You are your phone

Even getting that was a bit of a hassle and they only gave me the small loan (around $5000) because my income and expenses clearly showed I shouldn't have any issues paying for it. Outside of some minor low-interest student loan debt in the $10k range, I just don't have much history.

If I wanted to get a better credit card or some other loan/line of credit, I'd have a harder time getting approved for decent terms because I simply don't like to deal with debt. Like you, this makes me a minority (or at least a less desirable customer for lenders). I'd imagine it's a similar case. Some might decline to do business with me. Others might offer worse terms.

It's kinda unfortunate because in order to prove my creditworthiness, it would seem I need to do things that I consider less financially wise (take out car loans or other lines of credit to establish a record of paying them off).

Yes. Coke, McDonalds, The Gap and every other consumer company try like hell to create involuntary behaviors in people all the time.

is it ethical to judge users for behaviours deliberately created in them by applications?

Yes. Other than the specificity of the words "by applications", this is what credit scores are designed to do. Madison Avenue in deliberately trying to create behaviors in all of us. A credit rating measures a person's ability to resist that when it isn't financially sound.

should the attention of users be better protected?

No, at least not for adults of sound mind. People are free to make their own decisions, whether that's doing a keg stand or spending 3 hours clicking a button on Farmville. People can be warned about potential dangers, but it probably won't have much of an effect.

can we start developing consumer applications that aren't deliberately designed to capitalise on the attention of their users?

Yes. Or at least, you and anyone else who wants to can. But making products that people use frequently is a common definition of success. Most comapnies aren't going to pass that up because some people have addictive personalities.

how can we educate people to navigate a world of applications designed to hold and capitalise on their attention?

Good luck with that. Education vs the Forces of Capitalism. Winner: Capitalism.

Sounds impossible ;-)

I'm sure conclusions can equally be drawn from the way people try to micromanage their phone behaviors....

fwiw, this is basically the same feeling that alcoholics and other drugs addicts feel when considering giving up alcohol/drugs. "how will i ever cope? i'll be missing out on so much. i won't be able to socialize." like literally, the same sequence of thoughts. the. exact. same.

the 'craving' is the same also. for those of you who don't have addictive personalities, just imagine the feeling when you get up in the middle of the night, thirsty. that feeling of desperately wanting water is what you are fighting with addiction. it's the same mechanism, hijacked by a substance/activity and sent into overdrive. that helpless compulsive feeling that only has one resolution... yeah. same shit different day.

addiction is some pretty fascinating stuff. i always get a kick out of the people who say it's easy to stop whatever you're addicted to. lucky bastards, and they don't even know it.

Now get used to putting your phone down and forgetting about it. My phone exists on demand for me, not the other way 'round. So it might sit on my desk or on my coffee table but it's almost always on silent/do-not-disturb (with the except of a few key contacts like my wife who are allowed to bug me).

A smartphone is an incredible tool. Having access to the internet wherever you are has immense value. Being able to communicate with folks on-demand is very useful. But it shouldn't control your life. So learn to use the tool as just that, a tool, rather than a tether. It can be done!

Basically, it's setting expectations that a dumb-phone text or phone call is how to get you if it's urgent, otherwise you'll follow up sometime in the next 24 hours.

If I use a smartphone again, it's going to be exactly for Uber, Facebook Messenger (basically texting for people I don't want to give my phone number to), and Spotify.

As far as how to wean yourself from your smartphone, I suggest blocking out some time and putting your phone on airplane mode or powered off entirely.

One day, my tablet and my phone were both getting kind of slow after an Android update. I wiped them both back to factory settings, and when I was about to re-install all my apps, I paused for a minute and thought "fuck it, let's not". No more twitter, no more Chrome, no more Slack, no more anything on my phone. And seriously, I don't miss it. For a while I still had the reflex of pulling out my phone, realized that I didn't have twitter installed, and put it back in my pocket. Now, I don't even think about it, and sometimes even forget it at home.

Another thing I do, I sometimes deliberately not plug it, it dies during the night and I can't use it for a while.

Sorry, I don't think there is a magic recipe here.

My line of reasoning went in that I'm buying a general-purpose computing device that has been deliberately constrained to make it as undesirable as possible to actually use like a general-purpose computing device. Why would I want it, when I have a perfectly good IBM PC-compatible/Wintel box at home? For telephony purposes, I've always used dumb cells running some Java ME bare-bones interface or similar. And so I continue to do. It's not like I get cravings to check my feeds if I'm away for a few hours.

