Extract from ABC News
Updated
You're probably reading this on your phone.
You're focussing your attention here, on this article (thanks, by the way).But you are probably also fighting off other distractions — group chats, reminders to run five kilometres, prompts to capture 1 Second of your day.
All these things, plus Facebook auto-play and the compulsion to tap or swipe or scroll, are what consume large amounts of our time these days.
It's the attention economy — a bull market dominated by Google and Facebook and Apple — and we are not the customers. We are the product.
But amidst all this consumption, do you ever stop and think about your smartphone use?
Have you ever looked up from your phone and thought: Where did the time go? And what have I missed?
Catherine Price has — at some rather important moments
"I started thinking about my own phone usually more critically about two-and-a-half years ago, around the same time I had a baby," the journalist and author from Philadelphia said.
Her new book, How To Break Up With Your Phone, does what it says on the tin. It's not only an exploration of all the ways smartphones are simultaneously keeping you engaged and distracted, but a how-to on conquering a very 21st-century phenomenon.
"I had this moment when she was about six-months-old," Price said of her daughter.
"I was sitting in the dark with her late one night and was extremely tired and I had this out-of-body moment where I could see what was happening from the outside.
"She was staring up at me, and I was looking down at my phone on eBay. I thought, that is not the impression that I want my daughter to have of her mother. And not of human relationships in general."
Phone addiction is much-discussed
Studies have noted the negative cognitive effects of missing phone calls and the relationship between time spent on Facebook and depressive symptoms.Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego University and the author of the essay Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation, which went viral last year, told the ABC there seemed to be a link between increased smartphone usage and increased rates of depression and suicide in the US.
The University of Washington Information School's David Levy has said we have developed habits with our phones that are promoting distraction, information overload, and fragmented engagement.
Price and others suggest that spending a lot time on your phone is not just anti-social, but unhealthy — and that the desire to keep scrolling is something software companies actively promote through design.
"If you start looking at your phone with a more critical eye, you start to see features and design elements that are there to make your phone seem more appealing," she said.
"In the case of phone makers, they make the phones very aesthetically pleasing — there are lots of colours, and when you do stuff you get responses, like little whoosh sounds when you send a text message.
"All of these things are very satisfying to the primal parts of our brain."
Google Search has "stopping cues" — you need to actually click on a link to continue your journey.
Facebook doesn't. You can't finish Facebook. You can only keep scrolling.
This doesn't mean get rid of your phone
That's not the point, Price said. Don't hurl it off a bridge, or replace it with a dumb phone.And it's not about letting the tech companies off the hook either. They still have a case to answer, she said — even some Silicon Valley insiders think so — but cultural change there is not going to happen overnight.
Instead, here are some things you can do:
- Pay attention to your usage and download a tracking app
- Create a "speed bump" or habit breaker. This could be a rubber band around your phone or a custom lock screen image that says "do you want to pick me up right now?"
- Stop "phubbing", or phone-snubbing — using your phone when talking IRL with someone — and trial a period of phone separation
- Take a step back and think about what you want to be spending your time on
So, again, thanks for spending it on this article.
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