The tech industry's use of persuasive techniques on children
medium.com
medium.com
This was me. I was 14, my parents just divorced and I got hooked on Starcraft in 1999. I would play until the sun came up, go to school and sleep through class. I did it for 3 years straight, with varying levels of addiction.
At some point, my mom wanted me to see a pyschologist but I tried to show her I wasn't addicted. I took the cd out of the computer, cut it up and glued it to a piece of paper. I hung that paper on the corkboard for all to see, then, not 5 days later I bought another cd and started the cycle again.
I don't know if I was reeling with teenager angst or overloaded emotions because of the divorce but I needed help and my parents didn't know what to do. I nearly didn't finish high school because of it.
Now, with a son of my own - I am constantly thinking about how in the world do I expose my son to technology but also teach him moderation. I don't want to have a fight about how much time is too much, I simply want the technology to be useful to solve a problem and not something my son feels compelled to use all day long.
Same boat here, same-ish history as you. My theory is that having kids use technology is as essential as setting limits and discussing with them the lessons we've learned as adults. I largely gave up video games just a few weeks ago and understanding the effect of those thousands of hours if committed to better things like physical recreation, reading, programming, or something else has given me the perspective to handle it effectively (not getting angry or condescending) when my kids push back on going out or getting off the computer.
How do we distinguish what is a healthy hobby/persuasion, and what is an addiction?
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NwHNHNXsg0
First, there's the exercise aspect. Playing soccer during the day allows your hormones to be much more balanced and your mind healthier than being cooped up in your room through the night to play video games.
Then there's the social aspect as well. Playing soccer allows you to have real, physical interactions with others and have a sense of community, whereas virtual interactions provide cheap knockoffs to temporarily meet your social needs. Yes, gaming has become more social than ever before, but the lifestyle and culture that form around gaming make it rather difficult to form lasting, meaningful relationships with people that don't just fade away after giving you dopamine rushes.
I just don't think it's easy to have a healthy life when you're addicted to games. It's too easy to say "one more game" until the sun rises.
My parents taught me moderation and economics at the same time with computer time cards that were tradable for chores and other things they wanted to incentivize. Then when I got old and rich enough to just buy my own computer I understood the idea of a durable investment paying dividends :D
That's me. Except for the multi-millionaire part :/
Joking, but kind of not. Of course, there's a physical aspect that takes over. But most people start smoking as a teenager, to rebel against, you know, everything like teenagers do, because they're trying to figure themselves out. And the act of going out for a smoke gives you a pleasant little break from whatever you were doing before, which was probably not as much fun as smoking.
Now, it’s just the rules. (24 minutes was approximately “one TV show” and we do time it, but if they run a minute or two over, no one flips out...)
I think that this one can be solved only by teaching kids to do positive/needed things. By that I mean not just limit gaming, but more of teaching importance doing chores, homework, sleep, socialization and other such things. So it is not "stop gaming so you stare at ceiling" but "I did not done homework damm have to can't game yet" sort of thing.
I have a daughter that just turned one and the anxiety is already starting to set in for me.
I went through a really rough break-up in my twenties and got addicted to World of Warcraft. I also started drinking a lot. Once my heart got better, both of those habits went back to normal levels. I still do both in moderation to this day.
I guess maybe there are two lessons here: 1.)Treat the disease not the symptoms and 2.) Blizzard is evil.
I wish I could agree with you, but I cannot. Industries are hiring psychologists in order to increase the addiction of software (especially videogames) -- perfecting just the right amount of time before a reward is given, tuning the sounds to be "just so", etc. It's hard enough for an adult to resist, with years of defense mechanisms established, in places like Casinos or video games. But now that same degree of subterfuge is being employed for iPad games targeted at toddlers. What can an unprepared child do to resist? A: very little.
It is parent vs. corporation, now, in a battle for the child's mind.
Do you and your partner do anything other than use computers all day?
I work with four 26" screens, and am fairly well glued to my phone when I'm not sitting in front of my work PC.
But I also: run / walk / walk with my dogs; train my dogs; go to the gym; do pole dance / pole fitness classes; am learning to play guitar; am a metal fabricator by trade; ski; rock climb; play kayak polo; garden; cook; (slowly) renovating the house; read / research / write.
