The first smartphone only came out 12 years ago. Technical innovations are becoming more and more part of our everyday lives. And in contrast to the car, which took decades to establish itself across the board, the Internet and smartphone needed a much shorter period of time.
What should actually make our lives easier can also become a burden, or has already become a great burden for many people.
“Homo Digitalis” is how Alexander Merkowez describes humans nowadays in his book “Digitaler Burnout”. The scientist is particularly concerned with the negative consequences of our smartphone society. Using a self-developed app, he analysed the usage behavior of Germans regarding their smartphones. And the result is frightening: on average we switch on our smartphone 88 times a day, 35 times to look at the clock, 53 times to actually interact and only 7 minutes to make phone calls. Assuming we get 8 hours of sleep and are 16 hours awake: That means we interrupt our activities every 18 minutes to look at our smartphone. And that’s just the average. This behaviour is also independent of age, educational level and social class. In one chapter of his book, Merkowez focuses on the negative long-term effects on children: addiction, permanent communication pressure, cognitive, social and psychological disorders, as well as productivity and joie de vivre disorders, cyberbullying, health consequences such as overweight and obesity, and ultimately burnout.
Many adults fight their own smartphone addiction. Often the smartphone is left out of their own reach, switched off and so on. About 2% of Germans even do without their smartphone and revert to the old standard mobile phone. In a survey in 2017, 38% of those surveyed wanted to restrict their use of smartphones, but only 12% were successful.
With our Mobivisor App we enable the voluntary restriction of smartphone use, whether for yourself, for your employees/employees/colleagues or for example for your own children. You have the possibility to control your smartphone through a central administration. Apps/functions can be blocked or activated at certain times of the day, e.g. at work/at school/ in the evening/at night. Especially parents have the possibility to set limits for their children when using the smartphone and to avoid excessive use. In addition, the app offers protection against harmful content, whether on websites or with certain apps.
And if you’ve just read this on your smartphone, make yourself aware of how much unnecessary time you’re wasting on it and what you could do (experience) instead.