I M, the attention eating plague

IM Instant messaging

Background:

I have a gift, the gift is the ability to sleep almost anywhere instantly and most of the time my phone is mostly on ‘silent mode’, so I never hear the beeps. Infact, sometimes I get shocked when I hear an unfamiliar sound coming out of my pants. 👖 (pant emoji is the fun most thing I discovered today)

Trigger incident:

As usual, I was sleeping on my way to the airport and this time the only difference was that my mobile was not on silent. While I was listening to Damien Rice and getting ready to fall asleep, I hear a ping. I didn’t open my eyes but then I heard 7 more. After the first one, I had told myself that it is okay to let go one text but it still took mental processing. However, when the flurry started then I was just so impatient that anything could have happened. I tried to rationalize and wait but realized it was just me worrying about what they could have been and wasting time on that rather than fixing the instant gratification monkey 🐒 within.

Issue at hand:

This highlighted the basic problem with the tech ecosystem (which I am a part of) today. We don’t think of the repercussions of the stuff we build. We build IM for people to talk faster but we didn’t think about the distraction it causes, the switching cost we bear with any notifications we see via push.

Potential remedies:

We don’t only need a privacy and security review to protect user data but also some sort of a “Black Mirror” test to protect the user themselves. This would basically mean a team dedicated to extrapolating the impact of this tech to a level where it can turn into a Black Mirror script. Might sound a bit absurd but the idea is to get the doomsday scenario out there and then breaking down the features which are likely to lead us there and then making sure that feature set is either never build or built in a way which is more responsible and beneficial to people who use it.

Can we do it? Yes. Will we do it?….?

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