I started rock climbing when I was 33, started pole classes when I was 34! I learned to ski last year when I was 36!
Obviously I don't do all of these things all of the time.
Perhaps there are things you can do with your kids other than sit at home staring at a screen?
Also, I think perhaps maybe vlogging would be a cool thing to do with your kids. Public or not, maybe just to friends and family, but I reckon it'd be cool to help kids learn how to record and edit video.
What's being sacrificed to have the time to do all those things? If it's relationships, that's bad, if it is time that would otherwise be spent on watching TV or refreshing a social media feed, then it's good.
Now that I am an OK adult with decent life: my playstation just lies there, and its really hard for me to start playing any new game.
I figured that when I was younger, the video games provided an effective escape from the reality of being a child, with never having anything of consequence to contribute (I blame my parents for making me feel this way; even though they were perhaps just ignorant). Games had a structured environment, with rewards for specific actions, rewards that I did not find in my real life with doing anything. The fake medals/trophies were so much better than what I had in real life (which was nothing). It gave me a sense of belonging to a group, or to many groups, something which I did not in real life.
Perhaps this applies only to kids without siblings. But video games were the one place where I could really be happy. When that changed and my real life became more amazing, I stopped playing them. Perhaps thats all that kids want.
I should note that video games were not the only form of escapism, I enjoyed reading Harry Potter for that very reason too.
Which is something reality can't provide: short-term rewards disproportionate to the effort made.
I played insane amounts of video games as a kid. Getting up at 5am before school just to play more Age of Empires. But once as an adult I had other stuff to do that fulfilled my need to build and accomplish things, I stopped playing more or less naturally, except the occasional social game with a far away friend.
Kids have almost zero avenues to build or accomplish things. Their parents don't care or give them meaningful stuff to work on or tools to build stuff with. They might as well be under house arrest.
They have no way of seeing their friends except in-game because they must get their parents to drive them everywhere. Even if they drove to their friends house, they have nothing to do with them except play games.
We fail children everywhere by disallowing them from having meaningful stuff to do.
What kinds of meaningful stuff are you even capable of doing?
I take the parenting approach of throwing tons of stuff at them, and let them pursue what they find interesting. It seems to be they find meaning in exploring the limits of what their minds and bodies can do, which I reckon is fine for 8 and 10 year olds.
It arises sometimes during school holidays, but more often than not, they themselves decide it's time to finish up and go get some outdoors time.
I acknowledge that this dynamic is likely to change significantly when they get a bit older and particularly getting into teenage years, but I don't think we could have done this initial groundwork any better, IMHO. (And another key component is that all screens are in shared family spaces, not in bedrooms.)
I just want to point up how accurate this comment is. I liked PC gaming quite a bit as a child, both building new games (in QBASIC) and conquering professionally designed games. I would find friends against whom to spar via BBS, Usenet, and the web.
Sometime around high school, I found a real-world activity that permitted building. In my case it was a bit odd. I realized that many of my schoolmates were very musically talented, but (at our somewhat dreary public school) had little chance to show off. I built a recording studio and designed reverberation algorithms to make them recordings that sounded as though they were playing in famous cathedrals. Many of them submitted their conservatory applications using these recordings. It was great fun, and taught me the most important rule of business, which is that if you aren't solving someone else's problem, you aren't doing the right thing.
Later, I did programming for the Palm OS and built a company out of that. Then I went to college and indulged in the humanities for four years.
The observation above, viz., that kids (esp. boys) need ways to feel that they've built something valuable, is exactly right.
Wait, how common is this in States (I assume)? Here in Finland, kids from 6 or so up go around neighborhood on their own, and have yards&parks to play in. We take them there from the start. Moms/dads circles in parks are a thing, here, with the kids playing around them.
I wish they took me to museums etc :'( some day when I have kids I promise I will pay it forward and take them to science and history/art museums etc and indulge in what I missed out on as a kid :)
I grew up playing Atari at a family friend's house, and saw my first real computer (a Mac Plus) around age 8 or 9 which I feel was maybe my first transcendental experience with technology (drawing with the mouse in MacPaint). I can't even imagine what effect a fully-connected smart tablet would have had on my intellectual and emotional development.
