Ask HN: What is the price of distraction?

Modern life is filled with distractions. It started with news papers, radio, telephone, television and the now biggest of them all the omnipresent internet connected smartphone.

Is there a hidden price for all these things?

What is lost, when 95% of your young generation is preoccupied with distractive/addictive content 24/7. What is lost when they are robbed of their idle thoughts...

Distraction from what exactly? I hear you asking.

Distraction from oneself, if I may say so. Time spent in thoughts of their own creation and fancy.

Where did all the great ideas of the past came from. Where did that initial spark, that made the great philosophers, the great poets, great writers, great thinkers and great revolutions/reforms came from.

How many of those would have been lost, if those people had access to a television or smartphone from their infancy?

Would these great talents have emerged no matter what?

One last question.

If you are offered a chance to take smart phone and internet to a time 300 years before with one catch. You will lose the works of Einstein, Shakespeare, Beethoven and all great people of the past in the present day, but you get to make the lives of a million people better, because they can have google maps for easy navigation, Facebook for chit chat, youtube for cat videos and porn.

Will you do it? The question is not meant to imply that taking those things to the past will make use loose all those creativity. But instead, it is just to put in perspective the conveniences things we perceive as essential and losses that we are too oblivious to...