Former Senior VP of Apple Tony Fadell Says Company Needs To Tackle Smartphone Addiction (wired.co.uk)

In an op-ed published on Wired, former SVP at Apple Tony Fadell argues that smartphone manufacturers -- Apple in particular -- need to do a better job of educating users about how often they use their mobile phones, and the resulting dangers that overuse might bring about. An excerpt: Take healthy eating as an analogy: we have advice from scientists and nutritionists on how much protein and carbohydrate we should include in our diet; we have standardised scales to measure our weight against; and we have norms for how much we should exercise. But when it comes to digital "nourishment", we don't know what a "vegetable", a "protein" or a "fat" is. What is "overweight" or "underweight"? What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like? I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in -- as with nutritional labelling. Interestingly, we already have digital-detox clinics in the US. I have friends who have sent their children to them. But we need basic tools to help us before it comes to that. I believe that for Apple to maintain and even grow its customer base it can solve this problem at the platform level, by empowering users to understand more about how they use their devices. To do this, it should let people track their digital activity in detail and across all devices.

Comments

Need parenting clinics

[CityZen]

If a child is "addicted" to mobile devices, it's an issue with parenting. Maybe the parent is "addicted" as well. In any case, trying to un-addict the child is like treating final-stage cancer, whereas promoting prevention measures (ie, teaching good parenting) would likely be much more successful.

Re:Need parenting clinics

[cayenne8]

But what "good" parenting?

Forcing the children to go to church and indoctrinating them into the various religious cults out there ? (Christianity, Islam, etc.)

Spare the rod and spoil the child ?

Living wages and decent hours so parents have the time and energy to spend with their kids and actually raise them ?

However.....when these things were the norm We didn't see teachers in classrooms having to make keeping order in class their main undertaking each day...rather, they were able to TEACH.

Those ideals and methods you seem to try to disparage...when they were the norm for US society, sure did seem to work...

And as they've been tossed aside, you see the plethora of problems we now have.

Just sayin'.....I've observed both manners of raising youth and have seen the massive negative change over time.

And books, too! And newspapers!

[ScentCone]

It's not THE PHONES. It's the services, information, data, tools, communication, maps and other things one gets to through that device that are the issue. People aren't addicted to their phones. They're addicted to their social contacts, to the news, to the novel they're reading, to the weather forecast, and such. Before those phones, they'd have been "addicted" to the AM radio while they were driving, they folded map they looked at, the printed novel they gazed at over lunch, the stock pages in the newspaper, the tabloid paper they picked up at the grocery store, and all of those other analogs.

How much novel reading or stock research is healthy? It's not the phones, just like it's not the guns, and not the spoons.