What if Facebook was designed by Buddhists?

What if our apps were designed by Buddhists?

I don't mean just meditation apps or mindfulness apps. You might consider how odd it would be if Christian programmers were only concerned with Bible verse apps. What if what we aimed for, in designing our everyday technology, were to embody and promote values of leading a meaningful life?

In reality, our apps are already designed by teams of religious and secular ethical people - people who care about health, a meaningful life, families, making the world a better place, and long-term human good. But those values are rarely framed as the value to optimize. Deep customer needs are not often the customer needs that we set out to solve, with teams of considerable talents and skill.

But they can be - and sometimes are. How we frame the problem and present the choices has an immense influence on what we do, as designers know. If we frame technology "merely" as entertainment, it can be an uphill battle to go deep. The movie and video game industry can attest to this, as over the decades they've struggled to craft meaningful messages, seek to raise values other than laughter, comfort, relaxation, etc., and be recognized for deeper artistic or cultural value.

If we frame technology as "merely" tools of convenience and consumerism - with efficiency, sales, quarterly growth, or leisure as the ultimate values - it can be an uphill battle to re-frame it to seek other values.

If we were to design, from scratch, a tool for universal communication and access to knowledge, that we would be proud to give to our 6-year-old nephew, what would it look like? What choices would it promote? What choices would it take off the table?

How could I create settings options that made it easy, by default, for my friends and neighbors to manage their time and interact in the way I'd want to see in my ideal world? And of course, proactively made it much harder for malicious actors to cause harm through hate, ignorance, or greed?

How could I do my part to help all my friends and families who want to make healthier choices, get outside, take meaningful political action? Escape cycles of anxiety, worry, and distraction that leave them not feeling well?

What if the next way we connect was designed with these concerns not as an afterthought, or a side note, but as the mission and vision underlying all of our work?

I think we're seeing the demand for this kind of work begin to be answered. I can't wait to explore what we'll do next.

6 months of no smartphone

6 months ago I wrote about taking an extended break from Facebook and trying to do better - with the bigger life problem: the distraction problem. Like working at the pizza shop and getting concerned about my all-pizza diet, I was bothered by how wrapped up in social media I felt. However, it's not just about one food. I found I had a habit of running to all kinds of distraction without thinking. At that point I had to admit, the biggest culprit was still attached to me: my smartphone.

I love the possibilities of new technology to improve our lives. But was this one right for me?

Forgetting not having one

Until I was halfway through high school, it wasn't a practical reality for everyone to have a phone on them. Even then, I didn't like the idea that I wouldn't get to choose when and where I was reachable and when I had "sacred" quiet time. I liked camping; at one point I'd learned orienteering (finding your way with a compass). It stuck with me how good it felt to take a walk and, sometimes, deliberately get lost.

But in the early 2000's, that became less and less possible. Over the course of 15 years through college and into adulthood, a small computer in my pocket became an ever-present part of my life. I traveled extensively for work into new states, I used GPS, music, searches for local food, churches, and more. I worked and took classes remotely, and had to connect from wherever I was. I organized big events, and tracked my plans. I got interested in marketing and technology, and generally existed as an extrovert, entangling myself in all sorts of smartphone conveniences and connections. I'd forgotten not having one.


I realized I wasn't happy with how things had evolved this year. I'd gotten over-saturated with social networks and entirely sick of dinging and beeping interruptions, not to mention disheartened by constantly checking the news. I was worried about what a kind of Wild West of digital social norms was doing, and I wanted to take some time to think about that. So I worked on setting myself some boundaries. I thought it would be hard but I could do it; I didn't really know what I was in for.

Setting boundaries

I'm a believer in the positive possibilities of the right technology to improve our lives. What usually trips us up, I think, is not thinking deliberately about it. We could set ourselves up better with good habits - like we do with personal diet and exercise; or we could create better societal rules for bigger deals - like we do with recycling, seatbelts, and FDA regulations. We haven't gotten very far regulating the digital world we live in, though I bet we will someday soon. So I gave myself a shot at making some personal changes. I set no-phone times and got an app for locking the screen on a timer. I talked to others in my life about when and how they could reach me, and tried to distance myself from "instant" messages unless urgent. I stopped using Facebook altogether for a while, and after deciding to open it again 6 months ago I widdled down the distracting features with tools like F.B. Purity and Social Fixer.

