A newly released app called Moment will show us just how addicted we are to our phones.
Designed to promote a healthier balance between our real lives and those lived through the small screens of our digital devices, Moment tracks how much you use your phone each day, helps you create daily limits on that usage, and offers “occasional nudges” when you’re approaching those limits.
The app’s creator, Kevin Holesh, says he built Moment for himself after realizing how much his digital addictions were affecting his real-world relationships. After you set up Moment the first time, you never need to open it up again. The app will just run in the background, alerting you as to when you’re going over your daily limits. Holesh states that “most people don’t realize how much they’re on their phone.”
There is this undercurrent of fear about what it means for technology to continue this encroach on our lives in this way. What does the world look like when you forget your phone for a day, asked this poignant (and pretty sad) video from last year, for example. (See below).
For those who wake up to embrace their phone before their loved ones, for those who treat real-world conversations of secondary importance to incoming texts and emails, and for those who spend foggy hours on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook when having only been in search of a momentary distraction, Moments may be a step in the right direction.
Moment itself is a free on iTunes.
