Your 2 Cents
This provocative article in the November 2016 issue of The Atlantic magazine documents the story of Tristan Harris, who believes that Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones, and his determination to make it stop. Harris is leading a movement, through his advocacy group Time Well Spent, to change the fundamentals of software design in order to bring a moral integrity to it; essentially to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from our devices. According to Harris, just as McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our cravings, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter hook us by delivering “variable rewards”.
Read the whole article at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/
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Addicted to Your iPhone? You’re Not Alone – The Atlantic On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called “Honey Bear” and wrote … |
Is it our responsibility alone to control the amount of time we spend on our devices – or do the software developers bear some of this responsibility as well? Send your comments to: livelaughlearn@algonquincollege.com
– Rebecca Volk