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Honestly, I'd say somewhere around six or seven hours a day, most of it on my phone — I rely on it for work emails, keeping in touch with colleagues, and the odd scroll through social media whenever I get a spare moment. Weekends tend to push that even higher, since I end up watching videos and catching up on the news online.

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Probably my laptop — I depend on it for pretty much everything, from studying and work to keeping in touch with family who live abroad. Without it, I genuinely wouldn't know how to organise my day.

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That would be genuinely difficult for me, to be honest. I rely on the internet for my job, so without a connection I couldn't send my work or check my messages. A short holiday off-grid would be fine, but a full week without internet — I think that would be seriously stressful.

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In the first picture, a group of friends are sitting together, yet everyone is absorbed in their own phone and nobody's actually talking. In the second, people are having a genuine conversation — smiling, looking into each other's eyes. The contrast is striking: the first group is physically together but not really connected, while the second looks far more engaged and present.

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I think it's a bit of both, honestly. On one hand, technology makes communication faster — you can text someone on the other side of the world in a split second. On the other hand, I feel people are losing the habit of having deep conversations, because it's so much easier to send an emoji than to actually talk about your feelings.

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Yes, definitely — during family dinners, for example, everyone ends up checking their phones instead of talking, myself included sometimes. We don't really discuss our day like we used to; we just scroll and show each other funny videos. It's becoming a real problem in my own family, not just something I notice in other people.

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The biggest benefit of technology, I'd say, is how it connects people across huge distances and transforms medicine — doctors can now diagnose diseases far faster with specialised software, which saves countless lives every year. It's also made education more accessible than ever: anyone with an internet connection can learn almost anything for free, which is a genuinely remarkable shift for society. That said, there are serious problems too. The biggest, in my view, is that people have become overly dependent — many can't even find their way without GPS, or have forgotten how to communicate face to face. Cybercrime is another growing issue: people can lose money or personal information very easily if they're not careful. As for balance, I think the key is setting clear boundaries — putting the phone away at certain times and making sure real-world activities don't get crowded out.

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I'd argue technology is mostly a solution rather than a problem. In medicine, for instance, vaccines were developed remarkably fast thanks to new technology, and that saved millions of lives during the pandemic. Renewable energy, like solar power, is also getting cheaper because of technological progress, which could make a real difference against climate change. And in everyday life, technology gives us opportunities our parents never had, like studying online from anywhere in the world, for free. That said, there's a negative side too — cybercrime, jobs lost to automation, and the argument that we're becoming less social. But on balance, I still think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, since without technology we simply couldn't tackle problems on the scale of disease or poverty.