My Perspective: Time for change

Today I deleted Facebook from my phone.

No, I am not leaving Facebook. I just choose to move it out of easy reach.

The first step to doing something about a problem is admitting you have one.

A few months ago, when I had been mulling over my compulsion to pull out my phone and check Facebook repeatedly I moved the app off my phone’s main screen and into a folder, foolishly thinking that this would help.

WhatsApp too, for that matter, is far too distracting.

Part of the problem is that in my profession I have to be on Facebook and WhatsApp constantly as these platforms are vital sources of information. So naturally I belong to almost every WhatsApp group in the area. The message icon is constantly flashing.

There is no way of knowing if the messages pertain to a major crisis, something personal, another lost dog (lost chickens and rabbits at least keep it interesting) or some inane banter about the rugby (despite having emigrated recently to England, former Salt Rocker Bob Russel remains the main culprit of this).

What pushed me over the edge with Facebook were two things: my Facebook stream became inundated with advertisements and cute cat videos (by the way I unceremoniously unfollow anyone guilty of this).

Then a well-timed article that I read, ironically on Facebook: ‘Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia’ by Paul Lewis of London’s The Guardian newspaper.

Lewis reports on the Google, Twitter and Facebook engineers (the ones who helped make the technology so addictive) who are now disconnecting from the Internet. People like Justin Rosenstein who created the “like” button on Facebook are taking radical steps to disengage.

Rosenstein has tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. The 34-year-old tech executive even set up a parental-control feature on his iPhone to prevent him from downloading any more apps.

According to Lewis, Rosenstein is not alone. There are a growing number of tech developers who are now the biggest critics of their own creations.

They are taking radical steps to protect their families from technology – cutting off the internet from their homes at set times during the day and sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and laptops are banned.

The article makes a profound revelation: Most of them are, like me, in their 30’s. We are the last generation that remembers life before Facebook and smartphones (we even remember telephone directories! Hello, just Google it!).

And what they are warning us about is worth taking note of.

The impulse to quickly check our Facebook feed and find ourselves mindlessly scrolling 20 minutes later is no accident, they were designed this way.

Trillions of dollars are spent every year on finding more sophisticated ways to manipulate people into habitual use of these products.

As a result, the thinking of billions of people is being shaped by massive corporations with no real interest in our wellbeing. But most crucially we are losing the one thing we can never get back: time.

Time is the one commodity everyone has but no one knows how much they have left.

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Moses had the first tablet that could connect to the cloud.