“‘Insiders told us that social media companies track vast amounts of data, every swipe and click, and analyze it in real time. Artificial intelligence then uses that to adapt what we see on our screens to keep us coming back.’ Asa Raskin, who designed the endless scroll and other popular app features, says, ‘We’re in the largest behavioral experiment the world has ever seen. You’re being tested on all the time. Things like changing the color of your like button. This shade of blue, should it be a little bit more red? And they will keep trying until they find the perfect shape and the perfect color that most maximizes your continued scrolling. Behind every screen on your phone there are literally a thousand engineers to try to make it maximally addicting. It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface.’ Asa says, ‘I don’t want my mind to be hijacked.’ So he does things like having very few apps and keeping his phone in black and white instead of color. Endless scrolling is based on a soup experiment which showed that if a bowl of soup is endlessly refilled without the knowledge of the eater, he will eat a lot more, because there is no cue that the meal is finished. Without endless scrolling, you scroll to the end of a page and have to click to go to a new page. ‘We found that if you don’t give people stopping cues, they just keep scrolling. We found that our design techniques became so powerful that it just addicts people.’ Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president, describes the company’s original purpose as follows: ‘How can we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.’ The whole gambling industry is built on the unpredictability of rewards. Could our smartphones be like a slot machine or worse? The gambling industry calls all of the razzmatazz in casinos--the noise and lights and action and music--‘the juice.’ Our smartphones have juice, too. Professor Catherine Winstanley, who has done leading research on the way dopamine fuels addictions, says, “Unexpected rewards activate the dopamine experience. I think there are elements of design of apps on smartphones that seem similar to the electronic gaming. So if your smartphone is recruiting and activating your dopamine system in the same way that we think happens when people are gambling it would imply that those two behaviors could be addicting in the same way as addictive drugs.” (See also “Dopamine, Smartphones & You” by Trevor Haynes, sitn.hms.harvard.edu.) BBC documentary Mind Control: The Dark Side of Your Phone Comments are closed.
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