BroApp allows Android users to schedule texts to send to their significant others:
In response, Evan Selinger worries that apps are “beginning to automate and outsource our humanity”:
In our correspondence, [BroApp creators] James and Tom focus on managing subjective perceptions as opposed to realities. The key, they say, is that a girlfriend will be happy because she’ll “perceive her boyfriend as more engaged”. But focusing on perception misses the point. When we commit to someone, we basically promise to do our best to be aware of their needs and desires — to be sensitive to signs of distress and respond accordingly, not give the appearance of this fidelity and sensitivity. Time-delayed notes do just the opposite: They allow the sender to focus on other things, while simulating a narrow range of attention that obscures the person’s real priorities.
It’s easy to think of technologies like BroApp as helpful assistants that just do our bidding and make our lives better. But the more we outsource, the more of ourselves we lose.
Jenny McCartney thinks the app might be a joke:
I suspect that the BroApp is, in fact, an amusing spoof (the list of “contacts” on its phone in the promotional picture include Germaine Greer and Jordan Belfort, the original model for the rogue trader in The Wolf of Wall Street). Yet the technology industry has so far been unable to pronounce for certain on whether this “innovation” is a clever satire or a sorry statement on the mechanisation of human relationships.
The Dish 