I know some folks that do this and indeed I do hate it. But not because I'm a slave to my device. I hate the buzzing because you should just put it on silent if you don't care about the notifications. It's pretty annoying to have to hear a buzz or ringer in an otherwise quiet room, and it gets to the hate level when you clearly don't even need it on.
It annoys me either way. Just put your phone on silent (unless you have certain contacts that need to get through in an emergency).
It's especially annoying when you don't look at your phone because you're just making noise for no reason. It's on the same level as playing music through your phone on the subway with no regard for those around you.
I know someone who will sit there for an hour texting people and each text that comes in rings the phone. They're literally staring at their phone and think that they need the ringer on.
but since our phones are ad-delivery platforms, they only give you the minimum amount of flexibility to solve it. So that person is helpless trying to choose between not knowing when somebody texts or having the phone ring all the time. It's not their fault that they don't have any reasonable option.
That's exactly it. The companies behind the devices have a negative incentive to solve the annoyance issue for you, since your annoyance (attention) is their flow of income.
Like why do I need to be repeat notified if someone texts me 3 times quickly in a row? We ought to have some kind of an agent system that can handle these things somewhat intelligently. Apple is doing a little better in this regard, but I can't help but feel that in the OSS world we would have had a bunch of solutions to this by now. In a fragmented fashion with terrible usability, of course.
My favorite bit of Apple user experience is when I get a text and don't read it immediately. My phone will buzz me again two minutes later to really reinforce the urgency.
> but since our phones are ad-delivery platforms, they only give you the minimum amount of flexibility to solve it.
Three actions (volume button, tap, tap) on my Android to turn my phone from ringer on to silent isn't that bad. And even though I don't have an iOS device, I'd hardly say they're built to be ad-delivery platforms. iOS isn't really in the ad business as much.
My biggest problem is forgetting to un-silence it. I'll literally go days and miss tons of important calls/texts before I remember to check. I used to do that all the time but stopped after missing a some very important calls.
It's annoying, period. You're forcing me to listen to your life events in an annoyingly prodding manner.
However, I can tolerate it if there's reasoning. If you simply don't care and let a device make incessant irritating noises, now you're just being annoying.
what sort of frequency are we talking here? Because the frequency that my kids get annoyed by it is maybe once a week. Most of the time my phone is in my pocket and nobody else even knows it's buzzing. The kids only know when I have the phone in my hand and they are nearby, or if they are looking at my phone (which is rare). I don't think it warrants a solution like silencing, which mainly serves to ensure I miss everything until days later when I remember to turn it back to vibrate.
Putting the annoyance aside for a second, I think this is partly a difference of viewpoints when it comes to what constitutes being a "slave to your device" as you say.
Having the phone on vibrate or the ringer on all the time feels like being way more attached to your phone than having it on silent. Vibrate/ring means the phone gets your attention immediately all of the time. Silent means I decide when I give the phone attention.
Back to the annoyance, I know two people who like to think they're not attached to their device and leave it at home when they're out. But then when I'm visiting and they're out running an errand or something, their phones ding and ding and ding and there's nothing to do about it (since I'm not going to silence their phone for them...). I have lots of stories like this.
Of course, this all stems on me being baffled that someone would go days without checking their phone.
> I know two people who like to think they're not attached to their device and leave it at home when they're out.
This baffles me. Like, 80% of the reason I even have a phone is to be able to communicate/look up needed information when I'm away from home. It's when I don't leave my house for a few days that I might find I missed a bunch of important messages.
> Back to the annoyance, I know two people who like to think they're not attached to their device and leave it at home when they're out. But then when I'm visiting and they're out running an errand or something, their phones ding and ding and ding and there's nothing to do about it (since I'm not going to silence their phone for them...). I have lots of stories like this.
This would heavily annoy me too and is absolutely deserving of criticism. However I think that is a very different problem than having a phone that vibrates in your pocket that somebody occasionally feels because they're sitting next to you or holding your phone (my kids sometimes take pictures for example). The two might seem somewhat similar at a high-level, but the fact that one includes the phone being on the person and the other does not, that seems like a huge difference to me.
