Written by: Srijal Ulak - 21117, Grade XII
Posted on: 12 November, 2020
Over 2.5 billion people have smartphones now, and tons of them are having a tough time putting it down (including me). Today’s phones are hard to place down. The biggest problem is that our smartphones are designed to make us stay engaged. They're intentionally addicting. Push notifications buzz in your pocket, red bubbles demand attention, and endless distractions sit at your fingertips. It can feel impossible to tug faraway from. But that’s quite the purpose. When people mention the “attention economy,” they’re pertaining to the very fact that some time and a spotlight are the currency on which today’s applications make money. Because apps profit off of the entire time you spend on their platform, there’s a robust incentive to use psychological tricks to stay you endlessly hooked. But it doesn’t need to be this manner. Start with turning off all notifications, apart from one when a true human is trying to succeed in you. once you get a call, text or a message it's actually because another person wants to speak with you, but today’s apps simulate the sensation of that sort of social interaction, to urge you to spend longer on their platform. For instance, if Facebook sends you a push notification that a lover is curious about an occasion near you, they're essentially acting sort of a marionette, leveraging your desire for social connections in order that you use that app more. But notifications weren’t always like this, when push notifications were first introduced for email on blackberries in 2003 they were actually seen as how for you to see your phone less. you'll easily see emails as they come in, so you don’t need to repeatedly open your phone to refresh in inbox. But today you'll get notification from any app on your phone. So, whenever you check it you get a couple of notifications which will cause you to have a broad sort of emotions. If it's not random then it is predictably bad or predictably good, then you'd not get addicted. The predictability takes the addictiveness. Most apps have pull to refresh design. That’s a conscious design choice. Those apps are usually capable of continuously updating content, but the pull action provides an addicting illusion of control over that process. Designers of many companies get paid to make the app more attractive and more addictive.
In the future we'd see healthier ways of delivering notifications research shows that bundling notifications, where phones deliver a batch of updates at set times, reduces user stress. Then the second way is to grayscale your screen. The simplest thanks to attract the eye's attention on a screen is through color. Human eyes are sensitive to warm colors and in eye-tracking tests, they gravitate particularly to bright red. This is often the reason why numerous apps have redesigned their icon to be brighter, bolder, and warmer over the years. This is often also the rationale why notification bubbles are red, a notification in blue or black or greed doesn’t have an equivalent impact on your attention because the red one. And third way is by restricting your home screen to everyday tools that aren't the apps that you simply can fall under then sucked down some bottomless vortex of stuff (apps that use infinite scrolling). Unlike pagination, where users need to click to load new content on another page, infinite scrolling continuously loads new material so there is no built-in endpoint. Video autoplay works during a similar way.
Tristan Harris, who runs Time Well Spent, is functioning to make a world where platforms can more honestly respect their users’ time. It’s true that we’re seeing unprecedented levels of teenagers using digital devices, most teens have access to a smartphone, and 45 percent say they're online “almost constantly,” consistent with a 2018 Pew poll. and through an equivalent period of your time that internet and smartphone use has increased for a generation of children, the suicide rate has also steadily increased (across all ages overall). We check our phones tons of time during the day. Most folks drastically underestimate how often we do so. But technology won't always look in this manner. There are ideas for alternative interfaces that offer you functional choices and are more transparent about what proportion of time you'll lose with one action, versus another. But it is a really deep philosophical question: what's genuinely worth your attention? On an interruptive basis? Do people even have the skills to answer that question? it is a really hard question; it isn't something we expect about. But, for now, it is a question that everyone must start asking.
Reference: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2018/2/9/16994794/smartphone-tech-addiction
https://medium.com/@archiveblog/the-reason-why-it-is-so-hard-to-put-your-phone-away 410be8159289
