1 of 33

Visual Presentation of Learning

Ethan Blake

2 of 33

My driving question

…and why I chose it

How is technology exploiting and altering our natural tendencies, and what can we do about it?

3 of 33

Technology and our Natural Tendencies

4 of 33

Don’t Get High on Your Own Supply

“I can control my decisions, which is that I don’t use that s***. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that s***… The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”

-Chamath Palihapitiya, Former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook

(qtd. in “Ledger of Harms”)

5 of 33

The Tech Effect

6 of 33

Attention

72% of teens and 48% of parents feel the need to immediately respond to texts, social-networking messages, and other notifications.

In a study of 15 mobile device users, half of the notifications were viewed by users within a few minutes of their arrival, and email + mobile messenger apps interrupted users in almost 50% of cases.

The presence of a smartphone, even when off, can reduce cognitive capacity by taxing the attentional resources that reside at the core of both working memory capacity and fluid intelligence.

A meta-analysis of papers found a negative correlation between media multitasking and memory.

Commercial vehicle drivers who text message while driving are 23.2x more likely to be involved in a "safety-critical event".

(qtd. in “Ledger of Harms”)

7 of 33

Mental Health

50% of teens and 27% of parents feel "addicted" to their mobile devices.

Almost 90% of 290 undergraduates reported feeling "phantom vibrations" from their devices, which were experienced an average of once every two weeks.

(qtd. in “Ledger of Harms”)

8 of 33

Relationships

44% of teens agree at least “somewhat” that using social media often distracts them from people they're with in person, and 34% agree either strongly or somewhat that using social media takes away from the time they could be spending with people face-to-face.

When people stopped using Facebook for a month as part of a controlled experiment, they showed an increase in well-being along with a decrease in political polarization.

In controlled experiments, people who were instructed to use Facebook passively (i.e., scrolling without commenting or posting) for just ten minutes felt 9% worse at the end of the day, because they felt more envious of others. This illustrates how vulnerable we are to social comparison.

(qtd. in “Ledger of Harms”)

9 of 33

Substitute Phones

10 of 33

Corporate Motivations

+ Political Implications

Digital media platforms are designed to optimize interface attractiveness and utilize social validation mechanisms that specifically reinforce mechanisms of addiction. According to Christian Fuchs, feedback loops impact our attention and attraction which inevitably leads to a reduction of our human agency in favor of increased consumption of digital advertisements.

With regard to politics, digital media proliferates the message that capitalism is the only possible system that can produce and disseminate meaning for consumers.

Maximizing user engagement to increase revenue, for better or for worse, inevitably leads to more extreme or emotional messaging on social media platforms and balloons into a disproportionate effect by platform algorithms. As far as algorithms are concerned, users’ engagement volume, favorable or unfavorable, ranging from cat videos to political violence, belongs to a similar demand pattern. The kind of political messaging users “like” and engage with, including political figures they support and share, lead to the appearance of similar figures and messages online, leading to self-generated and algorithmically supported filter bubbles. Without equal exposure to different views, users end up thinking their view is supported by the rest of the population and develop more extreme and entrenched opinions on politics. This has led to unprecedented levels of polarization over emotionally charged policy issues, fed by bot-generated news that fits into our version of events. Bombarded with information overload, we end up sharing what our like-minded friends share and submerging into the opinion tribe we create for ourselves, with the help of a business model that monetizes our attention.

The resource-generating digital model benefits emotionally charged content over verified information, creating the very environment in which trolls, bots, and fake news thrive.

11 of 33

Your Time

is

Their Money

The more time you spend on their apps, the more data the companies have to sell to advertisers.

12 of 33

The Value of Your Data

Rewards programs

Habit tracking
Targeted advertisements

What data gets used
True price of ‘free’ on the internet

Your data can be used to target specific marketing towards you, as well as track your habits to find when you are most likely to buy. That’s why rewards programs are in place. They basically pay you for your valuable information by tracking purchase history when you use the rewards program. Today, the reason that free applications, websites, and services are able to make money is because you pay with your data. Since we as consumers decided that we would rather give up our information than pay for access, sites can track what you do and then sell that information.

With all of this data being created from your actions online, your data can be analyzed to create an ever-expanding personal record. It can include information such as your risk tolerance, sexual orientation, habits, and preferences. This profile can hen be sold to advertisers.

13 of 33

Hijacking Our Brains

14 of 33

Infinite Loops...

Examples:

Youtube and Netflix have autoplay (it will start another video/episode at the end)
Twitter and Instagram have user ‘feeds’ that never end.