I still found myself with the nagging urge to break those self-imposed limits. It's normal - people have trouble with New Year's resolutions for a reason - but of course it's frustrating. Without thinking I'd catch myself on my phone, doing just one more thing, then another. I'd look up and see everyone on the bus, the sidewalk, in their cars, in the cafe, at the party, wrapped up in their phones - including me. It's not just something I came up with on a whim that smartphones are having a troubling effect on people's minds and emotions, often without us realizing it. Research is starting to show that nagging feeling things are too often out of balance may be rooted in something more serious.

Besides, the more I heard "How can anyone live without a smartphone!" the more I had the strong impulse to huck mine off a cliff.

So I did.

Cold turkey

I am stubborn; this is my work and my treasure. I decided half-measures weren't enough and sold my smartphone back. I'd quit Facebook for half a year, why not smartphones next? It felt good to call my own bluff.

A baffled phone store employee, practically having an existential crisis on my behalf, helped me switch to a 1990's era clamshell, a real brick that laughed in the face of the phrase "mobile optimized". The web browser was a broken time travel machine that could only see one page from 1992.  I'd text about half a sentence before giving up and making a phone call.

It was perfect.


I felt a bit curmudgeonly, and resolved myself I was OK with that. It seemed a fair exchange for leaving the "young" off of "young adult" as I am now firmly in my 30's. I couldn't GPS, I couldn't Uber. I asked people to call or visit in person instead of text long, confusing conversations. My coworker half-joked about whether I could function on a business trip.

Most people were tolerant about this whole life choice I was making, but one thing was pretty clear. This was different than just not liking Facebook. People who sadly nodded their heads and agreed they'd love to take a break too when I talked about quitting Facebook, now stared blankly at me or immediately swore they'd never leave their own smartphones. It was too important, too vital, too tied into everything they did and needed and enjoyed. Many people simultaneously said they had a problem - i.e. they admitted to breaking their own limits and not liking it, or not feeling like they could really stop themselves - and said it wasn't that bad.

I'd given myself no choice but to stick with it anyway, or else I don't know if I could disagree. I'd felt the exact same way.

I'm not a Luddite who wants to grab people's phones and smash them, but I think we could stand to question it when we feel cut off instead of connected, when we see everyone's looking down, all the time.

I live in a busy city, and I walk by an intersection every day where a woman my age was hit and killed in the crosswalk. I debate with myself how effective it would be to say to passersby, please look up. Please take care of yourself. They're usually just annoyed with me. I usually don't.

Why do this

Well, even if that weren't the case, even beyond my right to be an annoying stubborn old person if that's living the dream for me, I felt committed to the idea that we each have the right to determine our own quiet time. It resonated with high-school me, first resisting a cell phone because Edward Abbey said every free American has the right to get lost, sunburnt, and eaten by bears. We should be allowed, and able to stand firm to say "no" to things even if we feel pressured into them because of convenience, artificial urgency, or because everyone's doing it.

Over the spring and summer, into the fall, it's only recently I notice myself not craving to check my phone any more. It's taken, realistically, months for that to really change. I gradually remembered things I used to have to write down or check ahead of time, like bus times, phone numbers, what I was doing that afternoon. I could work to make club communications more widely accessible. I could get a work phone. But the real difference is more profound.

It feels like I'm starting to get my attention back. Not to be overly dramatic, but I force myself to do whatever I'm doing - ride the bus, look at the sunrise, notice people around me - instead of by default, thinking about my phone. Sure, I could do this before. People can and do set aside their smartphones, detox and unplug. People can use them as great aids, planners and communicators and organizers, then put them in a fixed place and set firm boundaries. Maybe I simply had trouble with this myself, and like anyone's personal health journey, with steps forward and back, you'll find differences and similarities to help you with your own. But there's something pretty important I was having trouble with when I had a smartphone on me. It was always there, even when I didn't want it to be. It always had a piece of my attention, and I could rarely give my whole attention, 100%, to anything else.

I was having trouble forgetting what it was like having one. I was, I'd say, unable to imagine living without one.

I don't think I'm going to get a smartphone again, not for a while. Maybe never. It's too valuable a thing to sit and think about sunrises and nothing else.

Reflecting on a half year off Facebook

Since September, I've been taking a break from Facebook. I actually use a lot of social media for work; I've compared taking a personal Facebook break to working in the pizza shop, and I needed to seriously rethink my own pizza intake.

I deactivated my personal account for the last 6 months. As I'm considering what's next, I wanted to be honest about what was a success and what I failed at, and make some commitments to hopefully help me in the future.

