How your smartphone hacks your brain!
Every time there has been an invention — the telephone, the radio or the TV, some people argued it would disrupt the society, driving kids away from outdoors and social activities; but it has not been as disruptive as it has been feared. Thus, the smartphone has been considered alike, thinking that the same logic would apply. But, according to Roger Mcnamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners and early investor in Facebook, Google and Amazon, the smartphone seems to be a different story because of the interaction made possible between the user and the object. By vibrating or ringing, your smartphone is inviting you to look at it. The more notifications you receive from diverse social medias, the more you will be tempted to look at your phone and thus, be distracted from what you were doing.
In addition, most social medias have the incentive to attract as much as your attention as possible, heavily relying on the interactivity of your devices. Since most social medias’ business plan is based on advertising, the more time you spend on their platform, the more money they make. It is what Herbert A. Simon called the attention economy; people’s attention is a commodity traded on the market, and more recently on the Internet. In fact, Netflix’s CEO said that their biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep — because the amount of time you spend elsewhere is not spent on their platform. To make you go on their platforms more often, tech designers and engineers use neuroscience and behaviour researches to develop their platforms, implementing techniques that are similarly used in propaganda — constant notifications — and in the gambling industry — variable rewards.
Fogg Skinner is a behaviourist professor at the Stanford university whose lectures on persuasive tech design have been attended by many Silicon Valley’s tech designers and engineers, including Tristan Harris. One of his famous insight is that to make people behave in a certain way, one has to design the box — people’s environment — in a way that will trigger the desired behaviour. Making experiments with mice in boxes, he showed that if you want mice to often push the button that opens a trapdoor from where food falls, you have to give the mice variable rewards — making the box acting like a slot machine. If you always give the mice the same amount of food, they will only push the button when they are hungry. But, if you randomly put different amount of food and sometimes even, nothing, the mice will very often push the button to be sure they will get enough food when they will be hungry.
Going back to the human case, from behaviour studies we know that humans crave for social recognition and approval. Additionally, Mauricio Delgado, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Newark, explained that a virtual social interaction — such as a text from someone liked or a nice picture shared — makes your brain releases dopamine alike real-life social interactions — such as a meeting with a friend or a hug, boosting momentarily your happiness and making you desire more of it. These insights in the human mechanisms have been used in the design of social medias’ platforms. As an example, when a person visits her Twitter account, there is a delay from 2 to 3 seconds before the number of notifications appears — it is not the page loading, it is created by design to appear as if the number of notifications is random. The feeling of randomness is what makes the product addictive, behaving like a slot machine, the rewards are the number of notifications, and triggering one’s desire to visit her Twitter account more often. Thus, she is kept hooked on the platform. Other examples are the autoplay design of YouTube’ videos and Netflix’ next episode or the snapstreaks on Snapchat. The purpose was not directly to make people addicted to social medias’ platforms and to their smartphone but, by designing their products to maximize the time we spend on them they made people addicted.
As a result, we on average check our smartphone 150 times a day according to the 2013 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s annual Internet Trends report and, according to Common Sense Media, 50% of teens in the United States feel addicted to their smartphone, spending more time that they desire online. A big consequence is the inability to fully concentrate on something and to be efficient in daily-life tasks. If someone does not want to gamble nor to become addicted to gambling, she can avoid casinos and gambling websites; but, she cannot avoid having a smartphone. Tristan Harris, a former Google’s product manager and the former Google’s ‘product philosopher and design ethicist’, was the first person to really spoke out the impact basic design choices have on millions of people every day, and the responsibility large companies like Facebook or Google have to respect people’s wellbeing. He created the organisation Time Well Spent, explaining the problem and suggesting some solutions such as ‘humane design’, cultural awakening and, engaging employees at tech companies to rethink the way their design influence people’s life.
One other interesting idea to foil the inefficient advertising economy comes from Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, who is now working on Brave, a new browser using blockchain-based digital advertising. The Brave browser efficiently blocks ads and trackers and, the Basic Attention Token is a blockchain-based currency that enables users to remunerate publishers for their content and, advertisers to remunerate users for their attention. That does not directly solve the problem of addictive design, but by transforming the way advertisement works, it can wipe out the first reason why these designs have been implemented.
Thus, we cannot consider technology as neutral, it can have damaging consequences for human beings. It is therefore everyone’s responsibility to use and help develop technology towards the respect of human’s wellbeing.
By Louise Phung
