READINGS:
The People Behind Your Tech Addiction Are Now Trying to Curb It
Miles Schneiderman
Important Quotes:
“Center for Humane Technology understanding that smartphones are designed to capture and keep attention. Most people don’t understand how they are being manipulated by their smartphones. The CHT was created to help them recognize and resist unhealthy habits often fostered by tech design.”
“According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of American adults own smartphones, up from 35 percent in 2011. A whopping 94 percent of people aged 18–29 own smartphones, as do 89 percent of people aged 30–49 and 73 percent of people aged 60–64. There’s no truly significant drop until you hit 65 and older, but even then, the ownership number is still 46 percent.”
“Anything that induces pleasure has, at its extreme, addiction,” Lustig says. “And those exposures can be chemical or behavioral.”
Notes/Takeaways
The definition of addiction is changing with tech taking over our lives. All things which don’t necessarily include ingestion or digestion of some sort, including social media, video games, and devices like smartphones or computers. Social media takes advantage of this process with things like like posts and like buttons. Your brain becomes stressed when a post is made, and relieved with dopamine when a like or some form of attention occurs. This addiction is becoming an economy which large corporations and websites are trying to tap into and control. Changing this is going to require a large moral shift in the leaders of these companies, they need to consider the morality of manipulating children into believing certain things
The Internet is a Force of Nature, It’s our Job To Civilize It
Jason Dorrier
Important Quotes:
“We can’t make the internet safe any more than we can gravity, so instead, it’s our job to civilize it.”
“But simply attracting a billion users onto a platform doesn’t a business make. Google figured out they could pair ads with search back in 2002, Facebook followed suit, as well as many others. It’s the self-reinforcing interplay of these trends and practices and the incentives in the ad-based business model that have resulted in some of today’s less-than-desirable outcomes.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re stuck with the system we’ve created. “This is all something [that’s] very new in the unfolding of this technology, and I would submit there’s ample room for us to say, you know what, we want to shift course a little bit and do something different,” Whitt said.
Notes/Takeaways:
Whitt’s supposed root causes:
Network effects: The idea of F.O.M.O. Everyone wanted to be apart of these platforms because they saw all their friends becoming closer through interaction using these platforms.
Web Inputs: User likes and dislikes can be tracked and use to create a picture of the person and predict their behaviors.
Attention economy: The economy of the internet relies on attention. This requires companies to figure out how to keep their platform the most entertaining and attention grabbing. Over time this has caused companies to take more malicious routes to keep people’s attention.
Platform Dynamics: The value of business platforms on the web vs old techniques or tactics for business.
We need to take back power from these platforms. We, the users which control the revenue and profits which they seek, can work together to change the relationship we have with the platforms. Some tools like ad blockers and VPN’s exist to help combat these issues, they aren’t always particularly user friendly, resulting in minimal widespread usage of them. One positive step we could make in the future would be to negotiate the terms companies create before obtaining our data, or “terms of service”. A potential way to simplify this process would be using AI or a computer which could quickly identify potential threats or malicious terms.
Humane Tech Video
Important Quotes:
“I have to get you addicted to getting attention”
“We are downgrading our humanity. It is the root of all our problems. Our capacity to work together to solve all of our problems is going down. Requiring a change in course immediately otherwise the future will only become more dangerous. “
“With technology you don’t have to overpower people’s strengths. You just have to overwhelm their weaknesses.”
Notes/Takeaways:
How to solve the issues created by this:
We need to get a better view of human nature rather than technology. We need to look in the mirror. We need to understand our brilliance and where we are brilliant.
The issues Human society is targeting to change are
Artificial Social systems, Overwhelming AI, and Extractive Incentives.
Their main goals are to create human social systems, humane AI, and regenerative incentives.
If technology was designed to heighten the feeling of support from others, it may help our brains change in a more positive way, if positive social cues were brought to attention when the user was feeling down.
Small safe spaces like a living room, dining room, or bar can show how we can connect and find common ground with people who we may find ourselves in conflict with if it were online interaction provoked by some hard questions.
If social media was designed to create smaller spaces to find common ground and slowly restore positive communication within humanity on the internet.
