# There has been a lot of discussion about Farhad Manjoo's piece "It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone" in which he quotes that Apple is possibly our "only hope" to curb tech addiction.
I agree that we should have much more granular control over notifications and it would be nice if iOS had some kind of built in time monitoring feature to highlight our usage patterns, but is it really Apple's place to go beyond that?
He cites government regulation and user restraint as "options" but as quickly dismisses them saying "the former is unlikely and the latter is insufficient."
Personally, I keep removing apps from my phone because I just don't use them and I'm already running pretty minimally. This is after removing the likes of Twitter, Facebook and other time sinks.
I do this because I have taken the time to really assess and understand how I use my phone and vowed to make my time with it more constructive. The less I have the less that can distract me.
I acknowledge that I'm very much in the minority.
Still, it all gets me thinking that maybe this state of affairs we find ourselves in isn't a tech problem but a societal one. I don't believe "tech" is able to fix itself.
As I mentioned before, there are recommendations that schools should be more involved and I feel this is the right approach. It is an educational issue as much as anything.
Children today learn to swipe before they can walk or talk. Phones and tablets are the new baby sitters, and texting/messaging is as second nature to them as talking - in some cases more so.
The question, therefore, becomes how do we educate them to intellectually examine this behaviour without sounding like we are delivering a sermon promising eternal damnation? How do we get them to stop and rethink something that is as easy as breathing?
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# Just testing my “title_save_pre” hook when posting from the micro.blog app.
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# My wife said something to me earlier that got me a little emotional. She just said "you sounded a bit like yourself then."
It's a small thing and probably wouldn't mean much to anyone else, but when you haven't sounded like yourself for 4 months it means everything!
@colinwalker Great post! You indirectly mention this, but I think the problem is more about people not being intentional. Smart phones aren't the cause of that problem, but they do exacerbate it. If we can teach intentionality, I think the phone problem solves itself
@jordon It's essentially what I was getting at with the actual word. Thanks for adding that.
Eli Mellen
hi@eli.licolinwalker? @eli Hmmm. I didn't get the mention for this even though your markup is right. eli? @colinwalker my site does automatically send webmention a, I have to do it manually. I just haven’t had a chance to do it for this post, yet. I go for the carrier pigeon style of sending webmentions