How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. People expect that they can change venues last minute and I'll be checking my messages. People expect that they can be late 45 minutes and that I'll be okay with it because I can check my messages.
No. That's not the life I want to live. When I leave the house, I have a plan and I execute it according to schedule, giving full attention to the world around me, not the world inside a stupid 6" screen.
This makes no sense. The single best thing about a phone is removing friction from the last mile and last fifteen minutes of meeting friends. Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships. If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group. If someone is late, it's not a problem unless it is a pattern. If it's a pattern, then you know how to plan around it or avoid that friend
> Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships.
I hate this culture of "checking in". If we agree to meet at place X and time T, is it so difficult to just ... actually be there? I remember the life in the pre-smartphone days when things were just that simple.
Also, when arranging to meet at a place, I am usually specific. Like, "meet me at the train station in front of the inside entrance to Starbucks at 8:20a". That completely eliminates the need for the stupid rounds of "where are you? can you hear me?" at the actual meeting time.
> If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group.
What about my needs, which are to concentrate on what I'm doing for the day instead of being glued to my smartphone worrying if the time and place has changed? What if I planned a hike for the day and am without reception? What if I'm on the way, biking or driving, and don't want to look at my phone for safety reasons? What if I'm out of battery but still running according to schedule?
In general I consider it disrespectful to change venues last minute, unless someone physically present at the old venue, or a sign is posted is there to inform people who did not see the change of venue. If it's a group of friends meeting at a restaurant that closed, is dietary-wise unsuitable, or something like that, I'd rather just gather everyone at the pre-specified venue first, and then find an alternate venue together.
My motorcycle is set up for hands free operation but phones still generally assume you have a screen active and shift into screen mode and then accept touches in my pocket which makes me pull over and fix the phone. Or simple shit like google not knowing how to "read hangouts" or "send hangout" but able to text. You can tell it's definitely an afterthought feature. I've spent some time getting that all configured but it's not ideal and doens't really survive new phones.
I would rather stare out of the window on the train in the morning than at facebook or twitter.
Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
I doubt your conclusions are very accurate. I suspect many of the people you see engaged with their phones are enriching their real lives, not just the life in the phone, but the life outside of the phone, by connecting with friends, arranging IRL meetings, and learning.
The guy in the video was doing this to a pathological degree... projecting his own unexamined intuitions as facts about other people.
If by "cursory" you mean "many years of close, and 24x7 observation, including of close relatives and friends", then what's not to love?
It's not like people saying that are some tourists to Earth that have just some short-term cursory relationship with the "other people".
At some point, there's enough observation to "jump to conclusions" about what is going on with other people.
The alternative is a kind of solipsism, as if we cannot say anything and make generalizations of what we see people do ever, and can only speak for ourselves.
As if everybody else is some unique snowflake that one needs to study meticulously to draw conclusions from their behavior.
Or as if somehow there's some inner difference that makes their outward behavior (e.g. glued to a screen all the time, even in the most intimate situations) unfit to draw conclusions from ("Yeah, this person has his eyes glued to some BS mobile app while just 10 meters in front of them there's fireworks and naked people running around and Kanye jamming with Bruce Springsteen, KISS, Aphex Twin and Keith Jarrett on stage, but you cannot say that they're oblivious to their surroundings -- in actuality said person totally enjoys and absorbs whats going on around them").
We should be able to call a spade a space, and masses of tourists with their phones out snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre as uncultivated idiots.
However this romantic idea that without phones people would be living vivid moments to the fullest also needs to die. Lets not romanticize the lived experience of a boring commute as a sensory roller-coaster just to score a few points against people glued to their phones.
People who make arbitrary distinctions in the book/e-reader/smartphone spectrum are just wrong. Many people use their phones productively during their commutes.
When I lived in Vancouver, I'm sure many people mistook me for a Candy Crusher or Facebook Scroller, but I was actually learning japanese.
No, but the problem is that people don't just do that on "boring commutes", but screen-staring increasingly encroaches other parts of life, from concerts to dates.
While at it, let's also lay to death the idea that all eras/decades/periods are the same, and everything a society does, from norms to arts, is either "the best it has ever been" or "the same as it always was", and anyone complaining is only romanticizing.
There are peaks and valleys, progress and regression, in lots of social norms and output, and its worth to point them out.
I mean, even when it was fashionable, they probably already suspected that the mule haircut was a bad idea...
Totally unrelated but I feel the louve is a massive misuse of space in a lot of cases. The room right before the lisa on one side is a massive long gallery with around a hundred gigantic (8'x12' or bigger) religious passion paintings that no one really looks at with a few gems sprinkled throughout. The other side is a very high gallery with some great paintings 20'+ up in the air. It's like the louve has so many paintings they feel it just all has to be out on display without thought about how people will look at it (or at least that section is). I found the impressionist museum much better but this is 16 years ago.
At least it's better than Versailles...
No, you're just jumping to conclusions that fit your imagined narrative.
When I'm using my phone on the train, I'm going through my reading list or listening to podcasts. If I had a physical book in-hand, I bet you wouldn't jump to similar conclusions. Yet the activities are the same and the content is the same.
