This Extremely Cute Bean Wants to Help You Stop Doomscrolling
By Megan Farokhmanesh, senior writer, WIRED
The following is an excerpt from a recent WIRED article, which discusses the effects of focus apps on attention span.
People are trying to lower their phone use. Over the past several years, there’s been a growing “dumb phone” movement—ditching smartphones for devices that cut off access to modern parts of the internet or apps—to reclaim attention span from the scourge of screens. Others have tried “bricking” their phones, a controlled blocking of things like social media apps. Personally, I have to mute notifications, throw my phone into another room, and set a timer for at least an hour to keep myself from the clarion call of my barely functioning, cracked iPhone 12 mini.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span, has been tracking and studying our ability to focus for nearly two decades. Thanks to a constant barrage of things like mobile phones, social media, short-form video, and powerful algorithms like those on TikTok, our attention spans are on the decline.
“Every time you go onto the screen, it’s a gateway to an entire world,” Mark says. “On the one hand, it’s the [phone] interface you’re looking at, but there’s also this entryway to all this other information and people. You can access things so fast—a thought pops into your head, you can immediately go and Google it and find the answer. We’re used to scrolling.”
As much as I love and swear by all things Pomodoro, Mark says it would be better for people to use their own free will and agency to control their attention spans. “Whether you use the Pomodoro method, or whether you use software blocking tools, you’re offloading it onto a device,” she says. “The device is doing the work.”
That doesn’t make apps like Focus Friend bad, she says, but we should be mindful of how we use them. “It’s really powerful to have the agency to be able to pay attention when you want to,” she says. “If you’re constantly offloading the work of being disciplined to a device, you never learn the skill of being able to pay attention on your own.”
People who struggle with their focus can benefit from using apps, she adds, “but I would rather see that device being used to allow people to wean themselves off of the app so that they’re not so dependent on it.”
Read the full article on WIRED.