Your phone’s notification settings and the meaning of life

• Published date: 30 June 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

A photo app started trying to sell me a print album. A train ticket app prodded me not to forget my upcoming journeys. The Financial Times app urged me to read the latest headlines. More disturbing, Google News installed itself and did the same thing, except for news sources I don't follow and don't want to. Most absurd of all, every single incoming email announced itself with a beep and a teasing extract on my home screen. Fortunately, I don't have social media on my smartphone; I could only imagine the cacophony if I did

This was all simple enough to fix. Calendar, text messages and phone calls are now the only apps allowed to interrupt me. Still, it was annoying. I wondered: surely everyone switches off most notifications, right? Right?

Perhaps not. I stumbled upon an essay by Guardian columnist Coco Khan marvelling at how much calmer she felt after turning off notifications. She described this peace as completely unexpected, "an unintended consequence of a tiny tweak". She went on to explain that WhatsApp alone had sent her more than 100 notifications a day and that she had only muted the apps because she'd been on holiday in Bali, and the phone was buzzing all night. As well it might, given that social media notifications were still on. She felt calmer when this stopped. Who could have predicted that?

Cautionary tale

On the face of it, it is absurd that she was surprised. But it is always easier to be wise about other people. I read Khan's account as a cautionary tale for all of us. We humans can adapt to a lot; it's easy to sleepwalk into a state of chronic stress and distraction without ever reflecting that things could be different.

Khan's experience seems common. One of the most robust findings in behavioural science is that default settings wield an outsize influence over our choices, even when it is trivial to change those defaults. It is no wonder that many apps pester us endlessly, by default. App makers clearly believe we'll put up with it, and they may be right.

One study, published in 2015 by researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, found that on average six out of seven smartphone apps were left in their default notification settings. Given how many notifications are clearly valueless, this suggests that in the face of endless notifications, many smartphone users have learnt helplessness.

Of course we sometimes want to know immediately when something has happened. As I am fond of saying, a...