Cruz attends a photocall for the film “Wasp Network” on September 1, 2019 presented in competition during the 76th Venice Film Festival at Venice Lido. (AFP)
Hollywood star Penelope Cruz warned on Sunday that technology was driving high anxiety that would one day make “all our brains explode.”
The Spanish mother-of-two said she was worried about how children’s mental health and development were being affected by the ubiquity of tech.
“I have my personal war with it,” she told reporters at the Venice film festival.
“I wish we could have lived in the 1990s for a little longer. For mental health issues that would have helped a lot, because I think things are going at a speed that we are unprepared for,” said the actress.
Cruz, 45, who is starring in “Wasp Network,” a thriller about five Cuban undercover agents who became heroes for infiltrating radical exile networks in Florida, said tech was coming to utterly dominate children’s lives, hogging their time and imaginations.
“This might seem like an exaggeration to other people, but I am convinced that we were raised with a different relationships with technology,” she said.
“Right now children and teenagers are in contact so much with electronics and it takes the time away from children to learn to play, to have conversations, to be at a table having dinner talking to their family, or to be bored - which is something important we all should learn as children,” the actress said.
Cruz, who has an eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter with fellow Spanish star Javier Bardem, said “our lives were being swallowed up by it.”
Tech’s daily dominance was “not only affecting children, but all of us.... It is something that is creating a lot of general anxiety and I wonder if this continues all of our brains are just going to explode,” said the actress, who made her name in “Jamon, Jamon” when she was only 15.
Cruz said that she hoped that rising fears about what we are doing to the planet would chime with a harder look at what tech was doing to us.
“I hope that there will be a movement for people to live in a different way, that will value a different pace, which leads us to the other big issue, what happens to the environment,” she added.
