As a business student you have presumably heard of the term ‘Technological Dependence’. It is an established economic indicator, recurrently used to describe the asymmetric dependent situation of developing countries, as a result of the industrial revolution (UNCTAD Secreteriat, 1977). On a broader level, technological dependence can be considered the opposite of self-reliance (Anderssen, 1995). Here and now, the term has revived in the context of the digital world.
Over the last decades technology has become more and more involved with our daily lives. Though some are more cautious than others, all generations have currently embraced the digital life to some extent (Johansson, 2018). The extensive use of technology leads to the dependency of it, and not without consequences. Remember the last time you left your house without your phone? Or that time you felt very anxious because you thought you lost it? Exactly.
Accordingly, we spent more than three hours per day on our mobile devices (He, 2019). In a world where we constantly receive messages and notifications, it becomes increasingly different to isolate oneself. Our mobile phone confiscates a lot of our attention, distracting it from other activities such as socializing and studying. As my personal average screen time comes down to two hours and 26 minutes per day, I fit the statistics of a general homo digitalis. While I sit here writing this blogpost, my iPhone has lighten up about 12 times in the last hour.
Luckily, technology itself has facilitated multiple solutions for this form of technological dependence. And it appears in the shape of productivity apps. A productivity app is any piece of software that makes your job easier and allows you to get more work done in less time (Thomas, 2019).
Last year, I dowloaded the productivity app Forest. Forest is an online application that taps into the specific problem of procrastination by making you “put down your phone and focus what’s more important in life” (https://www.forestapp.cc). While you are focusing for a set amount of time, the apps grows you a virtual tree. When you leave the app within this time-slot, the tree withers. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook etc. therefore will have to wait. Besides growing your own little virtual forest this way, the app has also partnered up with a real-tree-planting organization. When you have completed a significant amount of time focused, you can spent your virtual coins on planting a real tree. So while I leave my phone alone, I finish my assignment (win), my virtual forest gets fuller (win) and I’m saving up to plant a real tree (win).
While this app helped me do the trick multiple times, it keeps blowing my mind that I need my mobile device to stop me from using this same device all the time. While I have the feeling that I have taken back some self-reliance, it might make me only even more dependent on my device, doesn’t it? Is technology really the best we have in 2019 to fight our Technological Dependence?
P.S. This is not an add
P.S.S. How many trees will you plant this academic year?
References
Andersen, H. B. (1995). Technological Independence: The Asian Experience. Business History, 37(4), 138-141.
He, A. (2019, June 4). Average US Time Spent with Mobile in 2019 Has Increased. eMarketer. Retrieved from https://www.emarketer.com/content/average-us-time-spent-with-mobile-in-2019-has-increased
Johansson, A. (2018, July 25).We need to reduce our dependence on technology if we want to keep innovating. The Next Web. Retrieved from https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/07/25/we-need-to-reduce-our-dependence-on-technology-if-we-want-to-keep-innovating/
Stewart, F. (1979). International technology transfer: issues and policy options. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Thomas, J. (2019, August 20). The 9 Best Productivity Apps. Retrieved from https://www.getcloudapp.com/blog/productivity-apps
UNCTAD Secretariat. (1977). Technological Dependence: Its Nature, Consequences and Policy Implications. Africa Development/Afrique et Développement, 27-45.
Thank you for sharing this interesting post Hanne!
It is an interesting train of thought. I have also used this app and have found it extremely helpful in preventing myself from using my phone, but never considered the fact that I was using my phone to stop myself from using my phone. If we look at other apps in this genre, such as Habitica, they even take it one step further and truly gameify the process. In a sense, this is even more paradoxical – to help you stop being distracted by your phone, play a game on your phone! But as the saying so nicely goes, “modern problems require modern solutions”.
Thanks for commenting Daniel! My compliments for the link with the saying, i’m sure we can live by that quote as future information managers 😉