Time Well Spent wins round 1 of tech debate

by Suradha Iyer

2018 has been a year of introspection for the tech giants. The ‘Time Well Spent’ movement is leading the scrutiny on the impact their platforms or devices have on humans. Adding to the campaign’s credibility are the people championing it – Tristan Harris, a former product manager at Google, Joe Edelman and many others.

The ‘Time Well Spent’ movement calls for tech companies to build products that sustain the users and allow them to disconnect from technology, while raising awareness about the flawed design goals that companies like Facebook and Apple have for their products.

The movement is raising questions about whether the need for users to disconnect from the digital was the responsibility of these tech companies at all. It wagers that it indeed is.

Tristan Harris spoke up while at Google

Tristan Harris is a vocal critic of the design practices that keep users hooked onto technology. Tristan compares smartphones to ubiquitous slot machines. He completes the metaphor by raising the point of addictive designs in smartphones and social media. From his experience at Google, he understands the extreme psychological aids the platforms use to makes phones and products additionally distracting, leaving a handful of product designers and PhDs in charge of how billions of people lead their lives. He adds that even though he understood the design tweaks that were keeping users hooked to these devices for longer, he couldn’t help but fall prey himself.

This led him to raise an alarm in Google in 2013, with his presentation A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention. He called for a company-wide change at Google to change their design ethics. Harris was then elevated to Google’s Design Ethicist, a post he later quit to take his movement beyond Google’s platform.

He then founded ‘Centre For Humane Technology’, an organization of committed individuals to rally for large-scale change in technology. It does so by partnering with tech giants like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft to improve their designs, negotiating for better consumer policy with governments, and creating demand among users for ethical technology.

Time Well Spent movement beyond Google

Harris’ opposition to toxic social media platforms stems from the thesis that they were addictive, contributed to depression, diluted democracy, and didn’t contribute to meaningful interaction between people. This led to a response from Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in aFacebook post earlier this year. He claimed that Facebook would spend the year making changes to improve user experience and ‘encourage meaningful interaction among users’ to ‘make sure Facebook is time well spent’.

Android P takes the lead

The Google focus on design ethics will materialize with the new Android P, where notifications will be less pesky and more organized, a ‘wind- down’ mode, app usage limits and setting your phone to grayscale at the end of the day to help reduce addiction.

Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android recently said ‘’There are 2 billion Android users. It’s the largest mobile operating system in the world. We are the OS, and we feel like we need to be doing more around this area. We feel like we have a responsibility to do more,’’ while commenting on the new rollouts in Android P. These features are available as a beta on select devices now.

Android P also chooses to create pie charts of time spent on devices and the number of notifications received from certain apps on a Dashboard, which essentially helps the user track usage.

The data empowers users to use Dashboard akin to parental control on their usage by setting time limits on app access. It does so by greying out the app once the limit is reached. There’s also an enhanced Do Not Disturb mode which only allows certain notifications and calls to show on your phone. Wind Down is a mode setting which turns the phone into DND mode and also grays it down to discourage phone usage while going to sleep.

Apple, Facebook join in

Apple, in its WUDC 2018 launch of iOS 12, introduced similar tweaks in iOS– batched notifications, a screen time monitor and app overuse timer, Do Not Disturb and ‘Downtime’ modes in collaboration with Time Well Spent.

This week, Facebook also announced its monitoring and screen time timer for its Android app, six months after its initial promise to reduce the addictive factor of the app.  The feature is likely to be called ‘Your Time On Facebook’ and is yet to be launched. Instagram is also reported to be working on a monitoring feature to help curb addiction.

This is just the beginning

However widespread these changes seem so far, Tristan Harris tweeted that these are just the beginning of the road for technology to become more human-centric. These new measures are also the first step to giving control to the users – but to what end? How inherently useful is the ‘time spent’ data when the algorithm for Facebook’s feed keeps you scrolling infinitely? How effective are app-blockers going to be when we have the choice of superseding their control? Are these measures likely to net a long term benefit when the control over technology is embedded within the technology itself?

Companies’ uncertainty about putting these parental controls might undermine the whole Time Well Spent movement. Without a roadmap as to how people can take to these measures, the rest of Tristan Harris’ dream will have to be to target the product creators and upheave the entire social internet as we know it. This is an uphill task. As is getting people off their phones.

Suradha Iyer is a writing analyst at Qrius