“Park Jung-in, an 11-year-old South Korean, sleeps with her Android smartphone instead of a teddy bear. When the screen beams with a morning alarm, she wakes up, picks up her glasses and scrolls through tens of unread messages from friends, shaking off drowsiness,” begins an article published in the Associated Press about South Korea’s new pandemic: Gadget addiction.
South Korea’s government conducted a survey earlier this year in order to estimate how many people are addicted to their smartphones. The survey found that roughly 2.55 million South Koreans suffer from gadget addiction, spending over 8 hours a day on their smartphones and tablets. It has become such a problem that the government has decided to step in, implementing mandatory classes for children as young as three to deal with the problem. In addition, some schools are requiring students to hand over their smartphones when they begin class each day. Students then pick up their respective smartphones as they leave school at the end of the day. Meanwhile, the government plans to digitize all textbooks from 2015 and base all schooling around tablet computers.
[Via phys.org]
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Claudia McNeilly writes for the Toronto Standard. You can follow her on twitter at @claudiamcneilly
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