I'm just going to throw this out there, that we shouldn't be thinking of this as internet addiction, but more like, I dunno, asking a kid who grew up in space to live with gravity. Old folks like me (gen x) see kids on tablets and feel this understandable sense of concern, but forget that they are dabbling in their own little infinite universes just like we did. That doesn't release companies from their ethical responsibility of treating children with utmost concern though.
I don't remember the exact set up, but the result was effectively that people remembered where the info was stored, rather than the info itself. So like you explained, the computer is just external memory. It would make sense that its also external inputs, outputs, etc.
> But then, surprising everyone in the room, she cried, “They took my f...ing phone!”
> The first was that Kelly’s unhealthy attachment to her phone continued, causing almost constant tension at home.
So for her, it's not just a phone. It's a substantial chunk of her reality. It probably feels not that far from forcible lobotomy. Or at least, being isolated from her friends and interests.
There's also the autonomy issue.
But that doesn't mean that I'm blowing off concerns about kids having their minds pwned. It's a hugely serious issue.
And still, "no phone for you" was a harsh, and ultimately counterproductive, intervention.
It's not a "this community" issue-- dismissal of consequences is the Schroedinger's Cat of psychological support animals, to help engineers cope with their lack of a conscience. If you refuse to believe there are consequences for your actions, then there simply are none, and you can go back to your job developing child-exploiting apps and self-driving Zyklon-dispensing deathwagons without having to question your impact on the world.
I disagree, by actively censoring and ninja burying important issues that don't reflect well on Silicon Valley the admins of Hn have cultivated an echo chamber of SV Brotopia, these are the fruits of that labor.
1. When my parents (mom and stepdad) went through an almost and very rough divorce, my mom was an alcoholic and my stepdad traveled all of the time. My mom couldn't be bothered to pay much attention to my little brother and I was taking all AP classes buried in homework, but I did what I could. With all of the fighting and lack of attention my little brother got, he turned to video games instead of getting involved with bad kids at school or staying out/getting into trouble with girls etc.
2. My ex was as only child with a widowed mother who worked all the item. He played MMOs has is to this day over a decade later still friends with many of the friends he made from these games and sees them in person now.
Alot of these discussions center around the assumption there is this loving supportive family there, or a rich social life these kids would have to engage in, but video games is destroying their life. Many times is precisely the opposite, and kids turn to video games because their parents arent there, they don't have friends at school, and in many cases before video games they might turn to other alternatives that are objectively more dangerous.
Furthermore, video games can develop good habits, and some of the smartest people I know spent as children an immense amount of time playing video games, and still do from time to time. I think for smart people who like to be constantly engaged in interesting work, video games provides that level of intense focus while also allowing the mind to relax during "down" time. That is a bit of a tangent, but I would argue in some cases video games can be therapeutic for children, and perhaps parents should take ownership of the fact that perhaps the "terror" in the childs life is coming from them, and video games are an escape.
Of course no parent wants to admit or acknowledge that, but plenty of them passively do by not being around and having video games be the best alternative babysitter that they arent buying for their kids anyways.
I think this kind of story may be present near the beginning of many addictions, painful as it is to consider. On the other hand, there is plenty of additional harm due to the effectiveness of manipulative techniques on the part of tech companies and advertisers.
Peoples attention span is the new currency. Big data analytics are used to maximize user retention and user attention.
I personally found that if I use "smart phone" too much it is shortening my attention span, I could no longer read long text like manual pages without getting distracted. Why is it called "smart phone" when it is addictive and makes people who use social media to much more depressed?
Ponder if one is addicted to likes on Hacker News?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hands_on_resea...
Smart phone addiction the slot machine in your pocket https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/smartphone-addiction-slo...
And in the article, they mention that the defining event was when the parents went to take the phone away. So they did try to take the phone away.
This story, for you (as a soon to be parent) and for me (a new parent) might be great timing - it certainly makes me never want to get my child a cell phone that could even start them down this path.
That might work on a 9 year old. It doesn't work on a teenager.
> Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there.
You have it backward. As a parent you HAVE to teach kids to own a phone, and not let it dominate them. If instead you just take it away, then when they are old enough to get one themself (around age 14-15 I'd say) it will utterly consume them, since they have no ability to resist, and no parents to help them.