We rely on visual cues more than internal cues. Without any cue to stop, the user will go down the “Bottomless Vortex” and will just keep scrolling.

and the Bottomless Vortex

(Haubursin)

15 of 33

Random Chance

Phones have more connections to slot machines than you think:

Pulling to refresh ≈ pulling a slot machine lever; creates an illusion of control.

When you refresh, you cannot expect what content will be displayed. That unpredictability is addictive.

(Haubursin)

16 of 33

Color Palette

(Haubursin)

17 of 33

Notifications

Notifications were originally designed to help people check their phone less.
Facade of social interaction

Apps prey off our desire for social interaction by acting as a middleman

“[user] liked your post”
“Join [mutual friend] and [#] other(s) in following [user]”

“The red bubble” invokes a sense of urgency

(Haubursin)

18 of 33

Participatory Cultures

“Social media has become a new medium of capital accumulation, which attracts participation and engagement through attractive, and often addictive, platforms, including the “promise for change” and championing human agency to “make a difference”, digitizing functions for citizen engagement. Digital platforms sustain their hegemonic status by acting as the medium of dissent about all digital relations and interactions.” (Unver)

(Unver, 131-132)

19 of 33

In 2018, if you were a teen girl starting on a dieting video, YouTube’s algorithm recommended anorexia videos next because those were better at keeping attention.

With over a billion hours on YouTube watched daily, 70% of those are from recommended videos. The most frequent keywords in recommended content include: “confront”, “destroy”, and “hate”.

For each moral-emotional word added to a tweet it raised its retweet rate by 20%.

Confirmation Bias

Insecurity

Outrage

Sexuality

Conspiracies

Extremism

Fake news spreads six times faster than real news, because it is not limited by what is true.

When watching a NASA moon landing, YouTube would recommend Flat Earth conspiracies millions of times. YouTube recommended Alex Jones conspiracies 15 billion times.

Adults watching sexual content were recommended videos that increasingly feature young women, then girls and then children playing in bathing suits.

Human Downgrading

(qtd. in “Technology is Downgrading…”, 1-2)

20 of 33

How can we have a better relationship with technology?

21 of 33

Limit Social Media Use.

(Haubursin)

22 of 33

Turn off all notifications except for people.

(Haubursin)

23 of 33

Bundle your notifications.

(Haubursin)

24 of 33

Go Grayscale.

(Haubursin)

25 of 33

Keep your phone out of the bedroom.

(Haubursin)

26 of 33

Keep your home screen to tools only.

(Haubursin)

27 of 33

Use audio notes and quick reactions instead of texting.

(Haubursin)

28 of 33

Summary of Learning

Tech companies are financially motivated to maximize engagement, sometimes to our own detriment.

Users opt to give away valuable personal data in lieu of paying for apps/other online content.

Use of the internet and mobile technology has a proven impact on our attention, mental health and personal relationships.

Tech companies have researched and devised mechanisms exploiting our own brain patterns to increase or maintain our online engagement.

Users can take steps to protect their data and reclaim their personal power to choose how and when they spend time online.

1

3

2

4

5

29 of 33

Next Steps:

The Future of Tech

30 of 33

Sources

31 of 33

Digital Challenges to Democracy: Politics of Automation, Attention, and Engagement

Content:

Evaluates the need for the internet to fix biased algorithms and metrics of digital engagement; arguing for user’s sovereignty over their data.

Explains how the business model of tech companies drive predatory tactics and challenge democracy.

Timeliness:

Published Fall/Winter 2017.

Credibility:

H. Akin Unver is an Assistant Professor at Kadir Has University and a Fellow at Oxford University and Alan Turing Institute.

Article published in Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs.

Scholarly Article

32 of 33

It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting.

Content:

Details strategies which manipulate our cognitive functions in order to maximize engagement, and how to mitigate their effects.

Timeliness:

Published February 27th, 2018.

Credibility:

Part of Vox’s video series “By Design” merging design and technology.

Features former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic.

Video

33 of 33

Center For Humane Technology

Content:

Warns about the negative effects of technology with the Ledger of Harms. Helps users take control by explaining the tactics and how they work, as well as showing how to avoid them by changing their settings or by using certain apps.

Timeliness:

Launched in 2018.

Credibility:

CHT is an independent nonprofit aiming to realign technology with humanity.

Directed by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris- CEO of Apture (before its acquisition by Google in 2011) and one of the first people to blow the whistle on Big Tech.

More Information