Vortex of Recommendations
Written by Apurba Kumar
How many times in a day have you found yourself looking at your mobile but not really sure why you started in the first place ? How many times you go on to your favourite app to search for a video, which you do find, but end up getting stuck in a vortex of video recommendations from which you cannot just walk away ?
Let’s get answers to all those questions.
Hi! My name is Apurba and I’m here to talk about our excessive digital exposure.
Each of us spend a considerable time on our phones. Be it checking social media messages, text messages, mails, composing mails, replying to mails, taking photos, editing them and what not. The list is endless. If we want to learn something go on to YouTube and search for the topic and browse through the vides that appear. This is good and very accessible and we find a solution for most of our problems. But this just does not end there. Sometimes we may not find our answers in the first video, so we check out the second. Alas! No answer there as well and then we keep sifting through videos and then we find it. Sometimes we find it at first but we just keep on browsing because the other video looks more exciting or promises a better solution or something else.
The list is endless and thus we get stuck in the vortex of recommendations.
What we do not take into consideration is the time we lose in this. When we find what we are looking for and exit we do not end up giving more time. But when we stay on even if we have found something that’s when we are wasting time. When we sit idle and do not have anything to do, we again end up unlocking the screen of our phone and going through random apps to find something to grab our attention.
A few years ago, it was Television on which we would do this where we would keep on switching channels just to find something interesting to watch to pass time, which isn’t bad when done once in a while. But when we keep doing this every time, it becomes a little concerning
Even I do it. When it was television, it would happen only in the living room. But when this phenomenon takes over your cellphones this becomes a ubiquitous ordeal
How to get out of it
Luckily Google again has an answer to this question. Digital Wellbeing. It may come with other names on different versions of mobiles. What it simply means is this piece of tech has the analytics of what we do and where we spend most of our time in the phones throughout the day
How many times we unlock our phones etc. YouTube has this setting too. Go over to settings section in it and you can set a timer where it reminds you that you have spent this much time here it’s about time you stop. Set it to a time you like, start small, and let yourself adjust. And good thing is that YouTube gives you analytics of how much time you spent watching throughout the week and if the time watched is increasing or decreasing compared to last week.
This is a good place to start.
Keep watching this space for me when I shell out my own tricks that I follow.