Later on when we got a computer my folks would only get construction-set games (e.g. Pinball Construction Set) or simulations (Flight Simulator, M.U.L.E.). Later they expanded and got some strategy and role-playing games. If I wanted arcade games I had to use my own money or type them in myself from the magazines (printing game source code was a thing for a bit in the 1980s).
I recently discovered a book from the 1980s that my folks must have read, and which handles media literacy really well: "A kid's TV guide : a children's book about watching TV intelligently", by Joy Wilt. Yes, I'm just as annoying to my kid as my parents were to me.
I don’t think i’d be motivated enough to do that with html. The iPhone / modern smartphones are very much designed to be consumer devices. You can’t do much creation.
There’s something about building. You feel so accomplished. Even more amplified if other people want what you’ve created.
Threatening to kill yourself should have serious consequences. Because it's either a very serious threat, or it's perniciously bad behavior that needs to be corrected immediately.
If you take your kids phone away and they threaten to kill themselves, take them to a mental health professional.
I'm not a parent, but in friends of mine who are, I often see the scenario play out in reverse. They use technology as a way to pacify their rambunctious kids or otherwise get a few moments of respite - and so they foster that tech addiction without knowing it, until its really taken hold.
First, it's “nip...in the bud” (cut off before it flowers) not “nip...in the butt” (annoy it by biting it's backside.)
More to the point, the kind of sharp cutoff you suggest is exactly equivalent to what the parents did here, and would likely produce the same result.
They are trying to fix her thinking. I mean they could also just lock her in cage right?
But that's not the issue, the issue is how she thinks and behaves.
> How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions?
Very very very very hard. Take a phone away, and a kid will borrow one from a friend, or buy one, or steal one, or go to the library and refuse to come home.
You can't fix these things by focusing on the item, you need to focus on the person.
> This is not a rhetorical question. I will be parent soon and stories like these, terrify me.
They should. Phones are destroying society and rebuilding it, different. Not just kids. Adults too.
Will the new world be better or worse? Time will tell I guess.
1) A smartphone is increasingly required for getting by in society. My kid doesn't really need it, but I worry about him navigating the transit system to/from school and extra curricular activities. A smartphone takes some of the parental anxiety away here.
2) Sadly, a flip-phone is a sign of poor status and it invites bullying at school.
I feel there is a genuine need for parental controls on smartphones, but getting it right is, from an engineering standpoint, not as trivial as we might think. It's also probably not as profitable either (we have a lot of battles over the phone in our house, but a lot of parents just don't care about setting similar boundaries).
Really, though, the thing that I want (and I'm probably not thinking through the ramifications too deeply, so bear with me), is a remote kill switch that is physically manifested as a FOB.
Without such a device, our option of last resort is to temporarily cut service to the phone via the cell provider. This is not a process that lends itself easily toward doing and undoing, and its also only available to the primary account holder, which makes it sub-optimal. Though it has been done more than once...
It would be great if there were a way to flip this, so that having a flip-phone were seen as a sign of having super high-tech parents who could afford any phone but chose to get this instead.
I live in Silicon Valley and am curious to see what happens when my daughter starts school. I'm sure there are other parents who will want to keep their kids off devices, and many of them would be very wealthy. I'm terrible at branding, but this seems like a branding challenge. Like if you're the kind of parent who would enroll your kid in an SAT class or after-school tutoring, this is a thing that will have more impact on their eventual growth.
Maybe a less socially-wasteful solution would be to create an OLPC-like model, where you give your kid a phone and simultaneously signal that you have enough wealth to donate a phone to a kid in need elsewhere.
If I weren't already running a couple early-stage startups, I would seriously pursue this — for the good of kids in the US, and kids elsewhere.
Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS?
That's the real solution here... start demanding with your wallet that you would pay for these counter-measures.
One thing I've always appreciated about iOS (and contributed towards my brand loyalty and sales) is better security permissions (no, I'm not going to grant my flashlight app access to my microphone). I hear Android's gotten better about it, but even just the other weekend, an android-using family member asked me if I can figure out why some annoying ad appears somewhere on her lock or home screen (aka who is the spammy app). A walled garden does have its benefits if the gardener is incentivized with devices sales not eyeballs...
