Author: JOHN HERRMAN / Source: New York Times
As the ranks of tech-industry critics have expanded, it has become harder to tell what common ground they occupy. Across various political divides, there is a sense that Facebook, Twitter and Google exert too much influence on the national discourse; closely connected to this is the widespread concern that we users have developed an unhealthful relationship with our phones, or with the apps on them.
But on any more specific claim than that, consensus becomes impossible. The sudden arrival of a new class of tech skeptic, the industry apostate, has only complicated the discussion. Late last year, the co-inventor of the Facebook “like,” Justin Rosenstein, called it a “bright ding of pseudopleasure”; in January, the investment firm Jana Partners, a shareholder in Apple, wrote a letter to the company warning that its products “may be having unintentional negative consequences.”All but conjuring Oppenheimer at White Sands, these critics offer broadsides, warning about addictive design tricks and profit-driven systems eroding our humanity. But it’s hard to discern a collective message in their garment-rending: Is it design that needs fixing? Tech? Capitalism? This lack of clarity may stem from the fact that these people are not ideologues but reformists. They tend to believe that companies should be more responsible — and users must be, too. But with rare exceptions, the reformists stop short of asking the uncomfortable questions: Is it possible to reform profit-driven systems that turn attention into money? In such a business, can you even separate addiction from success?
Perhaps this is unfair — the reformists are trying.
But while we wait for a consensus, or a plan, allow me to suggest a starting point: the dots. Little. Often red. Sometimes with numbers. Commonly seen at the corners of app icons, where they are known in the trade as badges, they are now proliferating across once-peaceful interfaces on a steep epidemic curve. They alert us to things that need to be checked: unread messages; new activities; pending software updates; announcements; unresolved problems. As they’ve spread, they’ve become a rare commonality in the products that we — and the remorseful technologists — are so worried about. If not the culprits, the dots are at least accessories to most of the supposed crimes of addictive app design.When platforms or services sense their users are disengaged, whether from social activities, work or merely a continued contribution to corporate profitability, dots are deployed: outside, inside, wherever they might be seen. I’ve met dots that existed only to inform me of the existence of other dots, new dots, dots with almost no meaning at all; a dot on my Instagram app led me to another dot within it, which informed me that something had happened on Facebook: Someone I barely know had posted for the first time in a while. These dots are omnipresent, leading everywhere and ending nowhere. So maybe there’s something to be gained by connecting them.
The prototypical modern dot — stop-sign red, with numbers, round, maddening — was popularized with Mac OS X, the first version…
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