These include pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll features, and they “activate the same brain mechanisms as cocaine”. To create psychological dependency, social media companies use similar tactics to those of casinos. My use has increased steadily thanks to the advent of social media and colorful things that make noise on my phone. We’re more like “hackable animals”, Harari says – tracked by algorithms that “know us better than we know ourselves”. We have less agency over our technology than we want to believe, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari. “Having evolved in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty,” Harris writes, “we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus.” He argues that constant pinging updates and push notifications (I get 66 a day) exploit human impulses.
This is a version of that prehistoric impulse that compels us to eat lots of once scarce sugar and fat, but it underpins the attention economy rather than the junk food industry.
My bad habit is probably related to what the author Michael Harris, in his 2014 book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, calls “a very basic brain function”: the “orienting response”. I agree with the half-century of cognitive science that concludes multitasking is a comforting fiction. Like John, I have no illusion of productivity when I grab my phone mid-work task. Most of the time when I use my phone I’m kind of in zombie mode – I pick it up to look at the time and then the physical act of doing that prompts me to do something else. On average, we pick up our phones 58 times a day, and while some of our pickups, we like to think, are purposeful – a quick text or inbox check – in my experience (I pick up 39 times a day) such innocent glances have a mysterious way of leading to Twitter when really, I should be working. Pickups are also an important metric in determining how our devices affect us.
#APPS LIKE RESCUETIME FOR IPHONE ANDROID#
Max, 28, journalistĪccording to research from RescueTime, one of several apps for iOS and Android created to monitor phone use, people generally spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones every day, with the top 20% of smartphone users spending upwards of four and a half hours. It’s like constantly opening and closing your front door, hoping that someone will be there when they almost never are. Sometimes it even hits six, usually during periods of my life when I’m feeling bored and lonely. I spend an alarming amount of time on my phone. I do a lot of emailing on there so that’s probably it. So it’s telling me my average per day is four hours, four minutes. It’s not good, but I feel like there are people who are worse. Per day, I’m on it for three hours and 36 minutes, and then the weekly total is 25 hours, 15 minutes, which is gross. It’s not just all looking at selfies and cute bunny memes, even though that is a huge factor, I’m sure. But that said, I do a lot of reading long-form pieces. I spend three hours and 53 minutes per day on my goddamn phone, which is a lot of time. So I asked them to check their screen time.
My unease made me wonder how my smartphone habits compared with those of my friends and colleagues. Darkly, that total does not include the hours I spend on my laptop, nor watching Netflix.
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