Broadcast excerpt·TUE, 01 SEPT 2026 · 23:29:16–23:31:09 SAST
A short excerpt captured live from SAfm. Watermarked for fair-dealing attribution, free to share.
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To sometime in dinner, he'll say, Look, everybody's on their screen. But then at some point, he's on the Facebook and he's gone. He's not part of the room anymore. Yeah. So it's not just the youngins. No, not at all. It's actually becoming quite problematic amongst senior citizens. But part of that's also because of the number of seniors that are becoming isolated. Right. And if you go to just about any retirement village or old age home, whatever you want to call them, or lifestyle center, now people that aren't active and engaging relationships.
Are becoming more and more isolated. If their eyesight's going and they can't read anymore, what are they going to do? They're going to watch a screen. If they can't hear properly, a screen's much easier to handle. You don't have to go and page through books and go and find stuff because of the convenience of it all being on your palm of your hand. Makes it a lot more palatable. But then also, we're seeing an increase in all the folk getting taken advantage of through different scams because of not being familiar with what's going on online.
And how to protect yourself. So it is a problem. And just when you've got family that's living all over the world or not close by and not having that relational interaction, the screen becomes a really great escape and a great alternate reality. And so that's massive globally. It's happening all over. Older folk getting more addicted to their screen time. And then you've got online gambling and those kind of activities as well. That's also coming into play. But my dad plays cards. I don't know, hearts. He plays hearts.
Hearts with international people, and he has conversations with these international people. But at 80, I'm just so worried about what these international people are saying to him, you know, because he's naive. Yeah, he will phone me, he'll be given an SMS will come from his bank. John, can I follow this link? And it's like, Dad, you don't follow a link on an SMS. He just doesn't get it. It's that sense of connection. And I think that's one of the big things that happened, obviously, during Congress.
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