The most common and most harmful aspect of todays technology is accessibility. Smartphones especially are widely accessible and the ease of use is increasing exponentially. New phones are containing features including extended battery life, and other features like “low power mode” to further conserve battery life. These features reveal how these companies push forward the aspect of convenience, and in a sense justify overuse. This is the exact issue of how humans have become so addicted to technology and the reason it has become so normal for people to be on their phones all the time. The ease of use aspect allows no control or restriction of how much people spend time on their phones, so why not binge that new show on Netflix? Regarding social media platforms, there is a stigma that gives an incentive to compete with others to obtain more likes or followers, so this also largely contributes to the addiction in the world today. The sheer competition of gaining more fame from social media platforms taints the vision of the current generation to be focused on the wrong things in life. While gaining fame from social media can lead to a good career and have many benefits to your life, it should not hold any comparative value against one another. The digital life also makes it so that people judge other by their social media page, posts, likes, followers etc. This is a huge issue today especially because it makes people seek validity from others by how their digital life is setup, and also causes harm to many others that are overseen as a result to this stigma. It makes people feel below others based on popularity, and distorts the vision on what is actually important in life. It leads to depression on a large scale across the globe especially for the younger generation, and there needs to be a solution in the near future.

My solution to this problem of overuse is to create an app that makes daily screen time public to friends, family and others in your area. I feel as though if this app was created people would be more weary of how much time they spend on their phones, as others can view their screen time publicly. The application would also show how much time is spent on each app per day, making it so that people are more cautious about scrolling tiktok for hours at a time, or watching movies all day. Ideally, people would shift from being more competitive about how many followers they have to spending time elsewhere and not binging their devices all day. This would also make it a reason for people to confront friends or family about overuse and again cause them to be more aware of how much time is wasted out of the day. When I say wasted, I genuinely mean it because lots of the time people don’t even use their devices for work, instead use it to be entertained and feed their dopamine levels and its only getting worse.

Phone trance