6 ways to make smartphones more humane — and less addictive
6 ways to make smartphones more humane — and less
addictive
39% of millennials say they interact more with their
phones than with their loved ones
What if your phone was smart enough to leave you alone
when you wanted to be in the moment?
By LESLIE ALBRECHT Published: Jan 8, 2018 10:27 a.m. ET
A thousand dollars is a lot to pay for a device whose
mere presence makes us dumber — according to one recent study — but that’s the
price tag for Apple’s newest iPhone. Its facial recognition and wireless charging
make it more enticing than ever for Apple fans.
But what if our phones had built-in features to help us
use them less?
Some big Apple investors are now asking the company to
address the issue of smartphone addiction among young people.
With 39% of millennials interacting more with their
phones than with their loved ones (according to one survey), MarketWatch talked
with experts about how phones could be designed to grab less of our attention.
Here’s a look at some of their ideas.
Sleep mode during
family time and other activities
What if, based on your calendar entries, your phone would
know to leave you alone at certain times -- say, during yoga class, dinner with
your family, or when you’re in a meeting or focusing on an important project?
“It would be really cool if it would synchronize with
your calendar and when you were doing something that’s not email time or
texting time, it would go into some version of sleep mode,” said Julie
Morgenstern, author of “Never Check Email in the Morning.”
The phone would still work for phone calls, but people
trying to reach you via text or email would be greeted with a personalized
message like, “I’m not available now, but I’ll get back to you after 3 p.m.”
That would help users feel like they weren’t entirely dropping out of
communication — a fear that keeps many glued to their phones, Morgenstern said.
Apple is making some moves in this direction. The new
iPhone will have a “do not disturb” setting to keep people from texting while
driving — one of many potentially life-saving tools found on smartphones.
Auto-reply for
text messages
Why be expected to immediately respond to texts
immediately 24/7? “For our phones to be more humane, we should have the
opportunity to respond that we’re not available,” said Francine Hermelin,
creative director of National Day of Unplugging, an annual event where people
put down their devices for a 24-hour “sabbath” from technology. iPhones don’t
currently have this auto-reply function, but there’s an app called Lil Space
that lets Android users do it. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment
for this story.) Research has shown that it takes more than 20 minutes for our
brains to refocus after we’ve been interrupted by something as seemingly
innocuous as a text message.
On-screen timer to
tell you exactly how long you’ve been on your phone
Apps like Moment help track phone use, but it might help
people use their phones less if there were a built-in timer on every phone
screen that continuously told them how many minutes they’ve frittered away
liking Facebook posts about friends’ vacations, suggested Morgenstern. The
iPhone does tell you when it’s time for bed, so you can get your desired amount
of sleep. This idea would go one step further and make users more aware of the
time they spend on their phone.
Program an
inspirational message to yourself
What if, when you were using your phone, a message
occasionally popped up that said, “What’s the best use of your time right now?”
or “Be present now.” Little nudges could help us stay focused and productive,
Morgenstern said. It would be similar to this website. Except with these
digital pop-up fridge magnet messages of inspiration, you wouldn’t have to
search for them.
Screens that turn
gray and matte
One way to make phones less alluring: Make the screen
less pretty and shiny. There could be a function like sleep mode that would
make the screen resemble a Kindle screen, dull and somewhat lifeless. “If the
screen shifted to that, it would not be pulling at you,” Morgenstern said.
A tool that tells
you what you did with your phone today — and what you didn’t do
How about a function that measures “how my phone is
distracting me from my actual intention,” Hermelin suggested. “I check my phone
to see what time it is and I fall into an email rabbit hole,” Hermelin said. If
there were a way to see all the times your phone had hijacked your attention,
you might be less likely to get distracted by it, she said. Fitbit watches can
already do that to show how many calories you have burned in any given day.
This would be like that, but for your brain.
Of course, there’s only so much phone makers can do,
noted Adam Alter, author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and
the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.”
“Smartphones are just vehicles for apps and other
content; the engines of addiction are the apps themselves,” Alter told
MarketWatch in an email. To prevent addiction, “the best I could imagine is
that phone developers limit the sorts of things they’ll allow from app
producers,” he said.
For instance, manufacturers could forbid the “predatory
gaming practice of asking people to pay money at a critical point in a game,
when they feel it’s impossible to say no — for example, after investing 20
hours in the game and then discovering that to have any chance of conquering a
particular level you’ll need a weapon that costs $10,” Alter said. “Beyond
regulating the content of specific apps, I’m not sure phone developers
themselves could do much.”
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