Similar attention-control features wouldn't even be for kids -- it's something I would even use myself. The brain-hacking dopamine drip strategies talked in the article don't only affect kids, after all. Start showing there's profit in counter-measures.
> Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS?
Yep, and it's happening.
https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-t...
They have no screen time and start this at a very young age so it is not questioned later. Anything with a bright screen is not allowed during certain times of the day.
The most interesting feedback I heard over lunch at work was this: That kids do better with no screen time (complain/argue/fight less) when their parents ALSO abide by no screen time.
If you tell your kid no screen time but sit on the couch perusing your iphone all night but don't want your kids playing games on their ipad, what are you teaching them? Furthermore this example was used by a dad with an 18month yr old girl. He says she is very entranced as any child would be by a bright screen. It's very mysterious and alluring of course. While she has not screen time she is very interested in the bright lights coming from his screen, so now during no screen time he also puts his iphone away.
So my advice is implement no screen time as a standard habit in the house, and also try to abide by it yourself. So maybe the best way to prepare for kids its to start by training yourself to have no screen time. (just an idea, I don't have kids what do I know).
Remember there is a selection process that led to this story. It is an extreme, not the norm. It is likely that Kelly had a mental illness of one sort or another, as evidenced by the fact she was committed for a time. If not that, then there is some other reason this is an exceptionally extreme story.
Statistically speaking, you are unlikely to end up with that. (Not that that stopped me from coming up with some pretty bad genetic hands with my children. But it was still stastically unlikely....)
There are ways in which it is easy and people make it hard, but there are ways in which it is legitimately hard, too. My oldest is 10 and has made only the first initial noises about getting his own phone, but I won't be able to defer the matter forever. But I will say the current plan is to wait until he shows some understanding of what forces are arrayed against him before he gets anything of his own. To some extent, I suspect the average youngster is going to have to get stung a few times before they really get it, partially because I did myself. But to be stung "properly", you need to understand what is going on and why you were stung, not just be sitting there looking at your empty bank account one day wondering where all the money went, when the answer is "gems for some mobile game", and then doing it all again next week.
I'm not sure why the parents didn't take a harder line earlier in the process, but I have my suspicions. By the time a child is 15, parenting tends to become more results oriented. They are going to be on their own legally inside of 3 years, and parents have to take the training wheels off. Kelly's parents may have been attempting to get her to see the deleterious effects of the phone. If an 8 year old is spending too much time on screens, you take them away. By 15 Kelly's parents probably want her to take more ownership over behavior. The parents can point to the failing grades, lack of social progress, and missed opportunities and say "are you proud of this? Is this what you want?" Some kids have to learn things the hard way via personal experience rather than parental instruction. Parents may want their kids to make this sorts of mistakes before adulthood hits them and raises the stakes. After all, the real world has phones without any screen time limits.
The parental problem is that they let the problem go on too long.
When your kids grades start to drop, you take action. Now. You don't let it go on.
Taking the phone away now probably does feel pretty traumatic because their daughter has integrated it as her social life. She interacts with friends who interact with their phones the same way. etc. At this point, yanking the phone means hitting the reset button on her social circle at the age of 15--in the middle of a bunch of established social cliques.
They probably need to change schools for her.
I am reminded again, however, that the single characteristic that a parent seems to need is to be more stubborn than their children. If your children 100% believe that in a genuine conflict with you that they will lose, lots of things simply never get started.
Watching my goddaughter (age 3) is pretty terrifying, she knows how to operate Netflix and has seen some movies dozens of times, she spends a lot of time on tablets and smartphones and is already conditioned to them.
It's difficult for me to see parents capitulate to their younger kids outbursts and simply hand them a phone to placate them, I'm not a parent yet but given everything I know about the companies behind big tech I don't feel comfortable giving my child access to a phone until high school. If I was able to survive w/o one I'm sure they can too.
My kids may spend too much time watching Netflix, but at least for every 30 minutes of screen time, they're getting 30 minutes of pure edu/entertainment and not dividing their attention 50% between filler content and commercials. For better or worse, they have no patience for ads.
> I don't feel comfortable giving my child access to a phone until high school.
Good luck with that. I said the same, and by the time my oldest hit middle school all her friends already had iPhones themselves, which led to teasing and exclusion for those in the clique that didn't.
