How technology is changing our likes and loves It might be set in the future, but the idea seems almost dated - because we've long been in love with our devices. We take them to dinner, to bed and on holiday, and let them pacify our children. One in 10 of us even admits to taking our tablet to what Ofcom's survey calls "the bathroom." We stroke and coo at the latest versions as if they were kittens. Yet if you're anything like me, that love affair comes with a side of doubt, concerns not just about how much all these devices may be affecting our relationships, but whether they might also be changing our minds, fundamentally, at a chemical level. That said, if anyone's drunk the Kool-Aid, it's me. I'm on Facebook, Pinterest, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, and even wrote a book extolling the world-changing virtues of tweeting. I've long accepted the idea that anyone who really wanted to spy on my email probably could. But that underlying suspicion is mostly cancelled out by a certain fondness, because I am heavily indebted to technology. Like many who have moved far from home or, in my case, lived abroad, Facebook has helped me maintain my relationships with friends and family through the everyday minutiae of their lives, with few expensive long-distance calls required. And were it not for internet dating, I'd never have met my husband - and the proportion of my circle who can say the same is far higher than the average of 20 per cent for heterosexual couples. For gay couples, it goes up to 70 per cent. Technology has, without question, transformed the way we make those connections - and there is positive research on how strong those connections can be. A University of Chicago study of 19,000 people found that married couples who met online were on average slightly happier, and slightly less likely to break up than the ones who met in the old-fashioned way. But to me, it still feels as if there's a stigma, that it's somehow inferior to being set up by a cousin or snogging the person on the next bar stool. And I know from experience that it requires focus to make the leap from online to off: the tyranny of choice on the likes of Match.com can induce a plenty-more-fish mentality, making it harder to settle for any one person. Of course, the technology backlash has been under way for some time. In 2010 San Francisco, the tech capital of the world, was getting sick of it, with cafés there at the forefront of an anti-Wi-Fi trend, with the aim of promoting conversation, rather than solo working. And it was a San Franciscan, Brian Perez, who invented the phone-stack game, where they're piled on a restaurant table and the first person to cave into temptation pays the entire bill. It's also not just at the cinema where basic etiquette is having to be overtly enforced. At a wedding I went to last year, the rabbi asked for our phones to be put away so that the congregation could be truly present. And while it's normal now - and to most, entirely acceptable - to receive a baby announcement by text, it's increasingly common for it to have a postscript asking, "pls refrain from facebooking the news" (as one of my friends recently sent to her close circle) so that the new parents can ensure everyone hears it directly from them. My friend and I know two women whose pregnancy announcements were Facebook-gazumped by third parties, so I could see why she'd err on the side of caution. And anyone who's spent time on Twitter has reason to believe our most basic of social contracts, to treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves, is being undermined, if only by a very shouty few. "Research shows a significant decline in empathy and an increase in narcissism among young people compared to the previous generation," says Dr Jim Taylor, a psychologist and the author of Raising Generation Tech. We can't determine whether the cause is social media and technology, but it's occurred pretty much coincidentally with the emergence of the internet. I'm not a Luddite or anti-technology - I couldn't live without it. It's how it's used that matters, and there's been no time to consider the ramifications on our lives. Taylor has concerns that the so-called "digital natives," the generation who have grown up not knowing a world without the internet, are at a very young age "engaging in "impression management." Their self-identities are being shaped by their perception of what's required of them to be accepted by the outside world," with the result they are creating a "false self." He also cites research showing that they're losing their ability to focus. That last point might seem like common sense, with so many digital distractions, but it's contentious - as was the link made by the neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield in 2011 between "an increase in autistic [sic] spectrum disorders" and "the rise in the appeal of Twitter." Recent years have indeed seen increased diagnoses of both attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and ASD but, say scientists, they could be just that: increased diagnoses - not an increase in prevalence. And while America has Internet and Tech Addiction Anonymous, you won't find "internet addiction" in the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: it isn't a recognised condition. Once unpicked, much of the scaremongering appears to be correlation, not causation. In fact, scientists are increasingly finding evidence that shoot-em-up video games, which have been blamed for all manner of societal ills, right up to mass shootings, are actually good for us. There is plenty of study-based evidence that regular use has lasting, positive effects on concentration and spatial skills and can improve vision. And an APA review due out in 2014 is set to show that strategic games improve problem-solving, simple games can ward off anxiety, and multi-player games may promote social skills. But it's hard to shake the feeling that, somehow, all this time spent online might not be good for our relationships. We seem to prize quantity over quality, not just in the volume of daily digital interactions, but in the number of people with whom we communicate. Who hasn't compared their own online follower or friends tally to a new connection, and felt their heart sink or sing depending on whose was higher? One friend of mine has 939 Facebook friends, and swears that each and every one is a friend offline as well. Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, begs to differ. There's a number named after him - Dunbar's Number, which refers to the average number of relationships any one person can maintain. It's more a concept than a precise figure but it averages out at 150: the typical size of a hunter-gatherer community and of villages in the Domesday Book. And despite everything, he says, it hasn't changed. There's a study of around a million Facebook profiles looking at the number of friends, and there's a huge bump in the middle: around 90 per cent have between about 100 and 300 friends. Facebook is a bit misleading, because it allows you to call anybody your friend - including acquaintances. In real life, something like 40 per cent of our total social effort is directed to an inner core of five relationships, friends and family. Although that number increased a bit between the people with small and large numbers of friends, it was nothing like in proportion - it went up to about 10. While the size of our circle may be largely unchanged by all the texting, emailing and social networking we engage in to nurture it, the quality of our interactions is not the same, says Dunbar. To his surprise, however, his studies show video chat to be as satisfying as face-to-face interaction. I hadn't expected Skype to be so good because it's still rather clunky, but it allows you to have a much faster, richer experience. You see the smile breaking as you tell the joke, whereas jokes notoriously fall flat on email. They have to be very funny to elicit a smile. This is important because "what seems to be critical in creating our relationships is the role of endorphins and neuropeptides in the brain, and these are predominantly triggered by laughter or physical activities like dancing or rugby. Things like Facebook do allow us to slow down the natural rate of decay of relationships when there's physical separation, but if you don't meet up, they are not going to stop it dying. It might take more work, but for those separated by long distances, there are myriad ways to try to prevent that decay - or even foster genuine connection. The video-call iPad app Ustyme, for example, allows family members to read to or play games with children on the other side of the planet. But it doesn't necessarily take anything that complicated. Stef Sullivan Rewis, a web developer who was the first person to get engaged via tweet in 2008, now lives in Arizona with her husband, but when they met they lived in different states and built their relationship via Skype, instant message and Twitter. "If he was in a different time zone, he'd Skype me after dinner, put his computer next to his bed and go to sleep with it on, so I'd have him in the corner of my screen," she says. Back in the olden days, it would have been impossible, but we were able to stay connected. Still, there is one aspect of technology's impact on our relationships that worries experts, and it's the ease with which we can hit quit. Don't like the way that Twitter conversation is going? Block them. Gone off your new girlfriend? Tell her by text. And if, as Taylor worries, "parents are now so terrified of their kids being abducted" that they'd rather they were at home chatting to friends by text than playing in the park, then we could all be sitting on a ticking time bomb. "In real life, if someone kicks sand in your eye, you have to learn how to negotiate some kind of compromise - you can't get out of the sand pit," says Dunbar. Online "you can just pull the plug. You are not forced to deal with complex and difficult social situations. The question then is: if you don't have that learning experience through childhood and especially teenage-hood, will you end up socially scarred? These skills take time to learn - it seems to be about 25 years before processing social skills become automated. Most research is done over a long time, so it will be a generation before the consequences of this come to the fore, but they could be appalling: even more fragmented, dysfunctional societies. Social cohesion is bad enough as it is. In the meantime, the number of internet-connected devices that creep into the average home climbs ever higher: at last count, mine had 10. There are still a handful of Facebook refuseniks, like two thirds of my family, whom the rest of us must still phone or email with news, and the handful of households (17 per cent and shrinking) in Britain that are internet-free. But to the children who make pop videos on their phones, who accept cyberbullying as part of the bargain of being able to have a social life, who can't grasp the idea that we once couldn't pause live television, who have an entirely different, fast-vanishing concept of privacy - to them, those strange technology-averse relicts might as well have their fingers in a dam, for all the good they think they're doing.