As a boy I managed, after much persistence, to persuade my parents to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ (the one with the black, concave keys). To do this I had to convince them it was not merely a machine on which to play games but an important tool that would teach me computer programming and aid my schoolwork. It did nothing of the sort, of course, making my own name appear repeatedly and inelegantly (10 PRINT "Saptarshi Ray"; 20 GOTO 10) was all I achieved other than spending hours playing the likes of Jet Set Willy and Gunfright.

The deception was one propagated by most of my generation and most parents were unknowingly complicit. We just wanted to play games but they didn't want to admit they were simply buying us a toy, but via our youthful vantage point of technical knowledge we helped assuage their guilt.

Now the reverse seems true. If you believe the hype of Apple, Microsoft, Sony and their ilk, work or practical use of any kind is merely a byproduct of every gadget and gizmo's ability to make our lives that little bit more zany, wacky or cool. I recently saw a newspaper advert for a satnav-capable mobile phone, the strapline for which was something along the lines of: "Now you'll always be able to find the pub your mates are drinking in."

The latest TV ads for the iPad, iPhone, laptops and cameraphones dazzle us with claims that you can access Facebook or YouTube quicker than ever. That you can download music and films faster than before, and that you can tweet all of this in an instant.

Advertising aimed at the youth market is nothing new, but these are apparently aimed at everyone. Somewhere along the way, consumer technology seems to have swung from what it can do to make our lives better, to what it can exclusively do to make our lives more fun. Surely it can do both?

Mobile phones have migrated from a demographic of bombastic bankers and estate agents clinching deals, to teenagers and adults eager to use them to giggle at videos or contact people they see regularly anyway.

Only a few years ago, advances in broadband, Wi-Fi, shadow servers and the like were seen as a step towards allowing people to work from anywhere. We were told phonecalls of immense clarity could be made to your office in San Francisco while you were on a train in Shanghai; you could access your files in Birmingham from an internet cafe in Kuala Lumpur. Technology meant you could manage your work-play ratio so much better. The play now seems to eclipse the work.

I am not against this development: I like Facebook, I like Twitter, I like YouTube and the way the online environment's relative irreverence has seeped into newsrooms and companies and made them a bit less stuffy. But I fall short of nostalgia for the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, synonymous as it is with table football and laidback accountants with headsets on orange beanbags. Where we are now seems like a hangover of that period.

Are we really becoming more frivolous as a society? Is the phenomenon of parents having flashier toys than their children a welcome or worrying development? Obviously working in the media is a biased sample, journalists are encouraged to tweet, post or forward funny and unusual material. And inversely, social media has been harnessed to help report some powerful stories by the public – such as Wikileaks' footage of a Baghdad air strike or Twitter's role in the protest after the Iranian elections. But at what point did we stop thinking that advances in communications were primarily to aid a greater progress?

On the one hand we are told to be more serious about the environment, carbon cost, lose our apathy towards politics and economics, hold big business to account, follow medical breakthroughs and the plight of farmers and workers in developing nations; yet on the other, we are driven to embrace our inner geeky child as technology becomes more portable and more convenient. Each time, the marketing pushes to become less uptight, more infantile – more teenage boy.

I applaud the ingenuity behind developments in consumer technology, but surely there is a market for each new product beyond man-boys and fanboys? I wonder if we couldn't be shown their uses beyond ensuring we don't end up in the wrong pub.