The worst part is the lack of visibility. Everything happens in private, on encrypted devices wielded by immature humans you are legally and morally responsible for. If someone's grooming or harassing your kid, this pattern of circumstances ensures you may never know until it's too late.
most of us here were, I think, fascinated by this new toy and we loved to program it and "play" with the code or hardware. very similar to gearheads and cars, or other hobbyist types.
but the design for "persuasion" or addiction is really a big deal.
And remember, the actual term of the art here is "engagement". Every time you see it, think of "getting people hooked on your dope".
if your app provides a service that is useful frequently throughout the day - say, a local news app for the sake of argument, high engagement should suggest that your app is useful. no one wants to build a useless app, and often we like knowing what's happening around us.
but addiction is ... overuse. pushing people to use it, although there's no real benefit to be gained by the user.
I liken it to alcohol. One glass a night isn't generally a problem (0.1 is actually more or less better). It's when you have, say, 6+ drinks (using the usual units) per night that it's a problem.
and when you design for addiction in your engagement strategy, and target children... well... I would frankly suggest that there should be criminal liability involved.
Hey, is this right place to contact those 50 guys? We're having this little problem where society is becoming increasingly polarized and fractured into camps, which are attacking one another with greater and greater ferocity. Like, I know you like money, but could you maybe use your influence to prevent societal collapse and/or nuclear war? Survival is actually in your interest too.
Like, e.g.: “Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”?
So sure, some people mostly from SV control the company that sort-of makes the OS used on the phones. Phones made by (and having their OS further altered by) companies predominantly in Asia. Sold with extra crap from companies all over the world. All to facilitate dysfunctional behaviours engineered by ad-tech industry that's, again, everywhere from SV to Tel Aviv to Berlin.
I'm all for criticizing SV for what it does wrong, but let's not overdo this.
I'm actually less interesed in criticism than it may have appeared. I'm far more interested in finding ways to harness the machinery built for generating revenue and refocus it to discourage the type of angry tribalism that's putting us all in danger. Sure, there are parts of it that are highly decentralized and difficult to influence in this way, but there are other parts that are more easily manipulated, eg. the content of a user's news feed. I'm trying to make the argument that it makes sense for Facebook et al to show users content that's less divisive even if it means less profit in the short term, as it helps to ensure that there will still be people around to use their platforms in 10 years.
> I'm trying to make the argument that it makes sense for Facebook et al to show users content that's less divisive even if it means less profit in the short term, as it helps to ensure that there will still be people around to use their platforms in 10 years.
I was going to write a long comment about how the divisive content is not Facebook's fault and they can't control it directly, but I guess all both know that. Facebook's contribution is the detailed mechanics of feeds, filtering, timelines, liking, sharing. They could tweak it a bit without immediately getting accused of censorship or not being a fair platform, but it's hard.
But it dawned on me - there's one simple trick to unbreak social media, both Twitter and Facebook. One simple trick that's so obvious, that its absence seems to me very purposeful. The trick is: display content in chronological order. It would immediately make both platforms more useful and less addicting at the same time.
(I can already hear the screams, "But this is hard! Think of the scale! Eventual consistency and all!". Well, so now you have a hard technical problem that's actually worth to be solved.)
I'm not having much hope, though. If there's one thing proven about humanity it's that companies don't self-regulate themselves out of profits. It's a ratchet, there's no going back without a hard reset.
--
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
In much the same way, tech optimizes for eyeballs and attention. Kids learning how to interact socially in person? Irrelevant. Constant advertising and status comparison driving users to depression? Doesn't matter, or can even be a positive if it drives engagement. There was an article on here just yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745630 ) about how people spend so much time trying to one-up each other on social media, endlessly trying to make it look like their life is better or more fun than it actually is. And of course, even if it sucks a lot of the joy out of doing things, this is exactly what social media companies want.
This isn't a problem with psychology or tech, phones or apps. It'd a core feature of the capitalistic system we operate in, and it warps everything within it.
In 1960, fat-shaming was national policy.[1]
US annual deaths from obesity: 300,000.
US annual deaths from anorexia: 10-1000, depending on source.
[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/9s-yJbLYuUyLS7_xlNTu...
