3 ms·
Well, you can mitigate some of the negative effects of notifications by reducing them everywhere - on your phone, on your PC, on your watch. But a watch is a ne
by clnq 3y ago
Well, you can mitigate some of the negative effects of notifications by reducing them everywhere - on your phone, on your PC, on your watch. But a watch is a new way for them to reach you. It goes in the opposite direction to reduction.
I'm probably showing my age here, but there was a time that's hard to remember now when there were no notifications, no devices constantly vying for our attention. You would know what you deemed important when you wanted to know it. No notification angst to reduce, no distractions to fight, no productivity to claw back, no sleep disruption to schedule DND around, no cognitive overload of all the systems on your machine, let alone a computer we carry around all the time, trying to tell you their state. That was for engineers operating complex systems, for 8 hours a day - very rarely more.
Perhaps we are accepting things like "you can snooze notifications now" because we've adjusted to the new, quite crappy, normal. Imagine an advert for a car that says "you can turn off sudden unintended accelerations on your preferred hours" in a market where cars would never SUA. That's the normal we had for notifications - none of the stress or anxiety.
- macintux 3y agoI also remember what it was like to not be able to reach loved ones in emergencies, to periodically find a pay phone to check a voicemail system while waiting for an important call, to have no idea that a tornado was coming. I’m happier with the choice to monitor in real-time what’s happening in my life, or not monitor, vs what we used to have: no choice at all.
- clnq 3y agoOkay, I'll bite. In the early and mid 00s we had means to do all these things without notification spam. Even in the 90s, were these things problems? In which emergencies were you not able to reach loved ones or were unable to tell a tornado was coming? A lot of the public warning systems we have are from that time. What you say makes sense if you go further back, but I feel like you're ignoring at least a decade where we had all these conveniences but no spam.
- kxrm 3y agoI grew up in Texas in the 90s and there was no way you would not know there was a tornado warning. People coped quite well with that reality, we live in a time where there is far more expectations to be always available. Before most people had cellphones if someone didn't know how to get a hold of you, they waited, and it was largely ok. Emergencies are probably the only thing I will agree with you on, but, and this could be just my luck, I just didn't have many of those. One in particular I can think of was when I went off the road into a ditch in the middle of nowhere while trying to avoid a deer and my car was suspended over the ditch so I couldn't get it out. I walked down the road to a local factory and hitched a ride with a trucker who took me to the security office so I could call a tow truck. Yea it was a hassle but it wasn't impossible to get through emergencies without a device in your pocket.