People are paying to get locked out of their phones
In the past few years, a whole industry has sprung up to sell itself as the cure to screen addiction. There are gadgets that'll lock you out of your mobile device – and subscriptions that'll swap your smartphone for a flip phone.
And while some of these things can genuinely help reduce screen time, are we all just being sold a new technology to fix the problems that the old technology created?
These types of friction-inducing tools are increasingly being used by young people – who are the exact ones trying to pull away from technology in the first place. 63% of Gen Z say they are intentionally trying to disconnect from their devices.
In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with Christine Rosen - a historian and author who's written about what we lose when we start living through our screens – and asks her whether the solution here is really buying new tech, or if we all need to do something else to claw back our attention from our screens?
