ScreenSaver—The eco-conscious screen-time tracker

Mock-up of widget for 0-250g CO2 worth of social media activity
Mock-up of widget for 750-1000g CO2 worth of social media activity
A detailed look at key features
Totally real tweet #1
Totally real tweet #2
What do you think?
Lots more to see!

The information you access while doom-scrolling through Reddit, zombie-scrolling on TikTok, or envy-scrolling on Instagram comes from data centres which use immense amounts of energy. In fact, this energy usage is estimated to account for over 2% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions.

People already know the harms of social media addiction. Still, it is incredibly difficult to break free. It's clear: we are not intrinsically motivated enough to rid ourselves of products that are designed to be addictive.

Saving the Earth, and saving your mind, we call it ScreenSaver.

But, there are many lovely people that suffer from social media overuse who care. They care about themselves, sure, but they care about the environment, about Mother Nature.

Indeed, sometimes we find it easier to care for others than to care for ourselves. So, with mental health and Earth’s health at the forefront of our minds, we have created a simple yet savvy application which calculates the carbon dioxide emissions your social media addiction is causing. The sky—easily viewable as a widget—becomes increasingly polluted the more you use apps, all of which use different amounts of energy. This is the eco-friendly way to track your screen time.

This is invisible impact made visible.

One challenge we faced was justifying why our cause is important—to individuals, but especially to the global village. After all, there are notable sectors which emit far more CO2 than social media companies do. Upon extra reflection and a bit of research, however, we realised that social media addiction also fuels consumerism. Fast fashion, expensive cars—the desire for material is exacerbated by TikTok and Instagram, and a general sense of FOMO. Moreover, mental health in and of itself is undeniably essential. To use an eco-concern to "gamify" social media detox was an interesting and highly creative endeavour. You can see potential effects of our app in the final slides of our deck, in which Twitter users express their new attitudes towards social media.

Moreover, our application will promote digital awareness. There may be more pressure on especially energy-intensive applications (like TikTok and Reddit) to be more transparent about the energy sources of their data centres, and to work towards 100% renewable energy sources. This is especially important as internet access becomes more universally available, and more energy-intensive tools are being widely utilized (ChatGPT, anyone?).

Future considerations: *providing an "only social media" mode which tracks emissions only for social media, alongside a new everything mode, where we have gathered metrics for email, calling, etc. and their emissions are tracked as well. (ie. advance into providing email-time tracker service) *enhance our graphic interface *provide sharing capability (so you can tweet your achievements) *integrate the deviceActivities api to retrieve the user time - still at debugging stage