ARE SMARTPHONES CHANGING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN?

By Jessie Gruman

April 2, 2014

In Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human?, Janelle Nanos explores the new generation of health apps and programs being developed by behavioral scientists. But when she finds herself feeling uncomfortable entering calorie data in her new diet app, Janelle ponders: I thought these apps were supposed to be giving us control over our lives. But here we are, feeling beholden to them, feeling guilty in their presence.

“Nagging is still nagging, whether it comes from your phone or your mom,” says Jessie Gruman, a social psychologist who heads the Center for Advancing Health, a patient-advocacy group out of Washington, DC. Gruman is a four-time cancer survivor who’s tried nearly every program on the market to help keep her weight up after she lost a portion of her stomach to the disease. But she gets so frustrated with the apps with how time-consuming they are, or how generally annoying they become that she’s deleted more than she can count. Because we think of our phones as tools that serve us, it’s disconcerting to find ourselves responding to their demands, she says. “We like our relationships with our devices to remain constant and uncomplicated.”

Read the full article on the Boston Magazine website

Original blog post by Jessie Gruman. Updated by the GW Cancer Institute June 2016.