Tech titans fight tech addiction

The mobile phone is indispensable, but US psychologist Amantha Imber says that instead of using it to bond directly with loved ones, people tend to use the phone for social media sites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, reportedly touching their phone more than 2,500 times a day.

Much time is “spent watching, reading, scrolling and clicking on things that probably are not significantly improving your life,” Imber says in her book “Time Wise.”

“Indiscriminate social media use is associated with “lower self-image, neuroticism, higher levels of anxiety and stress, poor sleep.”

Ironically, tech titans have sounded the alarm, with several of them regretting what they unleashed on us all.

Foremost is Sean Parker, Facebook cofounder, who at an Axios tech event confessed that the site “literally changes your relationship with society and with each other” and “probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

“[When Mark Zuckerberg and I created Facebook] our thought process was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? It’s a social validation feedback loop, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker such as myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates famously set household rules to ensure that their own children do not grow addicted to gadgets.

Jobs, who created the iPad, forbade his children to use it at home. Gates’ children did not use mobile phones until age 14, with strict limits. Cell phones were also forbidden at their dinner table.

Tim Kendall, former Pinterest president, used to imprison his phone in kSafe, originally designed for dieters to lock away irresistible food. Kendall hid his phone on weeknights and weekends, and his life improved so much that today he heads Moment, which helps people use gadgets wisely.

Tristan Harris, formerly of Google, told NPR that the company’s aim was to “hook people to spend more time on screen, drive more page views, click on ads.” After leaving Google, he started the nonprofit Center for Human Technology, whose mantra was “time well spent.”

“We want technology that cares about helping us spend our time and our lives well, not seducing us into the most screen time, always-on interruptions or distractions.”

Kevin Rose, founder of the social news site Digg and the intermittent fasting app Zero, was so distracted by flashing alerts that he put his phone face down.

Placing a rubber band around his phone, across the screen, acted as a subliminal cue to pause: “Do I really need to pick up and use that device right now? Oftentimes, the answer is no.”

Rose reduced daily phone use by two-thirds—and went on to create the meditation app Oak.

My favorite strategy comes from Jake Knapp, a former product designer for Microsoft Encarta and Gmail. The latter is an iconic product, but Knapp ultimately deleted it on his phone, together with other social media sites. Left on his phone were the basics—a torch, a camera, maps, music, podcasts.

Even if companies entice us to install their apps on our phones, I resist the urge and instead follow Knapp. Aside from Google Chrome, my only additional apps are Waze and Google Maps, indispensable in Manila traffic.

Most important, Knapp allows himself to get bored, which we generally find difficult to tolerate. What sight can be sadder than families who are ostensibly dining together, but hardly talking to each other as each is bent over their own device?

If Knapp’s dining mate leaves the table, he looks around the restaurant and allows himself to be bored.

“Being bored is pretty powerful,” Knapp tells Imber. “If you can have little pockets of boredom in a day, it lets your brain rest, and for me, it lets the subconscious come up with a solution to something, solve something, or propose an idea I hadn’t had before.”

Queena N. Lee-Chua is with the board of directors of Ateneo’s Family Business Center. Get her book “All in the Family Business” at Lazada or Shopee, or the ebook at Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks. Contact the author at [email protected].