It's not the technology, it's what you do with it

It’s always a fast-moving sector, as fashions and technologies are reinvented and revamped in the blink of the eye.

It really wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things that a television was a luxury item, and if you wanted to escape reality your options were a good book or your own imagination.

Today’s children find it almost incomprehensible that their parents couldn’t watch anything they wanted whenever they wanted, on iPlayer or DVD, let alone that their grandparents may not have had a TV at all.

They spend hours plugged in to electronic devices – texting, social networking, playing games.

If we thought our generation was one of easy wish-fulfilment, then we have nothing on them.

This has a good side and a bad side. On the one hand, we worry about them becoming targets online and that maybe they should occasionally see a sliver of daylight rather than the glow of a screen.

On the other hand, the digital age gives them access to a whole world of information and entertainment at the click of a mouse.

And if young people are spending too much time in the virtual world then we are the adults – we can always say ‘no’.

But what we can’t do is ignore technology in the hope that what we don’t fully understand might simply go away.

Children will live in a society where computers play a greater and greater part in their everyday lives and we need to make sure they know how to use them properly and safely, which won’t happen if we just look suspicious and suggest playing outside instead.

This week, I spoke to the director of a new adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four coming to the Playhouse in a couple of weeks. Orwell’s novel portrays a society in which the all-seeing government uses technology to watch and control.

It is a future where even thinking the wrong thing is a crime, and there’s nowhere to hide.

The genius of the book is that it plays on our worst fears while also highlighting how we can use precious knowledge, language and information to safeguard our rights and independence.

Orwell could not foresee the full impact and reach of digital technology but he foresaw enough to realise that it’s not the technology that matters, but how you use it.

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