“It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 20 years from now we find that what social media does to our brains is equivalent to what smoking does to our lungs”. — Yancey Strickler, CEO of Kickstarter
The computing power that NASA had in 1969 is terribly modest when compared to that of the phone you’re reading this on right now. Yet NASA managed to land the first person on the moon that year. Today, almost fifty years later, we use the exponential tech development we’ve since accrued to slap filters on our selfies.
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Screens and devices are all around us today, exposing us to an ongoing, intrusive barrage of notifications. Email, social media, distractions, chat conversations, browser tabs, and more distractions. These all add up to fuel our anxiety, deteriorate our mental health, and shorten our attention spans. What ever happened to technology enhancing our humanity? And why has it enslaved us instead?
A gem from my country. http://gph.is/29cDhuT
We spend over 4 hours on our phones each day. We also check our phones way too often. Different studies show varying numbers, ranging between 80 and 150 times per day. Similarly, we receive between 50 and 100 push notifications on a daily basis. While accurate numbers are quite difficult to define, the bottom line remains that we’re overdoing it.
The effect of social media is not only physical and mental, but also social. Apart from productivity and focus, look at the enormous negative impact social media has made on democracy in these past years. While scrolling through social media, these systems dish out compulsive triggers that tend to reinforce our biases rather than imparting knowledge and wisdom.
So what is this all about?
Tech companies compete over how much time we spend using their products, and how frequently we check them. Us users are their main resource. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and the rest of the gang are all free to use, but their people still have to eat. In order to make money, such companies sell the data they gather about us, their users, and sell them to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
You’re probably familiar with the saying “You Are Not the Facebook User; You Are the Product.” Meaning: the more time people spend on Facebook (and the likes) and the more often they come back, the more data these websites gather about people and the more money they make from selling it.
This has given rise to a new economy — the “Attention Economy”, which is practically a race to the bottom of the brain stem. And as a result, tech companies today hire teams of neuroscientists and product engineers to hack the brain, and build dopamine-laced services to keep us all hooked and coming back for more.
The Attention Economy — a race to the bottom of the brain stem.
How does all this affect our brain?
Dopamine loops:
Finishing a task, achieving a goal, or anticipating a reward excites neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which release the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain’s pleasure centers. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a result, some people become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences and engage in compulsive behavior such as a need to keep playing a game, compulsively gambling, or getting hooked on a drug.
For tech companies to consume as much of our time and conscious attention as possible, they need to give us a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get us to contribute more content, which in turn gets us more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop, one that these companies are exploiting as a vulnerability in human psychology.
For example, when a person updates their profile picture on Facebook, the company recognizes it as a cue for social approval. As a result, the new profile picture gets shown (rather, promoted) high up on other people’s feeds, to encourage engagement with it. And so it goes.
‘Likes’ are the cigarettes of our age: seemingly innocent and harmless, while in reality they are addictive. Their purpose is to drive more business to the companies producing them, regardless of the wellbeing of their consumers.
Mental health:
It’s in our human nature to compare our lives to those of others. We envy those who are more popular or successful. We feel like we’ve lost out when someone else ‘achieves or gains something.’ We make ourselves believe that others always have it better than us, be it with jobs, opportunities, friends, social lives, experiences, luck, etc..
This often results in FOMO or the ‘Fear of Missing Out’. FOMO is basically increased and pervasive anxiety or apprehension of missing out on social events or experiences that others are perceived to be having. It leads to a compulsive desire to stay connected with other people’s lives online.
We get addicted to social media to a degree where checking up on what others are doing or how they are reacting to our posts becomes all-important and all-consuming. Social media has taken FOMO to an all-time high.
Studies show that FOMO leads to extreme dissatisfaction and has a detrimental effect on our physical and mental health — mood swings, loneliness, feelings of inferiority, reduced self-esteem, extreme social anxiety, and increased levels of negativity and depression. It is not surprising that the use of anti-depressants has risen sharply in recent years due to FOMO.
Jean Twenge: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us
Addiction to instant gratification:
We are living in an on-demand economy today. Everything we want is a click or a call away. From taxis (or Ubers), to grocery deliveries and laundry services. As this becomes the norm, we tend to start expecting similar instant gratification in other aspects of our lives, leading to impatience and entitlement. We expect raises and promotions at work to come sooner, and our relationships are always a minor fight away from a breakup.
Information exhaustion, filter bubbles, and fake news:
The internet is an ocean of information and content, but a lot of it is irrelevant if not worthless. Blogs and news websites can also be guilty here.
By giving their articles cheap and usually dishonest titles (clickbait), these websites attempt to trick us into clicking on these links. We learn nothing from the articles, but the websites make advertising money off our clicks.
Additionally, social media allows us to block or unfollow people or publications who share content that we do not agree with. The more we do that, the more we only get exposed to just the ideas that we agree with — creating filter bubbles. When our preferences and bubbles become known, the content we’re exposed to could then be hacked or manipulated, and injected with fake news that we would tend to agree with, regardless of its truth or validity. Just don’t mistake fake news with facts that do not align with one’s interests, wink wink.
Shorter attention spans
As mentioned before, the Internet promises two things: instant gratification and an excess of information and choices. When we come across a piece of content on our social feeds, if we don’t like it within the first five seconds we can directly to jump to something else. The guarantee of a fallback option of “finding something else”, in addition to the quest for the next dopamine hit, leads to shorter attention spans and impatience. For this reason, and also to increase the time people spend on their websites, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and many others, autoplay the next video to keep us from leaving.
Context switching
According to Gloria Mark, Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after being interrupted or distracted from it. She also noted higher levels of stress, frustration, mental effort, feeling of time pressure and mental workload among people who were interrupted while working on a task.
Now, think of the effect those 50–100 daily push notifications have on your productivity. We appear to have lost the ability to simply be alone with our thoughts.
Read “Are You a Self-Interrupter?” for some deep insight on distraction in the technology age.
In short, it is not our fault that we are hooked on technology. It is designed and built to do exactly that.
In my upcoming posts, I will follow up with some tips and tricks on decreasing the time we spend on social media and on using our devices more mindfully. I will also discuss some ideas pertaining to the responsibility of designers & technologists in producing and promoting mindful design and humane technology.