CBS documentary.[2]
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gikpfrH9MPPNZs_fD6ZT9i-cb4T...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/documentary-fed-up-with-rising-...
These companies want your attention, they use abusive notifications, gamification, and the like to try and get that initial eyeball, than everything from there is about minimizing boredom, and maximizing interest and attention.
"Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit" (https://xkcd.com/915/)
Everything about the modern app is designed from the ground up to be interesting in some way or another, to avoid becoming boring after long use. But overuse is messing up how we frame what is really boring, kinda boring, sorta interesting, etc.
The sad truth is the answer is very likely regular periodical boredom, keep the brains auto scale system in check.
I wonder how effective just explaining this concept to kids or young adults would be at minimizing this.
Moreover, the observed behavior is certainly not something new to our present time.
If anecdotal evidences are of any use, then I can relate my own childhood experience. I was truly obsessed with computers in my teens, and avoided talking to my parents. The only difference is that this happened 25 years ago in post-Soviet Russia.
Yes, as opposed to those, because it is so much more effective at that, that it becomes its own category, and not just an extension of age old tactics.
> It's ironic that an entity dependent on ad money would create such a title.
Why is that ironic? Getting people to watch ads, is not what this article is describing. It's the way they convince the brain that doing xyz is a sign of success.
Making people watch ads is a problem, but it's a totally different problem.
Can we really assume the social media we know today would exist in it's present state without advertising? I think it would be inconsiderate and wholly unimaginative at best to suggest that it would. I think separating the two is a mistake.
The internet forums I grew up with in the late 90s were, I would argue, nothing but healthy. They exposed me to worlds of encouragement and knowledge. The social media we have now seems to be no comparison.
"Making people watch ads" is not the problem with advertising. The problem is the existence it creates for ourselves. Advertising, at it's current levels in the US, dictates our whole conception of the world we live in. I wonder if many will ever realize this without studying humanities and working in the ad industry; two things that combined have depleted my faith in humanity unless we can reverse this grave mistake. To think this is just an issue of time lost sitting through ads is just a misunderstanding of what advertising in 2018 even is, or of how it defines the world you think you live in.
Yes, advertising is the motivation to do these tactics. But it's not the problem in and of itself. Any other time-based money maker could replace advertising and nothing would change.
That's an indication the problem does not lie there.
But I put that word "time-based" for a reason: If you make money not based on engagement, but at a fixed rate per person, some things would indeed change. But only to a point: After all they need people addicted in order to convince them to stay, and recommend to others.
So I partly agree with you, partly disagree :)
We have burdened young humans, whose mental abilities are not fully developed, with a self-image permanently detached from interpersonal relationships. There is hard data on this[0][1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcBJ2bQ4HHE [1] www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy-Adulthood/dp/1501151983
So, advertising and entertainment are separate categories, and it's important to respond to them separately.
Entertainment does not present with ulterior motives in the way advertising does. There are a lot of blurry lines in this discussion, but I think they should be the focus. I think it's the manipulation in blurring the lines that we are really contending with. Entertainment does not generally present with blurry lines, but that's gradually changing, whereas advertising has been blurring the lines for far longer, and tech does so more through utility than anything else.
So, if entertainment is generally what it claims to be, advertising is more shape-shifting. As popular culture has subsumed it, logos have become decoration on clothing, brand names find themselves in pure art forms like musical lyrics, etc. and all the while serving to promote. It's easy to consider these conflations as notable chaos, but as long as it all remains conceivably easy to ignore (something I think Aristotle would readily debate), we consider it excusable.
Tech does not conflate the business intentions of it's product with entertainment like advertising does, but instead with something that is conceivably more difficult to ignore: utility. Social networking tools that the tech industry provide have become critical to a citizen's well-being. Getting a job that pays the bills generally means needing to promote one's self on social media. Even if it doesn't, one can never know if their insecurity is a result of avoiding thus, so they are by all accounts forced to participate. This goes quite a bit deeper than the repercussions of, say, modifications to T-Shirts and music. The utility of technology has a deeper correlation with civic duties and every-day utility. If it didn't, social media would unlikely seem so critical to adults, and teens alike.
It's important to remember how useful electronic communication is when discussing social media. There should be no debate over this. It's amazing.