My main takeaway is this: a break really helped me consider things I'd taken for granted. There's no received wisdom about the healthy balance for new technology in our lives - we each have to figure that out for ourselves.

We each have to figure out the healthy balance for new technology in our lives. Whether a long or a short break helps, it deserves some thought.

Here are the main things I found helpful to think about.

Value vs. time put in - what's right for me?

I'm an extrovert, so I usually feel particularly comfortable, fluent, and refreshed when socializing. But instead I often felt drained by time on my personal social media. I was determined to make it work, but pouring in more time just made me feel exhausted.

Stepping back helped me sort out what was happening. Social media burnout told part of the story - I needed to better balance quality vs. quantity. I had an embarrassment of riches when it comes to interactions and entertainment. Before, I wasn't looking at each particular activity, and whether it was fulfilling its social promise in the same way online as in real life. Sometimes it did; sometimes I had assumed it was.

What was different about messages vs. live conversations? A note sent directly to a person vs. a post to the world? Was I actually getting to know "Friends of Friends" three or four times removed?

I found I didn't experience the kind of terrible loss I thought I might by cutting online activities for a while. I was actually fine. I made other arrangements, friends found me and I found them, or we had an every-once-in-awhile note or call instead of every day. As much as quitting induced a knee-jerk anxiety that all my friends would mourn me as if I'd died and my social life would fall apart, it wasn't as essential as I'd let myself start to think.

When I get anxious over disconnecting for a bit in the future, it's good to remind myself it's no big deal. It's actually going to be fine.

There are definitely things that I still consider valuable, even after some thought. Like the ease of finding photos and events, the fact most people's "family newsletters" were on Facebook now, and how a thoughtful personal note to or from a friend felt good in any format. But I really needed the perspective. And I honestly needed to take a hard look at how easy it was for me to slip from something specific and valuable, into aimless internet-browsing.

It was easier to notice after I cut cable TV (years ago) and Facebook. Whenever my mind would wander, I'd have the impulse to just see what's on, or scroll through an endless newsfeed. But it's honestly something I've failed at even without those media: I would find myself opening up YouTube, rechecking the newspaper, or even reloading my email too many times for that "junkfood" media consumption, just because it was there.

Being more aware and deliberate about how I spent my free time is exactly what I wanted to get better at. And it wasn't working.

It isn't just a problem with Facebook, or TV, I realized, but a problem with distraction: fear of being bored is a huge challenge to overcome. Add to that fear of missing out; worry about our own image; and of course, naturally wanting to socialize or be "in the know". These all led me to spend time on impulse I might otherwise choose to spend differently. I might rather turn my daydreams into art or go out in person - but social media is so easy. Like a credit card makes it easy to spend money frivolously, Facebook allowed me to keep spending time and wonder where it all went. It many many things very convenient - but at a cost if I wasn't careful.

Facebook is like a credit card for time. Having it in my pocket made it very easy to spend without thinking.

I determined to at least cut down on owning too many "credit cards" or easy time-wasters. My smartphone is the biggest culprit right now. I need to actively work on mindfulness - trying to develop some basic better habits. I'll always face the challenge not to flee from discomfort into distractions every time my mind wanders.

Still, that wasn't the whole story.

"Best" or "best fit" communication

Reflecting on time, mindfully, was a good start. But on another level, I was also getting actively frustrated that writing more - in text, chat, comments and news feeds - actually seemed to communicate less.

Miscommunication isn't anything new. But humans are notoriously bad at tone and other important cues with text - and we consistently think we're much better than we are. The volume of text in our personal lives has exploded. With two thirds of all Americans online with smartphones, text and the problems that come with it are now delivered directly to us, constantly - in a flood. We assume a lot about the "best" mode for our message: that the people we have in mind will receive it in the same frame of mind as us; it'll be read and understood about how we intended; everyone's going to have about the same experience as we have with similar things, regardless of differences in schedule, personality, or distractions big or small.

It's even harder as social contexts often collide and clash. Etiquette and unspoken assumptions people share in different social contexts - like work, the bar, your family room, or broadcasting on a talk show - might be jarringly mismatched and mixed together. Social media and messenger apps interrupt us everywhere. We can't know when and where our messages will be read, or who will "overhear" them (in fact, we make assumptions about that too, which are rarely accurate). The boundaries are blurred, and keeping them becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

I've dealt with this sort of reality before, having worked in government, public relations, and marketing. Public figures often learn to speak and write carefully to very diverse and clashing audiences.

