If you're anything like a lot of people in 2018, your phone might as well be permanently fused to your hand. Whether you're texting friends and family, ritually checking email, or mindlessly scrolling through Twitter (that's me!), the bring glow of your pocket-sized touch screen is likely the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.
And whose fault is that? Well, sure, the user. But who should be responsible for helping to ween you off your phone? Some believe that when it comes to the iPhone,
it should be Apple who puts out a less addictive product for the well-being of their customers.
The New York Times's Farhad Manjoo spoke to Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who now runs Time Well Spent, an organization working to improve technology’s impact on society, who believes Apple "may be our only hope" in battling phone addiction.
Harris suggests that your phone could provide you with a report on how you're spending your time on your phone, or offer more fine-tuned control over notifications.
"Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week," Manjoo wrote. "It could also needle you: 'Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?' It could offer to help: 'If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?'"
Alternatively, Samsung users now have exclusive access to a new app,
Thrive, from
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington. The app is essentially a timer that allows you enter "Thrive Mode" for a chosen period of time and silence all calls, notifications, and messages. It will also send an auto-reply to anyone who tries to contact you, with a default message of "I'm in Thrive Mode." (As an aside, if I ever receive an "I'm in Thrive Mode" text from a friend, the ensuing eye roll will be one for the record books.)
Thrive can also collect data on how much time you spend using apps, and can actually cut off access to certain apps if you hit your own self-imposed time limits.
“The idea is, how do we keep the best things about our phones while making it possible for us to disconnect, recharge, do deep work, have an undistracted meal with a friend and sleep without having the phone buzzing nearby?”
Huffington told The Washington Post.
But couldn't we just, you know, turn the phone off if we need to do work or take a nap?
"(M)aking phones less useful isn’t the solution," writes The Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler. "We need phones designed to help us be better humans — and, at least for now, humans still need to sleep and breathe deeply and stare out the window every once in a while. Occasionally, we need to be bored."