We need new incentives to create competition which will create urgency to enact these ideals amongst society.
Everyone needs to be competing to find a relationship, and gain trust to take us where we want to go in our life.
Redesign of Applications
Problem: creates a fictional world, where you receive praise for looking different than you do in real life. Causes people to become addicted to falsifying their own reality for the likes of others.
Humane Design
Emotional: It causes stress once a post is created, and relieves that stress through a dopamine release when a like is received and a relationship is falsified.
Attention: Instagram scrolls infinitely and orders the feed depending on what keeps your attention or receives the most likes or comments from you. This custom feed controls the attention of each user in a very specific way meant to have your attention infinitely.
Sensemaking: Instagram is used as a platform for some communities to spread false information. It can be relatively easy to tell what is being used as clickbait or targeted information.
Decision making: Instagram creates the idea of a fake you which you can alter through photos. It creatives an addictive decision making habit of choosing to be the person you don’t even want to be but feel obligated to.
Social reasoning: Instagram simplifies our interactions and relationships and twists our perception of them. It forces us to compete against each other in terms of popularity, and causes us to fake our relationships with each other.
Group Dynamics: Instagram doesn’t do much to unite certain groups in a positve way. They do use hashtags which make locating members of a certain community easy, but there’s no interconnection or means of communication for said members.
Solutions: Instagram needs to improve their focus of human sensitivities in every category addressed on the humane design rubric. They could lessen the emotional addictiveness of the application by removing the like and comment buttons and limiting interaction to strictly community based interaction. This would improve social reasoning and group dynamics. If we could form meaningful relationships in meaningful communities, and use the platforms photo sharing system for positive feedback and interesting, provoking photos, we could create a much more positive space. Our attention would be much better spent on meaningful interaction rather than mindless comparisons within the self. This would also make it more difficult for false information to be spread, and communities would thrive off of interconnectivity and trust of each individual. I think some sort of system similar to Facebook’s groups, but intertwined using hashtags could connect people with similarities or help people find similarities with others in different communities.
Humane Design
Emotional:Facebook does not do a good job informing users of the harm of addiction to it’s products, nor try to help people have a healthy relationship with the application.
Attention: It works like most social media to keep the attention of the user, they use a similar, more recently implemented system like instagram where videos will scroll infinitely until physically stopped by the user. The topics of these videos specifically targeted to fit each individual’s likes and dislikes.
Sensemaking: Facebook is very bad at informing us what information on the platform is truth and what is being used as propaganda to trigger emotions. Most people I know stay away from facebook strictly because of how skewed sensemaking is when using the platform. You really are unable to tell apart fiction and reality.
Decision Making: Facebook creates bad decision making habits, creating a false reality where you feel enabled to act potentially different than how you would in reality. This decision making habit is only amplified by how the app controls your feed and what you feel is correct.
Social Reasoning:While at first facebook had relatively good seeming intentions within social reasoning, it’s now clear they are not concerned about humans abilities of social reasoning. We feel obligated to brag about our lives or put our self in front of others when using this app, not using the application to enhance communication of past relationships like the website did do at first.
Group Dynamics: Facebook does have groups which are a potentially useful feature, but they have not been worked on enough to improve the group dynamics within the website. It has instead become a platform for groups spreading potential propaganda or hate to gain traction.
Solutions: I think Facebook could be on the right track to solve some of these issues of humanity which its presence has created. The group feature is definitely a good idea, which if tweaked correctly could be a major improvement for the group dynamics of the app. If there was a way it focused on finding users who could be connected easily, rather than targeting weaknesses of users, they could help build the strength of humanity overall. Moving in this direction, similar to how I talked about Instagram implementing potential positive change, would only have positive implications. Our attention would be better spent on the idea of a community or a whole, rather than alone within the self. We would gain strength as groups, and hopefully the website could work with humanity and do a better job filtering false information. This would create a much larger sense of trust amongst the people of the internet, and help improve the sensemaking within all of us. Doing all these would be positive for the overall emotions of humans, providing stability of emotions within communities and learning positive interaction through small spaces.
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