On the other hand, the fact that I also feel no need to use any applications associated with the "sharing economy" probably helps, too.

Is it even possible to do so working in a tech field?

Absolutely.

I use social media very little, and only Twitter for sports and other news. I read a lot on my phone (Pocket, HN, Feedly), and I use it as my sole GPS, my sole camera, and my only physical phone.

I hate that I tend to use every idle minute reading or fiddling with it, and it's something I try often to be cognizant of. But, admittedly, I don't do well with it. I'm fairly addicted to using it to stave off boredom.

I would be curious to know if those who have succeeded in giving up their smartphone for a long period of time just replaced their idle time with something else - iPad, laptop, video games, etc. or did they genuinely reduce their "connected" time?

When I re-integrated into professional life, I got a pay-per-minute burner smartphone to cover me for the infrequent cases when I need to make a call or get directions, and I don't have wifi.

Wifi is so ubiquitous for me now (at work, at home, at restaurants/bars/etc) that adding a cell phone does nothing more but give me opportunity to be distracted when I out in the world, living life.

When I had a smartphone that was always connected, I would turn to it for novelty at the faintest hint of boredom. Not having it available has unconditioned that behavior.

So yes, while I still maintain a smart device that has my music and that I can do things with through wifi, eliminating my constant connection to the digital world has been a net positive for me.

Introducing some challenge is a good way to figure out what is really important to you. If you are willing to charge through obstacles to have something, then it probably does actually off value to your life (barring addiction, etc). Then later, take the obstacles out of the way of the good, and stop doing the bad.

Learning there actually are a bunch of people living without smartphones (or leaving them in their pockets) was interesting to see. I didn't really notice there were as many people connecting with each other when I was looking at my screen. Breaking completely from smartphone use for an extended period was necessary for me to start experiencing the value of looking around instead of taking every moment of free time to find some "interesting" new piece of information. However, having the dumb phone was really annoying when it came to texting (T9!), managing contacts, saving messages, viewing voicemail, and obviously no apps. There is a reason basically anyone who has the means wants a smartphone. From my experience, the only benefit of a dumb phone is more time to do what is important to you.

I live in the bay area and work in tech, so it is definitely possible. Now I have a smartphone again, but like other posters, I barely have any apps compared to standard user, and turn almost all notifications off. At the time, I got a "feature" phone for $20 and a $6 per month no contract plan. It is a very cheap experiment to run if you want to try! Just leave your smartphone at home for a week...

The fact can no longer be avoided: You are your phone. The pattern of smartphone use is the pattern of the self. This is who you are:

Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’ phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found, “generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone reveals more than you think:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit. Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers, working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had electricity.”

I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and trustworthiness. The tell-tale phone reveals all. Take a look at that chart again:

Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

It shows the pattern of one person’s smartphone use over a two-week period, beginning late on a Friday afternoon. Each vertical line represents a single use of the phone, the width of the line showing how long the use extended. The chart comes from a new study on phone use, published in PLOS ONE. Four UK researchers installed a usage-tracking app on the smartphones of twenty-three students and staff members at the University of Lincoln, and then examined the data after two weeks. They discovered that “a simple measure — recording when the phone is in use — can provide a vast array of information about an individual’s daily routine.” Data on phone use, to take a simple example, provides “a non-invasive indication of sleep length.” All but one of the test subjects used their phones as an alarm clock on weekdays, and all of them without exception reported that the last thing they do before going to sleep is to check their phone. Gaps in use during the day are also good indicators of naps.

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought. “For exploring checking behaviours,” the researchers report, “estimated number of uses show little reliability for measuring actual uses.” We see here how deeply entwined the phone has become with the self — a seamless extension of body, mind, and personality. It is so much a part of us that we are no more conscious of the device moment-to-moment than we are of, say, our hands.

If the mere tracking of phone use reveals how we spend our days, our diurnal routines, imagine what would be revealed by a deeper analysis, one that examined the apps we use, the people we connect with, the things we look at and listen to, what we say and what we write and what we like, where we go, what we search for, the photos we take. It’s all there, public self and private self. There’s no shame in admitting the fact: You are your phone.