A NEW study has found that screen time is not intrinsically bad for children's health, although it is linked to obesity and mental health issues.

In addition the study, the Government is producing guidelines for how much time kids should spend on social media.

But it's not just youngsters who are affected by our obsession with technology, more and more adults are also glued to their devices.

I recently heard that Tolstoy would never have been able to write War and Peace if he was alive today, with all of the distractions around us.

I don't know if there's any truth to this but it did make me question how our relationship with technology is changing us.

It was once widely believed that innovations such as modern conveniences and email would cut our workloads and create more leisure time.

However, while they have made us more productive, all of the extra hours they have produced appear to have been filled with more work.

In the same vein, social media was supposed to bring us closer together, but for many it has resulted in loneliness and mental illness.

On top of this, there is the insidious hoarding of social media users' data, which companies such as Facebook have become involved in.

Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr won the Orwell Prize last year for her exposé on how Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of millions of Facebook users in a bid to influence the US election.

Her reporting resulted in Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, apologising.

But it would be naive to think that this has stopped - nothing is free online, we are all paying for information, by handing over data about ourselves... even on news websites.

I think it's fair to say that what we have seen so far is the thin end of the wedge, in terms of infringement of privacy.

But there is a solution to all of these problems - and that is to put our devices down.

'Digital detoxes' have become increasingly popular in recent years and it's easy to see why.

More and more people are starting to realise the benefits of the physical world - the benefits of exercise, speaking face-to-face, and even... picking up a newspaper.