It's too tempting to plug into entertainment all the time

There's much to amuse at our fingertips - we've never had it so good. But is it good for the soul?

I have written before about my concerns over how technology - via PCs, phones, tablets and so on - is driving the family household into separate, isolated cantons. This is the way the robots are taking over - rather than lurid inventions of 1950s sci-fi imagination, they are chainging us, in isolation, to our private screens, with our consent. A new culture is emerging, and whining and bitching from me isn't going to stop it. C'est la vie.

However, my concern this week isn't so much the sheer scale of electronic integration, but what is actually being watched. I'm not talking about pornography or junk TV - although that is part of it. No, it's the vast pool of available entertainment - much of it very good - that worries me. It is a pool in which we are in danger of drowning, to the sound of our own laughter and the spectacle of our own fascination.

When Neil Postman published his seminal book on media consumption, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1985, he didn't know the half of it. Postman was worried about the dumbing down effect of television - he didn't know that by this time, we would all have not merely television but interactive screens in our pockets, our bags, our rooms. He was particularly concerned about the way news was being turned into entertainment - but he did not envisage a world in which news itself becomes an optional add-on to the infinite possibilities for online amusement.

I don't feel apocalyptic about it. So far as I can make out, all the entertainment saturation has not crippled the personalities of my 13 and nine-year-old, despite their immersion in electronic media. They still read books and they still seem reasonably adept with interacting with other human beings on those rare occasions when they choose to exercise that option.

Also there is the reasonably convincing argument that the modern screen generation is not as passive as the TV generation, because of interactivity. Building a world with The Sims, or playing Mathletics against opponents on the other side of the world may well be healthier for the mind than slumping in front of the TV to watch Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

Yet the distinction between entertainment, art and information remains - and the potential to build bridges between the three is more limited than ever. Entertainment - which I greatly enjoy - essentially keeps you amused and distracted. Art connects you with a different level of reality, what I unapologetically call the soul - and art is not always comfortable or easy in the way entertainments is. Likewise news.

As someone from a culture-free working class background, I would never have discovered my love of, say, Harold Pinter had it not been for the fact that there was nothing else to watch on TV; I would have never have discovered Shakespeare if the choices had been unlimited in the way they are now - because Pinter and Shakespeare require effort, and why make effort if you don't have to? Serious documentaries were also part of my staple diet. But no one has to swallow these pills any more. Do the New Screenophiles watch documentaries or the news on their smartphones? I doubt it. When there were just a few TV channels, one had little choice.

The art galleries and theaters are still full, so I don't think people are going to melt into their screens just yet. The internet is probably more stimulating to the imagination than not. Entertainment, I accept, is not a drug - but it is a temptation, and more of a temptation, because of its infinite availability, then ever before.

To look away from anything uncomfortable and challenging has never been easier. Perhaps, in a harsh world, that is a blessing. But it is a blessing that, to my mind, must always be mixed with a warning - that the human soul requires more than comedy, reality TV, YouTubers, video games and dancing cats to fully nourish it.