Do you find it hard to relax and switch off because you spend so much time on your phone? You just need to download another app. The popular New Zealand station Sleep Radio, which plays ambient music to help its listeners doze off, is now available on smartphones, to help people who use their devices late at night. Listeners have been tuning in from around the world. Meanwhile, Apple has announced a suite of new tools for the next iPhone operating system that allow you to set time limits on how much you use particular apps, and quieten the flood of notifications.
Apple’s new system is called Screen Time, while Google, which plans similar features for its next Android phone operating system, speaks of “digital wellbeing”, a particularly sinister marketing buzzphrase. Is there a new kind of digitally enabled wellbeing that is somehow more exciting than boring old analogue wellbeing, of the sort you might experience while looking at a tree? I’d better install something that lets me experience it.
Neither company, of course, really wants you to use its products any less. It was recently reported, indeed, that Apple is quietly looking to make more money from targeted advertising, since growth in iPhone sales has slowed. It is in the interest of both corporations to have you looking at ads for as many hours of the day as humanly possible.
At the same time, they are aware of big tech’s increasingly tarnished reputation since the Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Studies link social-media use to anxiety and depression, and a movement is growing in Silicon Valley called Time Well Spent, which calls for more humane design that reduces the time we spend on devices. (Earlier this year, citing Time Well Spent, Facebook changed its newsfeed in a way that supposedly encourages users to spend less time on the site while having more fun.)
Rather than wait for sterner regulation to be foisted on them, Apple and Google are going on a PR offensive to seem concerned about their users. Rather than solving the underlying problems themselves, however, they are shunting on to us yet more soul-sucking digital management busywork.
The real paradox here remains that of trying to help people be less addicted to products that are engineered to be as addictive as possible. Smartphones, social media sites and the like are full of design decisions – such as pull-to-refresh, or infinite scrolling – that actively hijack the brain’s reward system. They create what the behavioural psychologist BF Skinner, in his studies of animal conditioning, called a schedule of “intermittent reinforcement”, which he found was a very good way to maintain a particular behaviour in lab rats. Now we are all lab rats, desperately pawing the lever in our digital Skinner boxes in the hope of the next crunchy info-pellet.
Even the mere knowledge that your smartphone might buzz with a new message while you are doing something else has been found to disrupt attention. Few people have the psychic fortitude to follow the example of the technology critic Evgeny Morozov, who locks his internet router and phone in a safe when he wants to do some work. Given all this, the promise that new functions in these machines will help us break our addictions might seem rather cynical. It’s as though every pack of cigarettes came with free nicotine patches.
Still, what else are we going to do? The idea of just not using our tech so much is unthinkable. Better to trust that, as Homer Simpson said of alcohol, technology is the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems. And the paradigm of tech actively helping you not to use it could profitably be extended to other areas.
Tinder could do the drudge work of rejecting boorish suitors with an algorithm that writes your brush-offs for you. Uber could refuse to take you to the pub and suggest the walk would do you good. And rather than autoplaying the next episode in the series you are binging on, Netflix could sternly tell you it’s 2.30am, that you are slumped on the sofa covered in crisps and really should go to bed now, and then turn itself off. I could go on, but my laptop has just warned me that I’ve exceeded my sarcasm quota for the morning.
• Steven Poole is the author of Rethink, You Aren’t What You Eat, Unspeak, and Trigger Happy
