Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Children living in urban environments rarely see the sun rise or set and cannot tell the difference between east and west. When I volunteered to go into my local school to teach kids about direction, I found they struggled to distinguish north from south and east from west – though they could do so if allowed to use their phones.

Since 2005, when Google Maps was launched claiming it would help users get from A to B and then, three years later, when the iPhone 3G was released featuring “live” location, the online tech giants stated that today’s digital native kids would be the first generation who would not know what it meant to get lost. But is that a good thing? Their horizons and orientation, like their hippocampi, are shrinking with the collusion of online providers. In four generations children have gone from roaming up to six miles from home to an average of just 300 yards. Even before Covid, surveys found that three-quarters of children spent less time outdoors than prison inmates. Many parents know the subsequent 50% rise in agoraphobia has profoundly affected children’s mental and physical health. But it also drives biophobia, an avoidance, even fear of the natural world. If we come to dread nature, the result is an indifference, even hostility, towards environmental conservation.

Wherever kids do travel they are probably following the blue dot on their phone screen, showing them the way without reference to the world around them. Maps have never been more accessible in the palm of our hands on our phones, but they are as much a tyranny as a liberation. Our phones now map us, harvesting our online likes and dislikes.

Current studies suggest a link between this so-called developmental topographical disorientation and mental health, as online experiences lead to a digitally poisoned awareness of space and place. We are becoming, quite literally, disoriented in a digital world where we have given up on tools that enhance our cognitive abilities, like paper maps and magnetic compasses that enabled us to navigate and orient ourselves in tandem with the physical world. We have retreated from using the spatial skills that sustained us for millennia. No wonder our sense of being lost is existential as much as directional.’ (from the Guardian)

I am old fashioned in this regard, but I like to be out and about without needing to be guided at all times. And, as I child, I had plenty of freedom to roam, especially once I had a racing bike at the age of twelve.