In last week's episode, we talked about battery anxiety.
Let's see what you had to say.
So, first thing's first, I just want
to say that there were so many good comments on this episode.
Not that there aren't always good comments.
But the sort of incidents of people sharing
their personal experiences and their strategies
and their reactions to the ideas that we talked about was just--
it was Chef-kiss hand motion.
Very good.
So I just want to say thank you, and that if you need
some extra reading, you know, it's not a bad comment section
to scroll through.
Marian Robinson went on some sort of internal searching
and tried to think about things that she might consider
similarly to battery anxiety and the need
to have your phone charged at all times
and arrived at similar feelings about feminine hygiene
products, which is, probably unsurprisingly,
something that never even occurred to me.
But it makes perfect sense.
And, actually, I talked with my girlfriend
about this a little bit and about the statistics
that we discussed.
Like, 46% of people will talk to a stranger
even though it's embarrassing in order to get a charger.
You know, 40-something percent of people
will skip the gym if their phone isn't charged.
And her estimate was that the percentages
for feminine hygiene products is probably about the same.
10 Seconds to Impact points out that in Hong Kong
battery packs are sometimes called urine bags
because they connect people all the time with a cord
connection.
And I think that that is funny.
Atheist in Exile adds a little bit more detail to this idea
that our phones are a part of our body by talking
about our relationship to our phones
through access to knowledge.
And that we associate--
it is arguable that we associate knowing something
not with actually being in possession of the information
at a moment's notice, but knowing
that we will be able to get it at a moment's notice.
And so that's what our phones are.
They are knowledge in that we don't have to know stuff,
we just know that knowing the stuff
is nearby after a set of actions that we can take.
And if those actions are removed from possibility,
then it is-- you know, it changes your relationship
to knowing things about the world, which
I think is super interesting and a great point.
Thanks for this comment.
Maggie D and a couple other people,
including talzir on Twitter, pointed out
that the very last thought that was in last week's video
could be seen to reflect attitudes about people's bodies
as well as their devices.
That, you know, cell phone manufacturers
seem to think that people want slimmer devices as
opposed to longer battery life even though, you know,
longer battery life has massive impacts on their productivity
as a human.
And that we can see how that is maybe
related to our own relationship with the size
of our own bodies.
And, you know, maybe wanting to find that--
maybe wanting to have a similar idea about the slimness
and attractiveness of our devices.
And, you know, I don't know--
nothing came across--
I never came across anything that said one way or the other
that that was a possible reason.
You know, it seemed-- most of the stuff
that I read basically just stated it
as fact that cell phone manufacturers understand
that people would like things that are smaller as opposed
to batteries that last longer.
But I'm going to do some digging and I'm
going to see whether or not someone has looked into this.
And if they have, I'll post it on Twitter
and mention it at the end of an episode
or in comment responses, you know, at a future time.
Yeah.
This is a really good and, I think, interesting question,
especially considering the fact that, you know,
like we talked about, you think of your phone
as an extension of your body, you know,
it would make sense that you would maybe
want the same physical--
within reasonable bounds-- the same physical qualities
in your phone that you would desire for your own body maybe.
This-- OK.
This-- yeah.
This is a line of questioning I will follow.
MayuriKurotsuchi and Super_Dork_42 relatedly
ask whether or not it is true that people
want slimmer devices or cell phone manufacturers
just think that people want slimmer devices.
And I have a little bit of an unproven hypothesis
on this, which is that based upon the broad success
of certain devices, it has been synthesized that people seem
to want things that look a certain way as opposed
to things that behave a certain way.
And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised
if this falls into the category of industrial design
thought that goes something along the lines of,
like, consumers don't actually know what they want.
They think they want one thing, but it turns out
when they're presented with a range of objects,
they want another thing.
And it is possible that the shortcoming
is that there is just no device that
has seized upon the perfect balance between size
and battery life that has been successful.
And so they are taking that to mean people
want slim things and not long battery life.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it is, in fact, true
that people want slim things and not larger objects with longer
battery life, and that really it's just the cell phone
market is much, much larger than the group of people who
represent their opinions about the size of cell
phones on Twitter and in YouTube comments
and on Reddit, which is where, you know, I hang out.
Seems likely.
Joe from It's OK to be Smart posits
that one reason we might have battery anxiety
is the actual design of the icons that let us know
that our batteries are low.
And that if something turns red there
is an innate sort of response that we have that says oop!
Red!
Red bad.
Time to worry.
Time to stop.
You know, this is a warning.
And, yeah, I mean, I think that this is probably
a very purposeful thing on the part of the designers.
Maybe not purposefully wanting to cause anxiety,
but I think purposefully wanting to get
across this idea of warning or danger.
This also makes me think about a section of the script
that got cut for time about the number of segments that
are in a battery indicator and how
those affect people's stress level related to their battery.
And one paper that I read basically
said three segments in a battery is bad
because as soon as one is gone, people
start to get nervous because they only have two battery
segments left and it looks like a third of their battery
is gone, and that's just stress inducing.
But that 10 is too many slices to be useful,
and so people will look at two and they'll be like, well,
I mean, I'll probably--
I'm fine.
I still have two.
But, really, two is not a lot and they should be worried.
And that the ideal number of slices
was somewhere in the five to seven range.
And then they did the normal research paper thing of saying,
like, we did not look at all at continuous battery icons
like what's on the iPhone.
Our study was just for slices.
There's lots of research to be done
about what a good continuous battery icon design looks like.
But I thought, yeah, it makes sense.
Number of slices lets you basically
decide how nervous you are.
Joe Edwardo on the Facebook page points
out the weird, existential feeling of loss
that we might feel when we don't have
our daily accessories like, you know,
your watch, your wallet, your keys.
That if you don't have those things,
even if you don't need them-- even if you don't need
your watch, you still feel weird and imbalanced
when you don't have it.
And I think that there is a similar thing
to be said about having your phone as an object,
but it being essentially a paperweight
with a dead battery.
And I think that sort of speaks to some of the stuff
that we talked about with Ana Horta et al's paper about,
you know, feeling ineffective as a cell-phone user
without a cell phone.
I don't want to add insult to injury,
but not only does it fit in my pocket, it fits in my pocket
with my phone.
And I'm only just now realizing that that is--
I'm very lucky.
Why do ladies pants have such tiny, shallow pockets?
I don't understand it.
From what I understand, most ladies don't either.
It just-- it seems like an injustice.
Jason Downey writes a really great comment
about the linguistics of battery usage,
comparing the terms that we use for depleted batteries
in English and in Japanese.
And it's a really great read.
Super interesting.
Highly recommended it.
Links to this one and all the others in the doobly doo.
William PeepSo dead battery anxiety.
Battery anxiety on a cell phone, nomophobia,
is very much related to another thing
I read called range anxiety with electric cars,
specifically the Tesla.
And there are now all of these studies just getting
started about how people deal with their range
anxiety, which, to me, seems just
like a much more stressful and dire situation than battery
anxiety and nomophobia.
Good luck out there.
3kindsofsalt points out another aspect of battery anxiety
that, you know, probably because of the personal experience
of everybody who makes Idea Channel we completely missed,
which is if you have a family and you need
to be in touch with your family for all kinds of very
important reasons and your phone is dead,
that's the first place you go is that your phone
is going to conk out and then you're not
going to be able to get a hold of your wife, your kids,
and then your duty as a family member is then threatened.
And, yeah.
I could absolutely imagine this being
a for-real and impactful source of battery anxiety.
So was going to make a joke about somehow figuring out
how to have your kids power your phone,
but that seems unethical.
Bye!