And now we hear of a study done in the US that links the alarming rise in teenage suicide and depression (we’re talking doubling rates between 2007 and 2015, for girls) – and the rise in Smartphone and social media use in the same period. Gen Z kids spend hours and hours on their smartphones – connected but physically alone.

Evolution never planned for such a change to happen in less than a generation’s time. The outcome shows up in the research data: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on non-screen activities are more likely to be happy.

Last month I gave an invited keynote lecture at the XV International Conference on University Libraries at UNAM, the national university of Mexico. The conference theme was how libraries can face the challenges of the coming years, when infinite knowledge is available to anyone at the swipe of a smartphone screen, and continue to provide value to their users and to society; my keynote was to address the phenomenon of information overload and its repercussions for both libraries and users.

The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep.

What was happening is something I often observe: the younger generations –Y and Z – use many new messaging channels that their Baby Boomer parents often don’t use at all – and vice versa.

Where the older folks are primarily email users, younger people are all about Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp and so on. But the problem isn’t just that that they don’t share a channel to communicate on. There are many interesting implications here…

Five millennia of written record are about to grind to a halt. The fault, of course, is with our marvelous digital inventions: email, instant messaging, social media, and so on. So much better than a posted letter on paper, or papyrus, or parchment, or clay – as fast as an electric current or radio wave, cheap, reliable… but totally ephemeral. Clay tablets survive for millennia; paper can, absent major disaster, stay legible for many centuries. Email disappears, most of it as soon as you hit DELETE, but even the rest, the messages you archive in folders, will not survive for more than a decade or two.

An infographic about email overload and its solutions. Each and every day, 193.3 billion emails are sent around the world. More than half of those are business emails. The average person spends 28 percent of the workweek reading and responding to email, which equates to 13 hours a week. So what do we do about all this email dependence? Thankfully there are tools and strategies to cut down on inbox overload and get organized.

A study was done in Israel about the chances of a prisoner getting parole from the judge in court.

A NewDomain — Information overload. That’s the only way to describe Nintendo’s last night’s pair of lives stream events about the hotly-anticipated Nintendo Switch. But let’s not bury the lede. Pricing and Zelda were the biggest questions on gamer’s minds going into the broadcast. And Nintendo, at long last, had answers.

The Switch will retail in the US at $299. Most in the industry speculated an initial price point of $249, yet the pricing aligns nicely with the Xbox One and the PS4. Given the Switch is a hybrid gaming console and portable gaming device, I doubt many will balk at that price.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the biggest impact.

For instance, when $3.8 billion work chat app Slack announces on Wednesday that it’s adding threaded conversations, it’s not just adding a much-requested feature that makes it easier to keep team conversations on-topic and get things done.

According to tweets posted by Australian leaker Sonny Dickson, Apple’s Jan. 10 iOS 10.3 beta release might include a “Theater mode” for texting during movies.

The feature reportedly dims the display and mutes audio to make it easier to text in dark, quiet theaters.

The potential introduction of the feature signals that one of the last phone-free strongholds might finally fall to our smartphone addictions.