Opinion | Why We Need Fairy Tales in the Digital Age - The New York Times

She’s in a trance, her attention on nothing in particular — just the screen. Is she working? Wandering? Speaking to someone, or being spoken to? I don’t know. My toddler calls out to her, “Tía! Tía!” and without looking up, she coos his name. For more than a decade, the language of addiction has shaped how we understand our relationship with the internet. We talk about dopamine hits and rewired brains. We count the hours lost online as if they’re milligrams of oxycodone. We prescribe digital detoxes and “tech sobriety,” and we confess to falling off the wagon when we re-download Instagram. In an odd way, the addiction metaphor is comforting. It promises that what we’re experiencing can be neatly diagnosed, treated, even cured. And the addiction story does capture something real about our experience of tech — the compulsion, the phantom buzz in your pocket, the reflex to check your phone when you know nothing is there. But while it tells us we’ve gone too far, the story fails to help us

She’s in a trance, her attention on nothing in particular — just the screen. Is she working? Wandering? Speaking to someone, or being spoken to? I don’t know. My toddler calls out to her, “Tía! Tía!” and without looking up, she coos his name. For more than a decade, the language of addiction has shaped how we understand our relationship with the internet. We talk about dopamine hits and rewired brains. We count the hours lost online as if they’re milligrams of oxycodone. We prescribe digital detoxes and “tech sobriety,” and we confess to falling off the wagon when we re-download Instagram. In