This Hacker News thread asks an interesting question: When did “disturb” become the default mode for devices? Specifically,
A few days ago I took a nap and set the DND –do not disturb– on a timer for 1h. Once the timer finished it went by default to “Turn off DND”, which is the same as “disturb me please”… Because of this I was wondering when did the “disturb” mode became (sic) the default? This applies to my phone as well, which I always have with DND turned on. How is it that we have to turn on DND. Shouldn’t it be “turn on disturb mode”?
Some of the answers I found worth sharing:
people generally want to be disturbed by notifications. Just consider how many people don’t keep their phone in silent mode. I don’t think it’s the ideal way to live, but people love running over to their phone to see if it’s a new WhatsApp message that cause the ping.
At the beginning of the smartphone era, there just weren’t that many disruptions to warrant a DND mode. Most notifications were interesting. And we didn’t have wearable devices tethered to phones or computers either. The normalization of distraction kind of got us by surprise, society-wide, and it’s only now that new UX patterns are developing to help people manage it.
My theory would be that that:
> “disturbable by default” is a carry-over from landline-only time
calls where rarer in landline-only time because they (sometimes) cost money
> calls where rarer in particular times (eg late at night) because of a social norm
> calls in the middle of the day where probably rarer, but also much easier to ignore because you were not at home and your phone simply run in the void
> calls were mostly done by human beingsNow, the “phone calls from a human being who respects social norms or that I simply never hear” have been replaced by “automated notifications from bots in a piece of plastic that’s constantly in my pocket, or text messages from people that expects me to be reachable at any time.”