Tech Giants Look Beyond the Screen
for our politics and social relations.
Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don’t discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones.
If it works, it could change everything again.
Screens are insatiable, voracious vampires for your attention.
One study, led by Adrian Ward, a marketing professor at the University of Texas business school, found that the mere presence of a smartphone within glancing distance can significantly reduce your cognitive capacity. You cannot help but spend a lot of otherwise valuable mental energy trying to not look at it.
When you do give in, you lose your mind.
“What you get sucked into is not the one thing that caught your attention — your text message or tweet or whatever,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at the technology research firm Creative Strategies. Instead, you unlock your phone and instantly, almost unconsciously, descend into the irresistible splendors of the digital world — emerging 30 minutes later, stupefied and dazed.
Screens have now become a crutch for technologists, a lazy, catchall way to add digital experiences to every product.
We have seen this in cars for years. By placing interior controls on touch screens rather than tactile knobs and switches, carmakers have made vehicles much more annoying and dangerous to interact with. The Tesla Model 3, the most anticipated car on the planet, takes this to an absurd level. As several reviewers have lamented, just about every one of the car’s controls — including adjustments for the side mirrors — requires access through a screen.
Or look at augmented reality, the technology that allows you to see digital imagery superimposed on the real world. In a few specific uses — turning your face into a dog’s on Snapchat — this can be fun. But too often, A.R. feels gimmicky. Rather than commingling the digital and the real, it simply uses a screen to usurp the world around you.
At Apple’s developer conference last month, Martin Sanders, a Lego executive, showed off a new A.R. Lego set. When he pointed his iPad at a Lego structure, his screen filled with digital fireworks, superheroes, sports cars — a whole bustling Lego town that he didn’t have to build with his hands or imagine with his head.
“There’s so much to do here!” Mr. Sanders exclaimed as he and an assistant stood completely still, staring at animated Legos through a piece of digital glass. It was bizarre. The whole point of Lego is physical interaction, but thanks to A.R., he had turned Lego into just another video game.
There are two ways we may overcome our addiction to screens.
First, we will need to use our phones more mindfully.
Help is on the way. I’ve been using Screen Time, one of the new features in Apple’s next version of its mobile operating system. The software gives you valuable information about how much you are using your phone, and it can even block you from using apps that you deem unhealthy. I suspect it will profoundly change how we use our phones.
Then there is the need for other, less immersive ways to interact