Thank goodness the tech companies are protecting us from ourselves…
It’s in the nature of pendulums to swing from one extreme to another; and in the case of technology adoption, 2018 has proved to be the year when the tech companies have over-responded to user demands for protection in the form of less attractive or easier-to-use products, as well as calls for them to warn us about how much time we spend on them, all based on theories about addiction overwhelmingly rejected by psychologists’ associations from all over the world. It turns out that despite the well-meaning efforts of the do-gooders, “addiction theory” is full of holes.
One of the more recent repercussions of this trend is that the two operating systems used in our smartphones, iOS and Android, now include tools to control the amount of time we spend on them, including data on the number of hours we have used our devices each day or week, along with a detailed analysis on how much we spent on each app. I could speculate on which operating system does so best, but my particular perspective more in line with Margaret Morris’ argument in “Don’t worry about screen time — focus on how you use technology”, which is that it’s what you do on your smartphone, not how long you spend doing it that counts.
Providing a breakdown of the time spent on one’s smartphone is, to say the least, a simplistic approach and offers us no insight whatsoever to any potential problems we might have.
As with any activity, it’s possible to spend too much time on our smartphones, and yes, there are disorders associated with certain compulsive behaviors, but they existed before smartphones and they’ll exist after them. To be honest, I don’t see how providing a function that informs us about how much time we spend on our smartphones is going to prevent obsessive-compulsive behavior.
Monitoring makes no sense unless we know how we’re going to use the data it generates, and this is all the more the case when nobody even agrees about what constitutes misuse. Not only are we obsessed with searching for something we don’t know exists (and that many experts say doesn’t exist), but we’re using the wrong indicators, because knowing the amount of time we use an app isn’t much use without data that is harder to obtain, related to the reasons or the nature of that use.
In short, the tech companies are doing little more than a hand-holding exercise, trying to put our minds at rest, offering us a placebo: “If I’m monitoring my smartphone use and this week it tells me I’ve reduced it, then I must be getting better”. What’s getting better or the reasons why we’ve used our smartphone less this week is of no interest; all that matters is that we’re using the damn thing less! Maybe that week we spent more time in airplanes, or it rained and we were stuck in traffic for longer than usual, or a friend of ours published photos of somewhere we are thinking of visiting and we looked at every one of them in detail. In other words, there are perfectly normal variations in use that wouldn’t necessarily make it clear we’d been wasting what little spare time we have on an online game app or stalking our ex while turning our bedside light on and off all night.
Hopefully this phase of the pendulum will soon swing back toward something approaching normality. I’m tired of morality, ridiculous warnings printed in yellow on the screen of my smartphone as though it were a packet of cigarettes, as well as being monitored as though I needed treatment. More training, more education, more maturity, and fewer detoxification therapies for nonexistent addictions is what we need.
