We are constantly being notified
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| Apple; We are constantly being notified |
It begins very innocently. After you download an app, it will request your consent to send you push notifications. Yes, you say. What possibly could go wrong? I want to know when my burrito or shipment will arrive. But when additional apps are downloaded, each one requests your permission to notify you, and soon your lock screen is overrun with apps vying for your attention.
The application never stops talking. They are eager for interaction. All at once, they want you to be aware of the following: your favorite goods are on sale; you haven't exercised your Spanish today; your delivery person is five stops away; and your child at daycare just had a blowout. Welcome to Notification. Hell is a place where we all reside.
We haven't always resided in this area. For a while, businesses like Apple wouldn't give app developers the freedom to demand our attention at any time of the day. They were adamant that the power should be used for good rather than bad.
Although Google Photos is not an assistant, it frequently violates notification laws. It constantly picks up new skills, such as how to recognize a beer or a latte in a picture, and then nags you to see how it can recognize all the pictures of beer and lattes you've ever taken. It also really wants to tell me when it discovers numerous images of my cat napping on various pieces of furniture and brings them to my attention against my will, like a dog who finds a stick. I took the pictures with my brother in Christ. I am aware of their similarity. As long as we've given our consent, app developers are now allowed to send us marketing notifications. And guess what? You've chosen to receive a lot of notifications if you've chosen to receive any at all. The call is now even coming from within the house; Samsung is trying to sell you a new phone while you're using your Samsung phone, while Apple is advertising its services in the settings menus. Actually, there is nowhere to hide.
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| Settings |
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| Settings |
Not just advertisements are the issue. The digital assistants on our phones are working very hard to observe our behavior and anticipate our every move. They don't truly comprehend what is helpful and what isn't, probably because they are robots. Like when Siri provides a shortcut to put my phone in airplane mode when it notices that I have a flight on my calendar. Then it prompts me to dial into the meeting I have scheduled with my flight right away. With good intentions, digital assistants are paving the way to Notification Hell.
The creators of our operating system aren't completely insensitive to our pain; they have thrown us a few lifelines. On iOS, you can choose to have non-time-sensitive notifications delivered once per day in a daily digest. Additionally, you may configure focus modes (whose user interface is its own special brand of hell) and have some applications send notifications silently unless they are time-sensitive. However, in order to do it, you must first sort of figure out a puzzle. I once attempted this using Amazon. I believed I had set it up to send me notifications when an item arrived. A grocery order waited outside my house the night of the Fourth of July for five hours, so clearly I did something wrong. I hereby permit Amazon to notify me as often as it pleases.
That accurately describes our predicament: we are stranded in notification hell with no hope of escape. We only have a few rudimentary tools at our disposal, so it's up to us to figure out how to escape. I know I'm in it for the long run until I figure out my notification settings. For the time being, it's only consoling to know that others are suffering alongside me, because misery enjoys company.
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