Time Well Spent

Several posts ago, I told you about Tristan Harris' initiative Time Well Spent (TWS), which now has a very thought provoking Facebook group that I'd encourage you to consider joining. It represents voices throughout the world and regular posts about news worthy articles that essentially worry that through smartphones we've created unfiltered information portals that infuse news/apps of questionable veracity/utility to very young minds to the point where personal technology has become an external vital organ to our very being.This recent post highlights an interview with one of the original Apple designers of iPod and iPhone, Tony Faddell, who rues:

“And I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens,” Fadell says. “They literally feel like you’re tearing a piece of their person away from them—they get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days.”

And I especially like the discussion about the harm of the tech mono-culture the article  suggests is at the heart of how this happened:

And it’s not just that these early Silicon Valley wunderkinds didn’t have children themselves–there were no women or minorities or older people around either, as sociologist Judy Wacjman points out. “Silicon Valley is notorious in particular for not being family-friendly,” she says. “It’s notorious for being full of young male designers. It’s great that they’re thinking about this now that they’re having kids, but I wonder if one could envision a different design community full of people of different sexes, full of people of different ages. Some of the design that you get is the reflection of the limited cultural understanding of the young guys who are doing the designing.”

The TWS Facebook group actively wants feedback from members; Tristan was a project manager of a gmail team at Google who left, because he felt the focus was primarily on how to make gmail more pervasive in our lives to profit Google, not so much about making it "helpfully" pervasive for actual users.

I for one have participated by suggesting if there is a way that email, in general, think Microsoft "Outlook", can prompt to require an email forwarded more than once must be versioned with a new name in the subject line so that you can reasonably save a lengthy string for future reference. What about if you could add tags to emails to help with retrieving relevant discussions? Or at least, have some sort of easy to use email tool that acts like a "speed bump" to alert teams, "hey, this has gone on too long in one string -- does the subject even now match the current discussion?".

What's in your brain you'd like to share?