People who want to waste time will waste time. Back in the day people read garbage magazines to fill that same time that they now fill with maybe Candy Crush. Everything is different and yet everything is the same and that's what people fail to realize.
The difference now is accessibility. It's the 24/7 nature of it that I think is valid to critique. But the commuters who don't stare out the window now weren't staring out the window pre-smartphone era anyway. They were reading newspaper columns, gossip magazines, playing handheld games, etc. So I'm not sure your example is the best.
It's the same thing today, except we're wasting less paper, and we can have a bigger selection of music.
Yes there are additional bad things, like shopping apps/consumerism and free-to-play games that try to get that super addictable part of the market to give them tons of money for their shitty form of entertainment. But that's all in the choice of how you use things.
Similarly, in general I don't take unscheduled phone calls. But I am all for scheduling calls and will make time, find good reception, and be ready to give my undivided attention when taking a scheduled call.
This is so important. Not only are larger screens better for content creation, they are better for consumption as well. Virtually everything I do on my phone is done so only because of circumstance--I am not close to my home workstation, office workstation, or laptop. If I am anywhere near my workstation, I massively prefer it to a tiny-screened phone.
If anything, I am addicted to my workstation(s). But I've been addicted to them for nearly my whole life, so I'm not too concerned.
My phone is just something that makes a noble effort to fill that gap while I'm between home and work or otherwise away from the real computers in my life. But it can only do so much with that tiny display and limited input capability.
A routine refrain in my life is: "I'll do that when I'm at my real computer."
I know, I know - supposed to be on vacation - but I was just sitting there. And I fixed the issue too.
How is that not amazing already??
It's mind blowing how many computing use cases my iPhone completely takes over for me.
There's some things that my phone will never be able to fully handle, like my full-fledged Lightroom photo management and editing workflow for example...but that's fine. Even some basic photo editing workflows are being handled by Instagram these days and the touch interactions are surprisingly efficient.
I understand the argument that people should be able to manage themselves but human nature is not that simple. People are never told that they are about to use a drug that has been proven to have addictive effects.
Receiving a like on facebook releases dopamine the same way smoking, drinking alcohol or gambling do. All fine in the right amount but dangerous when taken beyond a certain point. One of the problems for example is that people tend to use these substances more under stressful situation like studying for exams, dealing with a problem in your relationship, etc.
I think that argument is made because people arent aware of the degree to which external factors can influence not only our behaviors, but our thoughts. Im sure the HN crowd is aware of things like framing and anchoring, but there are dozens of cognitive biases we are all susceptible to
It should give us pause when free software/services have a significant amount of design in common with the lottery and slot machines.
Paid software, too, and especially video games, and even more so if it supports paid DLC, can also employ similar tactics that exploit human psychology for profit.
Stallman was right. Either the program controls the user or the user controls the program.
A newspaper prints articles most likely to consume your time (that's why you buy them). TV channels produce programs you're most likely to watch, and arrange them in such a way that your most likely to continue watching (damn HBO producing quality content so I'm more likely to watch it).
Don't pretend companies are forcing you to look at your phone all the time. Take responsibility for your own actions, and choose not to stare at your phone if you don't want to.
Should we praise the most boring magazine on the stand for not wanting to grab our attention? All hail Drying Paint Weekly, for they are the true guardians of my attention -- producing content so boring that's there's no chance of me getting suckered in!
I think everybody is in favour of interesting articles and engaging content - I think what this guy is against is the cheap tactics being used at the moment to make you check your phone regardless of the quality of the content you're checking.
Given that, it's like we hungered for them all along. They click into us like a lego brick.
Also, I see "employers" demanding that their "employees" be accessible via cellphone basically all reasonable waking hours. So it has us by the wallet now.
I find it unlikely that ads are the only problem, after all Netflix wants people to binge just as much as Spotify does and the customers have already paid.
For Spotify, binge use is the end goal, whereas for Netflix it is merely a consequence of producing an enjoyable service.
You're right though, it would be difficult to directly incentivize something as nebulous as 'improving lives' beyond providing services that do just that, since corporate incentives generally follow the money.
Snapchat -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)
But HN has an advantage in that it has a specific audience (the sort of people who know that Ycombinator is a thing). So the content is already probably relevant. Maybe that model has advantages we haven't fully explored yet.
> Never before in history have 50, mostly male, 20-35 year old designers, living in California, working at 3 tech companies, influenced how a billion people spend their time.
This is an incredibly specific statement that wouldn't be true if scaled back a bit. The result of this seems to be pure FUD. I have to say what an incredibly biased piece. The attention economy did not start with the internet. This a cultural issue not the fault of the companies in Sili Valley. Take responsibility for yourself people.
In order to truly accurately measure such a thing, you would need to know (or infer/predict) someone's personal goals, and their progress towards their goals. This raises concerns with privacy, but perhaps it is a level of trust that more people will be able to give technology at some point.
The Battery Usage statistics on iOS are also helpful, if not as granular.
Once people have awareness of how they spend their time it becomes easier to make an informed decision.
I think the best way is to get rich via trading Cryptocurrency and then be free from wage-slavery. Read physical books and eventually do something worthwhile like teaching in remote areas.