JULIA MONTAG| COLUMN I t’s Monday night and your paper’s due sometime tomorrow. You spent your weekend unwinding – socializing, catching up on “Game of Thrones,” following your favorite NBA team – because let’s face it, you deserve some down time! So you sit down Monday, ready to begin this paper, and instead, you launch Instagram, just to get a brief idea of what you’ll be missing in your social circle tonight. Two hours later with zero progress made, you regret wasting your time. This June, Apple, Inc. released new, groundbreaking software that aims to prevent this uniquely millennial circumstance from occurring. Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference took place June 4, highlighting its platforms’ most recent iOS 12 software updates and forward-thinking initiatives. Users are getting excited about new ideas that will make iPhone harder to put down: group FaceTime, customizable animated emojis, an update to Siri’s intelligence and a 40-percent increase in overall speed. However, among the most radical of Apple’s 2018 announcements are those focusing on curbing our technolog y addiction. Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted to CNNMoney’s Laurie Segall just how accidental the apparent iPhone addiction is. “You know, we want people to be incredibly satisfied and empowered by the devices that we ship, but we never wanted people to spend a lot of time or all of their time on them,” Cook explained. “And we’re rolling out great tools to both make people aware of how much time they’re spending (on phones) and the apps that they’re spending it in, but also how many times they pick up their phone, how many notifications they get, who is sending them the notifications. (We’re) empowering people with the facts to decide themselves how they want to cut back or if they want to cut back.” Companies like Apple and Google may be ironically seeking technolog y-limiting technolog y because of the recommendations of investors or because of the scientific findings that inform us just how greatly our health can suffer from staring at phones. Physically, screen time is detrimental to our eyes and neck, causing users to experience symptoms such as dry eyes, headaches, blurred vision and long-term shoulder and back pain. Sleep is often disrupted, especially when we fail to resist putting our phones away when getting ready for bed. The blue light emitted by iPhones can interrupt our bodies’ sleep cycles by interrupting the natural production of sleep- inducing melatonin. Socially, immersion in social media can warp our sense of how person-to-person interactions are supposed to take place. Emotionally, increased phone exposure can make us more stressed, worried and prone to depressive symptoms. The new iOS 12 features were designed to counter these health detriments, yet are falsely idyllic. They will pose questions about how much time spent on our phones is too much time, or whether awareness will be enough to curb our enthusiasm toward tech. So how will we as college students react to the accessibility of addiction curbing tools – to the accessibility of phone-use knowledge? What are these “digital health” tools that will balance out the entertaining advancements of iOS 12 – the advancements that will further hook in users? One key digital health feature is the ability to pre-set “Do Not Disturb” time, which will allow us to sleep or work peacefully without receiving texts and email notifications. We will also have access to a weekly summary of our “Screen Time,” showing us exactly how much time we spend on our phone throughout the week, how many hours (and which specific hours) we spend mindlessly scrolling through each app. Finally, if these “Screen Time” summaries rattle your tech-conscience and make you want to use apps less, “App Limits” will allow you to set an exact time limit per day and only permit you to use the app until you’ve reached it. Additionally, you can’t work around the limit by using your iPad instead for the limits and summaries can be synced across devices. What troubles me about these new iPhone features is the users’ capability to turn on or shut off the technolog y limits. Cook thinks “ultimately, each person has to make the decision, when they get their numbers, as to what they would like to do. I encourage everyone to look and everyone to make an informed decision, and ask themselves, if they’re picking up their phone 10 to 20 times an hour, maybe they could do it less … But I think the power is now shifted to the user. And that has been what Apple has always been about, is giving the power from the institution to the user.” So now the user has the power to limit how much time they spend on Instagram or Facebook; the issue, however, is that the App Limit is not only voluntary, but the user also has the power to extend it. Will college students pass or fail? These new software features seem to say to us as tech-users that our iPhone addiction isn’t our fault, but is instead due to the simple architecture of the updates from the previous operating systems. Will we harness the new-and-improved “Siri Shortcuts” that monitor our habits and suggest we mobile- order a coffee based on the predicted traffic? Or, will we utilize the “Do Not Disturb” features, the “Screen Time” summaries, the “App Limits” that comprise the up and coming Digital Health Initiative? We will find out later this summer when the iOS 12 update becomes available to the public. 5 OPINION Thursday, June 14, 2018 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Alas, Washington floundered, and California was left to remedy its now-prolonged dilemma by facing reality. Undocumented immigrants began to be integrated into normal policy concerns, reflecting a national reluctance to truly take action. S.B. 54’s protection of nonviolent undocumented immigrants from federal agents, on the grounds that local law enforcement is more effective when less of the populace is afraid to cooperate, is justified when Washington’s inaction is taken into account. Calling back on recent legislative failures may help explain the current legal dilemma, but the only concern for many is that sanctuary protection invalidates the rule of law. No matter the convenience afforded to law enforcement due to sanctuary policies, nor the injustice imposed on undocumented immigrants by the severe backlog of American immigration procedures, the argument goes, welcoming undocumented immigrants as they are sends the message that U.S. immigration laws are pliable. While Trump’s misleading and race-baiting statements on immigration, along with a shift toward nativist policies and preferences for immigrants with specific traits and backgrounds, are inexcusable, these critics are right that circumventing Congress is not sustainable nor desirable. However, upon closer inspection, calls for a return to the rule of law also reveal that the true problem lies in failure to act at a national level. California’s S.B. 54 stridently disregards federal law only in the sense that it actively prevents state and local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration officers, a provision directly at odds with federal immigration law, as outlined in 8 U.S. Code section 1373. Other components of the law, namely the requirement that state and local officials release nonviolent undocumented immigrants in the face of orders from federal immigration officials, frustrate federal objectives yet exercise the perfectly legal practice of noncooperation. California’s pushback on federal policy, much like the aforementioned Arizona law, is only possible because much of the immigration issue has not been comprehensively addressed by Congress. Recent failures by Congress to come to consensus were met by President Barack Obama’s executive “stopgap” measure, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has since been followed only by extensive indecision and refusal to move forward on the part of Trump. This stagnation decisively illustrates the need for new national legislation and policy that faces up to the struggles burdening the states. It also shows how bickering over the supremacy of federal law or the ability of states to avoid compliance amounts to wasted time and energy. Rather, comprehensive immigration reform by Congress is the only real solution when it comes to resolving the concerns of states like California and places like Orange County. How will college students respond to the Digital Health Initiative? Julia Montag can be reached at jtmon@umich.edu Ethan Kessler can be reached at ethankes@umich.edu. CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor and op-eds. Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to emmacha@umich.edu A state divided by Ethan Kessler continued below: