Im a college professor. My advice to young people who feel hooked on tech

When I was a child, computers were a fixture in my home, from the giant Atari on which I learned my ABCs, to the Commodore Amiga that my dad used for his videography business, to the PC towers that facilitated my first forays onto the internet. But tech was still a niche hobby back then. Even in college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of my friends got by just fine without computers. 

For people in college now—namely, my students—things are decidedly different. Gadgets are everywhere, and are increasingly designed to insert themselves into every aspect of our consciousness, colonizing every spare moment of our time and attention. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have never known a world without mini-computers within arm’s reach. They learned to relate to the world through gadgets, to turn to them for everything from ent...