You think you’re using your smartphone — but it also uses you

You touch your phone an average of 2,617 times per day — more, if you’re a heavy user. That’s 18,000 times a week. Nearly one million times a year. Enough that all those swipes, taps, drags, flicks and pinches feel both hard-wired and totally natural. Of course, our interactions with our touch screens are neither of those things: They’re deliberately strategized, user-tested and designed toward specific purposes, by people with self-serving goals. And Ben Grosser, an artist whose work interrogates power and technology, thinks we ought to pay more attention to both. Grosser released the first in a series of three videos that will examine how we interact with our touch screens and how those interactions are represented in modern television and movies.