After watching The Social Dilemma, my eyes were opened to many of the problems technology causes that were always there but I failed to notice. Technology causes physical, mental, and emotional harm to humans and we are putting this technology in the hands of our children at a younger and younger age. The most obvious harms to our physical state are things like; texting and driving, physical inactivity, and eye strain. Now it’s not the phones fault that the person decided to use it while they were driving, but if the phone wasn’t there in the first place there wouldn’t be the temptation to look at it while someone shouldn’t. Technology affects our emotional state through things like social media. Hurtful comments on a post, seeing a group of people doing something fun without you, and constantly having to worry about how others perceive you are all issues that lead to the higher anxiety and suicide rates in kids these days. There’s a scene in The Social Dilemma that talks about how these rates in kids and teens were staying at a consistent rate for years until social media was introduced, then the numbers began to skyrocket. Technology also messes with our mental state and the most common way is through our lack of face to face interaction nowadays. People are much more anxious to talk to someone they don’t know and they need to “recharge” after socializing for a long period of time.
I think the human trait that technology preys on the most is temptation. I can speak from personal experience on this one, because all last year when my classes were online I found it extremely difficult to pay attention to class because my phone was just sitting next to me and the teacher couldn’t tell I was using it. Other times I have to catch myself when I’m just mindlessly scrolling because I’m just wasting time when I could be doing something more productive.
The best solution I could think of is designing an app that locks your other apps for a certain amount of time because the only way we can resist using technology is if it is cut off from us. I think a feature like this will slowly condition us to not needing our phones on us 24/7. I know for me at least that I would be completely fine without social media, I still need to text people but I could live without; instagram, twitter, or facebook. So maybe by locking these apps we’ll learn how to live without them and realize that we don’t need them so much. I think it’s ok to check these apps once a day, so another feature could be locking the app after using it once. I think these features will increase our productivity and cut the time we spend mindlessly scrolling down drastically.
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