Perfecting this difficult PR skill - being aware of how far and wide every word might go, and using new etiquette accordingly - is now tacitly demanded of pretty much everyone.

It can be alarming that everything online is public/shareable/on permanent record by default. Our descendants could research their family tree, our high schoolers could map their town's history with sample quotes from Facebook. How many of us have really accepted and adjusted to that reality?

Although young people growing up with social media have started learning this "public-by-default" mode, this social media space is new, and young, and quickly changing, for all of us.

Growing pains of learning and adopting this new form of communication are, plainly and simply, a reality now. Human mistakes will be made, frustrations will continue to exist as people learn and we all attempt to navigate a difficult space.

For myself, firm boundaries, a long-form blog, and defaulting to meet more in-person have been very helpful. I also allow myself to be limited in my connectivity, and take deliberate technology breaks and off time. I would rather deal with some slight inconveniences than set myself up for more burnout. Communication is hard enough as it is.

Texting and social media are here to stay. But it's OK to set boundaries.

All of these things added up for me personally and made a break very worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone to get a better personal perspective on this complex and overwhelming tool that has become a daily part of our lives. But there are also bigger things going on.

This didn't happen in a vacuum.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room:
The election

The truth is, globally, we're all right at the very beginning of figuring out privacy expectations, ethics, how we treat each other - even the truth with the new reality of the internet, smartphones and social media. People's ideas about how these should fit into their own lives vary wildly, and don't always mix in happy ways. Societies have always had phases of figuring out how to behave with new communication or technology. We're now in a new frontier of forming social norms and rules with a billion people in shared virtual space.

Which brings us to the 2016 US election. Or a lot of politics around the world in the digital age.

The 2016 US election and aftermath have drastically changed the discussion. This happened in the background of my own frustrations, but surely contributed to them. What was once a personal question - "Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?" - has become a society-wide reckoning with effects on democracy, psychology, civil debate, group behavior and more.

What was once a personal question - "Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?" - has become a society-wide reckoning.

A great good that's come from this is the honest conversation around activism and change with the reality of social media. Over the past 6 months I've had more (in-person) conversations with more serious, actionable ideas about community organizing and social media than I've had in the past 6 years. We've made a lot of assumptions about how the internet will change society and democracy, and this year has acted as a wake-up call that it's not necessarily going how we thought - we need to take a more deliberate, proactive role to affect positive change.

Though maybe I shouldn't be, I've been perplexed by the way people's behavior changes online. I can't seem to shrug off the common assumption that online abuse is the "norm".  The more I hear "that's just the way it is" the more I question that's the way it has to be. And seeing a public figure shrug and engage in bullying, mob mentality, willful miscommunication - it's disappointing. Indulging our worst impulses won't help us lead better lives. These are all forces we're going to need to examine thoughtfully and maturely in our own lives, and let's face it, in our country and our globalized culture. I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. But I want to try and do better.

At the most basic level, shouldn't we take a moment to deeply consider what might happen in an uncontrolled social experiment with 7.5 million kids?

For me, it's still personal. I think people have the right to set their own boundaries. Decisions like when to have privacy, who to associate with, and how to spend our time are deeply personal ones. But now, as concerns about weakening civic dialogue have come to light, it's personal on a new level.

It's not that social media - or any new form of communication - is a societal evil in itself. That's the wrong message. Ultimately, I'll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I've learned to live in a more mindful way. But we do need to talk about how new incentives, new products and new behaviors fit into our lives. We need to deeply consider how it's affecting us, not just the extreme cases but the everyday of how we're being treated and treating others, how we're thinking about our time and relationships, and if what's really happening matches the picture in our heads of what we think is happening.

 Ultimately, I'll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I've learned to live in a more mindful way.

We need to be free to reflect, to change, to question what we're doing just because everyone else is doing it, to try to make our lives better - and if need be, to walk back a path we've taken, whether or not we choose to return that way again.

"Friends" social media as your virtual living room

Picture everyone in your "friends" social media circle at a big (virtual) house party. The space is shared by friends, acquaintances, family, mentors, mentees. Each Comment, Like, and Share opens the door to other friends to walk in.

Let's say I open the door to my or my friend's house and let in someone who ends up being extremely rude, ignorant, upset or vitriolic. I'd consider it my responsibility to talk to them, and if I have to, remove them from the living room. I picture the faces of everyone I know who hears such words as if they were sitting on my couch, stunned, hurt, or waiting for my reply. What's the right response?