Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at M.I.T., has interviewed hundreds of people of all ages about their daily fixations on social media and new technologies like smartphones and tablets. In a recent interview with Scientific American, Turkle is worried that there's at least one hidden cost to our addiction to technology—the loss of solitude. Turkle says:

I do some of my fieldwork at stop signs, at checkout lines at supermarkets. Give people even a second, and they're doing something with their phone. Every bit of research says people's capacity to be alone is disappearing. What can happen is that you lose that moment to have a daydream, or to cast an eye inward. Instead, you look to the outside.

Solitude is the precondition of having a conversation with yourself. This capacity to be with yourself and discover yourself is the bedrock of development. But now, from the youngest age—even two, or three, or four—children are given technology that removes solitude by giving them something externally distracting. That makes it harder, ironically, to form true relationships. I have so many examples of children who will be talking with their parents, something will come up, and the parent will go online to search, and the kids will say "Daddy, stop Googling. I just want to talk to you."