Are you suffering from application obligation?
When I got my iPhone, one of the first apps I installed was Mappiness. There was a bit of buzz about it in the office at the time. I was intrigued by the idea - to map your happiness over time - and also into supporting the research by LSE. It all seemed so easy. Mappiness pinged me twice a day between 8am and 10pm and I dutifully answered the 6 questions on my level of happiness, location, activity and company.
For a while, Mappiness and I were the best of friends. It would ping and I would jump to it's tune. At work, down the pub, on my bike, I was hooked. Just the novelty of filling it out and seeing my stats served to perk me up, no doubt skewing the data.
But then the love affair began to fizzle, the honeymoon period was over. It would ping and I would greet it with a sigh. I began to ignore it more, or only respond when I was a bit bored. My response rate just before lunchtime on a weekday sky-rocketed.
Recently, we've reached an all time low. Despite downgrading our interaction to once a day, I can hardly ever bring myself to answer when Mappiness calls. I feel suffused with guilt whenever I see that blue notification message hanging on my screen. The fact is that the very act of filling it out depresses me entirely. I'm now skewing the data the other way, so I suppose overall it might at least be accurate. I've also become petty, I find fault with it any opportunity. It annoys me that it might catch me on a rare happy occasion but doesn't record the real reason I'm happy - not because I'm on a bus you doofus but because I very nearly missed it. And yes, of course I'm happiest when I'm outside, drinking alcohol on a Friday afternoon. Mappiness, it turns out, just doesn't understand me.
But I shouldn't be mean. It's not just Mappiness that produces this adverse reaction in me, I've just noticed it more in an app that aims specifically to chart my happiness levels. In actual fact, it seems to be part of a wider phenomenon which a fellow one of the Many, Conor, has dubbed 'application obligation'. That unpleasant twinge that wriggles down your spine whenever you see those 1724 unread posts in your RSS reader or count the weeks since your last tweet. And don't even contemplate opening the empty productivity app, downloaded in heady early January on a wave of eager activity. Tiny reminders of defeat, each and every one, which somehow add up to indicate that you have categorically failed to achieve anything with your life.
Sherry Turkle has recently written a book, Alone Together, which chronicles how social technology is damaging our ability to maintain relationships in meatspace. We spend hours glued to our iPhones frantically tweeting, emailing and facebooking as a way of confirming our existence, to the detriment of our interactions with the people around us. I seem to have the opposing malaise - I'm just not ready for the level of commitment the apps on my iPhone require. Despite being designed to make my life better, easier, faster, frankly, they are just too demanding.
Which all in all, is a roundabout way of saying, it's time to dial Mappiness down to zero. Instead I might, you know, get out more, go for walks, maybe take some pictures. Hey, have you heard there's this really great new Instagram app that makes sharing photos really easy and fun? No pressure.
So what do you think? Is this a genuine 21st century problem or just another #middleclassnightmare?
8 comments
Great post Cath :).
I went through exactly the same process. First I cut it back to 1 alert a day. And even then it made me feel bad to neglect it. Laughed out loud reading your frustration that the app didn’t understand you. I felt the same and would try to auto-compensate the results to balance things (I thought it would like weird if I was too happy while “on public transport”).
Of course it’s hilarious that we think apps should even understand us (!).
There’s this great promise that technology exists to enrich our lives. And of course that DOES happen in a million different ways.
I do indeed love my iPhone (really). But more than one dinner party I’ve attended has been ruined by people pulling them out to check facts during discussion.
Puh-lease.
I think some of the problem stems from you having to interrupt your day to use the app.
The best apps and services are those that seamlessly dovetail with your daily habits rather than making you stop, do a thing, and then carry on with what you were doing.
Don’t want to get into a reward debate but what’s the payback? What do you actually get in the long term from using the app?
I, for example, always use Cyclemeter when I go out for a ride on my bike. I turn it on, it doesn’t disrupt my ride in any way and it gives me a truck load of data when I get home. It quietly does its thing without slowing me down or changing my, deeply ingrained, habits. I can then use the wealth of data it gives me to aim / train for a faster time or average speed next ride.
The only thing I have to remember is to hit ‘start’ when I leave the house. And because of that I’ve been an avid user for a year or so and it remains on my iPhone ‘home’ screen.
You’re right Simon, an app that fits in with your daily activity rather than needlessly interrupting it is much more appealing.
There’s a clear tension for Mappiness between the need to gather useful data and creating an app that’s relatively frictionless. I don’t think they’ve found quite the right approach. They ask 6 questions, and yet I don’t feel that the information it gets out of me accurately reflects my happiness in context.
As to what I get out of it, not enough. Apart from the fact that I should drink more.
Justin – I hear you. In a similar vein, I’m totally fed up of going to gigs where everyone seems to be viewing it through the tiny screen of their iPhone video capture. Just switch it off and enjoy the damn gig. The video will be crap anyway.
The sheer absence of the iphone classes to consider the happiness of the poverty or hungered classes that contribute to their own illusion of happiness is manifested in an application that maps one’s own happiness to the exclusion of others.
Half the world is obese the other getting by on a couple of bucks a day. Their economic relationship is intertwined. The facts are a Google away. As is ones attention span.
Hi Charles, this is a very valid point and not one which I’ve touched on in my blog post, which is more tongue in cheek. In fact there’s a whole different blog post that could be written about that!
It’s a problem reflected in a lot of behavioural research. There was an article last year which pointed out that most subjects of behavioural research are WEIRD ( Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Not only that but the authors argued that this section of the population are outliers when it comes to many behavioural traits so conclusions drawn from this research will be inherently biased.
But I would still argue that there is value in trying to map the happiness of the UK population (although I don’t think that Mappiness is the right method to do this). As research by the New Economics Foundation shows, we need to find different measures of success to high GDP which is currently the primary driver for governments in developed countries and a key factor in the economic relationship you describe. The coalition government has shown an interest in this approach and plan to introduce their own happiness index.
However skeptical you are about their plans, I think the idea has merit. If they could get it right then it could be the foundation for policies which not only benefit us but which are also less aggressive and selfish in relation to other countries and people. Overall creating a happier, more well-balanced and equal world. There’s more on this on this NEF website http://www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org/
I gave up all of those goal-buddy/happiness/sleep/emotion/better person/ dreamcatcher measuring sites and apps some time ago because they were making me feel unhappy.The cognitive burden of using a meat-finger to interact with something inert was too much. I might take them all up again as soon as we’ve got tech embedded inside our bodies. If I could just think about it and it happened, or better still if it just happened without me thinking about it or being aware, then it might be useful and/or interesting. We will all soon laugh at how cumbersome our meat bodies were ‘back in the day’.
I remember reading about extinction bursts, and a lot of apps fall into that category when you find the service stops making you happy:
http://voice4dogs.blogspot.com/2010/02/extinction-burst.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)#Extinction_burst