Do Nothing To Get A Free Beer

We rarely take a break.

Especially if you’re working in an office, you might be in a constant hurry. In the few minutes you’re not in front of the computer, you’re playing with your Smartphone. Never do you take a real break, a real pause. We are either slaves to work or to the Smartphone.

Amstel Pause is a super cool installation in Sofia, Bulgaria, that makes you do nothing, and in return you’ll get a beer. How awesome is that!
Unlike other installations that ask users to dance, pay attention or do stuff, Amstel Pause just wants them to have a three minute break. And to enjoy a cool beer afterwards.

Watch this video to get the gist of it:

Did it work? Yep…

For 16 days, working from 16:00 to 21:00 o’clock in the busy center in Sofia, Amstel Pause collected:
— 4,032 minutes of break or more than 67 hours of rest for different people;
— Average of 84 users per day;
— Total of 1,344 beers given to people who do nothing;

amstel pause undigitize.me

amstel pause undigitize.me

Well kudos to Amstel

It’s not the first time this brand is helping us to cope with our Smartphone addiction. Remember the cool wardrobes for mobile phones in bars?

I can’t wait for it to get to my city. I always preferred my beer with doing nothing at the same time. It’s bad for my diet, but really good for my Digital Diet 😉

// Lior Frenkel

What did you just call me?!

A South Korean campaign against smartphone addiction involves warning kids in classrooms that too much internet use makes them “mindless slaves” or “losers.”
More than 80% of kids aged 12 to 19 were found to have a smartphone in 2012, double from 2011.
Losers!

read more: http://www.thefix.com/content/south-korea-fights-digital-addiction-school-speakers91860

What do you do when your battery runs out?

“If your iPhone’s battery, God forbid, ever runs out, and you have left your spare charger in your car and you’ve lent out your other spare, you find yourself having a nervous breakdown” – Jessica Poter, considers that to be one of the worst and scariest symptomps of a smartphone addiction.
I personally think that bumping into strange people on the street is alot more disturbing.

To read more from jessica http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/9-signs-youre-iphone-addict

Making fake phone calls?

Have you ever pretended to be talking on your phone just to avoid something or better yet, someone? it seems to be the most deadly symptom of smartphone addiction according to lifeteen.com.
Next time, maybe talking to the creep coming on to you on the bus in not as bad as the alternative.

read more http://lifeteen.com/the-5-phrases-cell-phone-addict/

Understatement of the year

The Child Welfare League Foundation survey revealed nothing new by presenting a shocking 36 percent of respondents saying they would feel unhappy, anxious or angry if they could not use their phone. So, you are warning us about smartphone addiction. Tell me more.

no, really, tell me more http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/07/17/2003567305

No more newspapers in the toilet

The next step in smartphone addiction- toilet texting. According to a new study, the magazines and newspapers have lost their appeal in the bathrooms among 75% of the american people. Nothing says “i missed you”, like a good old fashion text from the toilet of a loved one.

ToiletTexting-infographic

ToiletTexting-infographic

read more http://www.sociableblog.com/2012/03/07/toilet-texting-smartphone-addiction/

5 Tips on How to Stop Being a Digital Slave

Lifehack.org – a great collection of posts about how to improve our lives, wrote about UNDIGITIZE.ME.

Ohad Frankfurt explains:

Put your phone face-down.

I recently had the good fortune of discovering a fantastic project called undigitize.me. This project is a creation of a young entrepreneur who had enough. He wanted to focus on the things that mattered the most, mainly the people he encountered and his thoughts. One day he realized that the phone was his biggest obstacle.

So what does it mean to put your phone face-down? It means that you are preventing your mobile device from capturing your attention every time you receive an email, message, or any other stream of information. It’s not just a statement; it’s a way of life. Keeping your phone face-down means that you are trying to normalize the way you think and act, it means that once again you are in control of your time and focus and will not let any app or service control you.

Read more here.

Organic Apps vs. Junk Apps #1

So what defines Organic Apps?

Let’s start by understanding what are non-organic apps, or should we call them Junk Apps?

Connectivity addiction happens when we consume junk apps that boost our ego, make us slaves to our smartphones, and use our data to sell to advertisers, and harm our privacy in other ways.

Here are few examples for what Junk Apps do:

  • Push Notifications make us deal with unimportant stuff when we are busy with something important.
  • Students have hard time to learn to their exams since they visit addictive apps time and again.
  • At the office, people are having a hard time concentrating on their tasks.
  • Multiple people contact us via multiple apps – messenger, whatsapp, facebook, etc – sometimes all at the same time. Which mean we do not give them the right respect and response they deserve.

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Smartphone Addiction – Creative and Fun Way To Stop It

Jon Rettinger from TechnoBuffalo rants about our constant need to check smartphones in public places.

Before Apple and Google took over the phone world, people were less attached to their devices and could go out to dinner or a movie without being distracted by their phones. Now, anywhere you go you are almost guaranteed to see someone using their phone to check Facebook, read emails, or send texts instead of socializing and interacting with the people around them.

Jon has fallen victim to this behavior but has found a fun and creative way to stop it…

Nomophobia: A Modern Age Addiction

NoMoPhobia = No Mobile Phone phobia

is the fear of being without one’s mobile phone. Smartphone addiction is a real problem amongst this generation and is affecting peoples’ social lives and education is a negative way.

This documentary was created as a project at Bahrain Polytechnic, by 

The Journey Starts Now

Instead of becoming slaves to our smartphones, let’s take back control of our lives. Let’s raise the awareness for having less push notifications, less addictive apps, less interruptions when we meet other people.

We don’t have to stop using technology – quite the opposite. Technology is a great thing, it can help us be smarter, more productive, up to date, in the know, more social…
But we should use it smarter than we currently do, we should ask the App developers to stop making us addicted.

Continue reading