To be fair, for most people, a smartphone may be their only 'personal computer' - sure, they may or may not work a desk job where they use something with a keyboard, but most of the computing they do on their own time will be on that small (if not getting any smaller...) screen. Does that appeal to me? No, not really, I appreciate having a browser in my pocket sometimes, but I don't watch much in the way of videos or even game on my phone. But we're (mostly) technologists here, and I would think that we tend to feel that using computers is generally good / interesting / empowering. Can it also be pathological? Clearly yes. We have some evidence, accident rates increasing[1] as people can't stop checking their feeds for example. So that's a concrete social problem. But I am less sure about the impact on children - we've had several generations which grew up staring at TVs for hours a day, which may not have done us any favors, but it didn't cause the end of civilization either...

1: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/distracted-dri...