There are some harsh truths you'd rather not face, like what
you really look like eating a turkey drumstick, or how you sound while you
sleep. Also, how many hours you spend on Facebook and Instagram is a
potentially shame-inducing data point that for years you’ve had no real way to
assess. But today, Facebook has been widely—and quietly—rolling out a tool that
lets you measure how much time you spend using both the Facebook and Instagram
apps.
In the Facebook app on iOS and Android, you can find “Your
Time on Facebook” buried in the “Settings and Privacy” menu. Click on More >
Settings and Privacy, then scroll down to Your Time on Facebook. There, you’ll
get a bar graph of the week, with your usage time displayed by hours and
minutes per day, and the average total of time you spent each day. On
Instagram, go to Your Account > More > Settings > Your Activity, and
you’ll see the equivalent. @ read more thedelightbeauty
Though Facebook detailed both features in August, they're
still not fully baked at launch. The Facebook tool in particular has serious
limitations, the most glaring of which is that it doesn't factor in desktop
usage at all. You can't even entree it other than in the app. The Instagram and
Facebook tools also don't tally your total usage across devices. The numbers in
the bar graph indicate only how much time you spend on Facebook or Instagram on
that single device.
“As we continue to work on these vital tools, we hope to add
measure for the desktop/world wide web,” said a Facebook spokesperson in an
email to WIRED. The company wouldn’t elaborate on what might prevent it from as
well as desktop in the future. “We are starting with measuring time spent on
the mobile app because people spend more time using the Facebook mobile app
than on their desktop computers,” she said.
Facebook declined to share the data collapse by device or
demographic, but with mobile usage in general higher among younger people, it
seems likely that a disproportionate amount of older Facebook users may not be
able to effectively track their usage. It also won’t help anyone who may have
uninstalled the Facebook app on their phones, but still visit it on the mobile
web. @ read more beautycrazepro
Still, for heavy Facebook app users, the tool should give a
good sense of how much time you've sacrificed to the social network. The tool
nudges you to take more control over your Facebook experience. Below the bar
graph is the bolded suggestion to “Manage Your Time,” followed by links to your
preferences menu for the News Feed and your friends list, from which you can evidently
tell the algorithm to show you more photos and less news, or vice versa, or to
see more of certain friends and less of others. (Sorry, Janet.) On Instagram,
you get the option to change your notifications. Which you should! You don’t
need push alerts for likes on Instagram. @ read more fortunetextile
The most potentially disruptive and annoying—but helpful—new
feature for both apps is a timer you can set, which Facebook politely calls a
“Daily Reminder.” Tell the app how long you think it’s healthy for you to be on
Facebook or Instagram, and it'll nudge you to sign off once you reach that
limit.
While Facebook's digital wellness measures are welcome, it's
also industry standard at this point. This year, all the social media and the
big customer tech companies (with the notable exception of Twitter) have rolled
out similar slide tools, all with the goal of helping people reclaim their time
and use their phones and apps less. As a nod to the “Time Well Spent” movement,
these companies that became internationally dominant by addicting people to
their infinite scrolls have admitted that maybe possibly spending hours staring
at our phones doesn’t bring people joy. @ read more businesstextiletech
