Curbing phone addiction
Did you text? Sorry, I can’t see messages right now. Arianna Huffington locked my phone.
The media tycoon-turnedwellness-entrepreneur wants to keep you out of your phone, too, with a new app called Thrive. Its goal is to make it cool for a generation hooked on smartphones to occasionally detox.
Among Thrive’s capabilities: helping you humble brag you can’t be reached by sending text responses on your behalf. As in, ‘‘Try me later, I’m busy Thriving’’.
If smartphones are the new cigarettes, Thrive is a new kind of nicotine patch.
The app won’t cure everything that’s screwed up about our relationship with phones – Thrive is an add-on to the software that runs the phone, and it only begins to address the social illness that compels us to be always connected. But it’s something you can do to break the spell of these glowing rectangles.
There’s a paradox to using technology to wean us from technology, but Huffington has an explanation. ‘‘Going to sleep with the lights off doesn’t make us antielectricity,’’ she said.
What’s surprising is that Thrive is a partnership with Samsung, which made the free app available for owners of its Note 8 phone.
Thrive fires a shot back at what’s sometimes called the ‘‘attention economy’’, the apps that have made gazillions by hijacking our brains with likes, alerts and other irresistible distractions.
But making phones less useful isn’t the solution. 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.
The Thrive app’s main function is an egg timer for your brain.
Launch it, and choose an amount of time you want to spend napping, going for a walk or focusing on work.
While you’re in Thrive Mode, the phone will suppress incoming calls, notifications and messages. You can list a few VIP folk who still get through or choose a socalled Super Thrive Mode to block everything.
It presents this feedback in a rather unsettling pie chart: I spent how many hours on Instagram? But then you can self-impose limits (say, 15 minutes on Instagram) after which Thrive cuts you off.
Other apps for smartphones have some of these capabilities. Apps such as Moment and QualityTime can track how much time you spend on your phone, and Freedom can block access to certain apps and websites.
So what makes Thrive any different from ‘‘do not disturb’’ or just the off button?
The app is bidirectional, sending out messages to people while you’re in Thrive Mode to let them know you’re not just ignoring them.
Thrive would be more helpful if its response messages could also reach into emails, Facebook Messenger and Slack.
But tech fixes can go only so far. Creating new habits is hard. Can Huffington, her celebrity friends, or even a company with the marketing heft of Samsung make it socially acceptable to disconnect?
I’m hopeful Thrive will at least inspire competition between Apple, Google and Samsung to design less-addictive phones. They could use artificial intelligence and the data they already collect to understand what notifications are truly urgent, to identify unhealthy trends and (in the extreme) suggest sources of help.
Teaching a phone who your VIPs are and what time you want to get to bed could become part of setup.
I’d love a phone that stops news alerts and other non-urgent notifications in the morning, so I’m not tempted to check my phone even before I answer nature’s call.
Call it ‘‘Big Mother’’ tech: Sure it wants to control you, but ultimately it has your best interest at heart.