The Screen Time of Social Media
Apple released Screen Time as a new feature of iOS 12. Users can access real-time reports about the time you spend using this iPhone, and time you spend on each App. The data is visualized in the form of the histogram, grouping Apps into three general categories: social networking, creativity, reading & reference. The settings that users can manage in this feature is all about “setting limits”, including setting time limits for app categories, deciding the type of content that appears on your device, and etc.
As the lecture of Our Media theory course focused on our networked life this week, I roughly conducted an online survey to synthesize my friends’ Screen based on the social media platform, WeChat. The total amount of responses I received by October 3rd in 2018 is 21, which is not abundant enough to make any conclusion. However, it’s still beyond expectation to see the average percentage of social networking time is 58.3%. This number is probably a little exaggerated because as a media major student, my community is rather more involved with tech and media. But it can still, to some degree, support danah boyd’s claim that teens, young people in general, are engaged with networked publics.
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danah boyd wrote the book It’s Complicated to help bridge the gap between adults and teens, explaining why teens are engaged with social networking media and what they are doing with social media. I believe that a further step of action is supposed to be taken to based on the average time of 34h weekly phone usage. In 2018, although the adults can more understand the issue because they are also influenced by this networked culture, the kids’ phone addiction has to be addressed. The screen time does occupy the creation and learning time. The knowledge and creation, compared to social networking, can better shape a teen to be a fundamental interior abundant and confident individual. Apple’s Screen Time feature offers parental oversight, where I can see great educational application potential. It can also help people who are trying to manage themselves. It’s a big move that needs quite a bit of determination since the iOS is the biggest application platform, who has to balance the benefit of both app developers and terminal users.
Leading back to screen time, the screen occupies people’s attention sometimes just because they are physically trapped in a boring place. I went to a concert last Thursday, there wasn’t much I could do during a boring opener so I checked Instagram and WeChat until the host musician pulled my attention back. The users’ attention and engagement are what content providers are competing for. Now new technologies, like AR/VR have also joined the war. From my perspective, AR combined with the wearable devices will diminish the screen time soon in the future.
The archetypal networking behavior on the phone is receiving a message or notification first, checking it out and then deciding to respond or not. A phone by now provides the most suitable interface for this process, due to its mobility and multi-media input/output support. But in a predictable future, the phone will be replaced by a more wearable interface that integrated all the features to allow people to be networked, and don’t require people to bother carrying a small device. I argue that the accessories that people normally wear are more likely to be added with high-tech technologies and replace the phone for daily networking use because the medium, as is agreed as the extension of human, is supposed to be integrated into part of the human body in my opinion.
Stan, a teen whom danah interviewed for her research, put it: “You’d actually be surprised how little things change. I’m guessing a lot of the drama is still the same, it’s just the format is a little different. It’s just changing the font and changing the background color really.” Technology is unable to bring drastic change to society. The society and technology place effects on and then shape each other. One very big issue that failed Google Glass is privacy. People reacted strongly with concerns like being snapped unconsciously so some public occasions like restaurants even banned the Google Class. Stalking and hidden cameras are not new. People might be under close surveillance by the government or hackers all the time. So people won’t be panic about the wearable camera eventually, and will benefit and depend on the data processing function of a smart wearable camera a lot instead.
Smart glass project VAUNT by Intel just cut the camera feature to make it a pure AR device with limited interactions. Personally, I don’t see it as a good smart glass product and the fact that Intel has stopped the project also kinds of proves my opinion. I think it lacks the most important data input stage — — to pass in visual and sound environment data, analyze them using AI and ML technology and return personalized AR information. A bore notification device won’t help in this networked society. It’s about time to have a media that can synthesize the human body, the environment, and the cyberspace together to extend human intelligence and better connect people off-screen.
According to the book Thinking Fast and Slow, human cognition has 2 systems, one of which is automatic, intuitive, and heuristics of thinking, while the other one is effortful, controlled and lazy. When we swipe our phone screen scanning the feeds on the social media app or glance at the weather and time, active thinking, the system 2, is not always required. This passive input process can be run on a wearable device like the smart glasses or the smartwatch. Wearing a smart glass will benefit both the user and his/her community in several ways. First, users would reduce the times recalling the action of picking up their phone, which is considered rude and annoying on many occasions. Second, holographic smart glasses provide more privacy for the content — — the information is directly projected into the user’s eyes, in which case the retina is the interface. Last, the wearable devices offer a neuroscientific approach. Multiple senses will leverage the physical experience.
Google recently demoed a phone call made to a hair salon by the Google Voice Assistant, running Duplex, an AI voice system. This makes me reflect on the further utilization of the VUI (voice user interface). It’s currently still hard to accept the case where a human talk to his voice assistance in a public spot especially when being surrounded by people. The technology will finally eliminate the silly feeling of talking to a bot and accordingly, the input process of a wearable device will be more natural and intuitive compared to tying on a keyboard, which requires deliberate learning.
Danah concludes four affordances of social media: persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability. She believes understanding the affordances of a particular technology or space is important because it sheds light on what people can leverage or resist in achieving their goals. Donald Norman first applied the term affordance to design in his 1998 book, The Design of Everyday Thing, as “…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing..”
In this context, affordances of AR smart devices that would shape the social media as the content are:
- Wearability: our hands are freed and there’s no interruption within a task sprint. People don’t have to raise a snoozed phone, waiting for unlocking, then have a glance at the message. The bone conduction earphone integrated into the glasses frame offers private sound input.
- Exclusiveness: the notifications are customized based on the environment and the user’s physical condition. A case would be like you have a meeting somewhere you’ve never been before, and then your glasses would constantly show the direction until you make it to the destination。
- Reality-priority: micro-information will be automatically processed by human system1. Screen time will be remarkably reduced. The real world becomes the prioritized layer , as Turkle put it: Real Life is just one more window. If compared to the experience of watching a streaming Twitch channel, the smart AR glasses will display messages and information in a rather low-distraction mode, while only the important part will prompt the user’s attention.
- Entertainment: the message can include space-based 3D graphics, images, videos, audios that requires little efforts to create. Holographic projection into users eyes allows sci-fi imagination of cyber-meeting to come true.
Utopian and dystopian views assume that technologies possess intrinsic powers that affect all people in all situations the same way. This can explain why the society narrated in “Nosedive”, Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1, is surreal and will never actually occur. The smart wearable media will gradually take over the phone screen time, affect the way we approach information, and our long-established patterns of social interaction.
Bibliography
boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2015.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2011
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, 1988