And, I think it's worth asking if psychological damage of social media (assuming it exists) is exacerbated by advertising. The most obvious exacerbation is in funding through ad sales, and that can hardly be overstated. And such funding strategies probably undermine product design. But I think there's even more to it...
As we know, advertising abstracts our conceptions of who we are through archetypal narratives, and plays to the weaknesses of the self-identity problem. It does so in a purely intentional way. I worked in advertising for years, and this is what it's all about. But, I don't think that's how the tech industry works. It is providing unquestionable utility. But, an increase in communication can exacerbate the issues that undermined self-identity creates. So my point here is that I'm not sure this should all fall on tech, and I can't help but wonder if we need to shift all of the blame to advertising. This would at least give us an idea of where we stand.
> It's ironic that an entity dependent on ad money would create such a title.
No, it's not. As you say, they are dependent on ad money, which should not suggest they choose to be. I would assume quite the opposite. I would assume they would prefer integrity, and are aiming for such the best they know how. Again, it's the advertising.
It's interesting to hear about phone obsession and compare it with video footage of The Beatles landing in the US for the first time with hundreds of fans screaming to the point of delerium. Is there even anything that powerful that exists in our culture today?
EDIT: Could someone please explain why this is flagged? If you disagree with my statement, I'd love to hear why.
What is "this", in this context? The article isn't 1% as shallow as your pre-emptive dismissal of it.
> How psychology is being used as a weapon against children
My dismissal isn't pre-emptive btw, I read the article (and many others like it). I stand by my original comment.
But you don't even have the courtesy to say that, just leave it implied, and then paper that over with some fluff about the Beatles as if that could distract from that. So you "stand behind" stating a triviality and then not saying what you cannot directly defend.
About "older generations rejecting change", that old, dank chestnut... conveniently ignoring all the changes welcomed with open arms by older generations, too, and all the young people who think this stuff stinks. It's a fake narrative to skirt actual argumentation. More importantly, resistance against these methods, as well as the people who rationalize them, is just as much "progress" as is inventing and employing them.
The entire thesis of the blog post is that tech companies are "ruining" our children by employing psychologically manipulative product development. My argument is that this has been happening for ages and people continue to grow up as regular human beings.
That in no way mitigates the fact that this medium is categorically different. None of newspapers, comics, D&D, TV, or any of those other things had immediate, real-time feedback adapted specifically to the individual user, and designed to weaponize the amygdala and dopamine responses to maximize engagement, at the cost of basically everything else.
Interactive tech brings a sea change in this phenomenon and its effectiveness. You can't meaningfully dismiss that, because it's predicated on the paltry shadow of what happened with non-interactive media.
EDIT: Consider, for example, the cohort of children whose early development screen time correlates profoundly strongly with their inability to hold a pencil. That's new. TV didn't do that. D&D didn't do that. Screens did.
Advertising has been "weaponizing the amygdala" for a century. It's designed to instill insecurity and envy.
There was an element of TV and advertising to sell you a physical product. What is different with tech is the stimulation of the brain that it accomplished something or makes you feel good about something (likes on a social media pic).
Game and social media companies aren't just grabbing your attention to show you a cool new toy. They are grabbing your attention by hiring psychologists to help engineer their product (game, social media) so you don't want to put it down. Many mobile games are engineered like a heroin dealer - first one's free, you get to a certain level/time played and you have to pay to get ahead.
That is much different than seeing a commercial for a new Star Wars toy. And much more different than an older person not relating to new technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Bands may not have hired psychologists but record labels were definitely manipulative to fans and artists alike.
The main difference in the cell phone era is access and engagement. It's an interesting question, I think, as to whether this constitutes merely a difference of degree or a fundamental shift.
The difference here is the incredibly tight feedback loop and a unique, detailed psychologial profile of each user to work with.
Even though the sky hasn't fallen, its definitely something we should be concerned about and understand. Today, such influencers are often working with unprecedented levels of personal data (much of it freely-given) that can be used to manipulate people.
Our kids get into an agitated state when their devices have to be taken away but why is the fault of "tech industry"? IN the past it wouldve been "video games" or "TV" or "D&D"... just whatever the scapegoat du jour.
This is new grounds so I wouldn't dismiss the problem as simple scapegoating but rather parents need to understand why and how this technology is affecting their kids.