown otherwise I can’t relax.

I think that’s why I loved reading with my daughter last night. It can’t be rivalled by any interaction on social media; human contact will always win through. It’s wonderfully relaxing and I cherish every special moment of it.

Having said that I am considering getting her a Kindle.