Laura Rose – Social Media and Digital Cultures

Shanghaied by Social Media: Your Attention Is a Commodity & App Designers Are Using Addictive Design to Hijack It

Tristan Harris wants you to know that your attention is a commodity. In fact, it’s such a commodity that app designers are crossing ethical lines to grab as much of it as they can.

In his 2016 TED Talk, Harris describes the root of the situation:

“[E]very news site, TED, elections, politicians, games, even meditation apps have to compete for only one thing, which is our attention, and there’s only so much of it. And the best way to get people’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works. And there’s a whole bunch of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab to get people’s attention.”

The lab he’s referring to here is infamous. If there’s an origin story about how addictive design and social media became so intertwined, its setting would be there – at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.

Motivation + Prompt + Ability = Addiction

Back in the mid-to-late 2000s, the Persuasive Technology Lab and its instructor (BJ Fogg) introduced Silicon Valley to the formula at the heart of technology addiction: Fogg’s Behavior Model.

According to Fogg’s Behavior Model, there are three forces – motivation, prompt, and ability – that work together to drive user activity.

Motivation: A reason for users to act. Fogg categorizes them as:
- Sensation (pleasure/pain)
- Anticipation (hope/fear), and
- Belonging (acceptance/rejection)
Prompt (or Trigger): An external or internal “call to action” that reminds users to do a certain behavior.
Ability: Designing in a way that makes a behavior easier to do.

Take, for example, Facebook’s app.

Motivation: Receiving “likes” on something you posted acts as a form of validation and thus motivation to use the app
Prompt: Push notifications telling you that you’ve received a “like” act as a trigger to pull you back into the app.
Ability: The moment you open the app, you can easily and mindlessly peruse material in your feed’s “infinite scroll” will keep your attention with minimal effort on your part.

Think of any popular app (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) and the ways they use these three forces to keep users’ attention hooked become prolifically apparent.

Even Creators Get Hooked

Hooked By Social Media, Like a Fish — Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash

Even Silicone Valley designers have found themselves hooked.

Leah Pearlman, co-inventor of Facebook’s “like” button, realized she had become addicted to Facebook after she caught herself using the number of “likes” she received as a stand-in for self-worth.

Describing her mindset at the time, Leah recalls:

“When I need validation – I go to check Facebook. “I’m feeling lonely, ‘Let me check my phone.’ I’m feeling insecure, ‘Let me check my phone.'” – BBC interview

And while many designers of this addictive tech did not set out to do an ethically dubious thing, they feel responsible:

In 2006 Mr Raskin, a leading technology engineer himself, designed infinite scroll, one of the features of many apps that is now seen as highly habit forming. At the time, he was working for Humanized – a computer user-interface consultancy.

Infinite scroll allows users to endlessly swipe down through content without clicking.

“If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses,” Mr Raskin said, “you just keep scrolling.”

He said the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary.

Mr Raskin said he had not set out to addict people and now felt guilty about it.

– BBC interview

Harris’ Call to Arms

Tristan Harris has been fighting against tech’s manipulative design practices since he was working for Google back in 2012, when his 144-slide presentation “A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention” went viral across thousands of Google employees. Since then, Harris became Google’s first “design ethicist” before breaking ties and founding his own nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology.

Harris thinks three changes need to take place before addictive technological design loses its hold.

First, technology users need to become aware that their attention is being deliberately cultivated by tech. He argues that this does not have to be an all-or-nothing approach: users can make simple changes (such as turning off all push notifications) to regain control over their tech habits.

Second, the business model of tech and the accountability systems around it needs to become more transparent and ethical – something that will only happen once the people in the locus of control become more accountable and transparent. This could potentially change with some of the legal challenges to tech giants we’ve seen developing in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, among others.

Third, app design needs to go through a second birth – “design renaissance” – in which design choices like Fogg’s Behavior Model are used to encourage beneficial instead of addictive user behavior.

Reflecting on Addictive Design

What are your thoughts on addictive app design? Do you think Harris’ suggestions are viable?

Five Problems with Social Media

*Photo credit: Steve Johnson on Unsplash*

Last week I wrote about the mental health issues related to social media. This week, let’s pull that critical lens back a little further to evaluate five additional problems with social media.

Problem #1: Social Media Is Addictive

Most social networks and their content creators are fighting for your attention. After all, why – with all the other things you could be doing online – should you pay attention to them?

To ensure that not only will you visit once, but you’ll visit again and again (and again), social media platforms and posters have every incentive to be as addictive as possible.

And they’re getting better at it. Social media addition has become prevalent enough to spark some serious discussion in the mental health field, as well as in the field of ethics.

Learn the basic stats of social media addiction here.

Check if you have any symptoms of social media addiction here.

Problem #2: Social Media Kills Productivity

This shouldn’t be a surprise given the addictive nature of social media, but turns out it’s difficult to focus – let alone get into one of those highly productive “flow” states – when you are only a ping or click away from social media.

What you intend to be a quick check on that notification that just popped up on your phone can turn into a massive time sink. That one thing leads to another ad infinitum (see: addictive nature of social media) in something I’ve heard referred to rather aptly as “going down the rabbit hole.”

Learn more about the effect of social media on workplace productivity here.

Problem #3: Social Media Enables the Spread of Misinformation

To quote that line frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”

Misinformation spread by social media takes many forms. It could be benign, in which someone misquotes or misremembers something (like the falsely attributed Churchill quote). It could also be an intentional falsehood: catfishing, posing as someone else, lying to further yourself or a political cause, even propaganda.

For the vast majority of social media platforms, there is no fact-checking, no editorial staff ensuring that the information being spread is true.

To make matters worse, we are more likely to share information that we have an emotional gut-reaction to – which also happens to be information more likely to be false. This knee-jerk proclivity for sharing is something that attention-seekers and propagandists are happy to exploit.

Read about why social media is so good at spreading accidental and intentional misinformation and biases here.

Problem #4: Social Media Encourages Extremism and Echo Chambers

Analysts have demonstrated time and again that social media is more likely to encourage extremism and echo chambers where the only opinions we hear are the same as our own.

There are a number of reasons for this. Social media users tend to engage with like-minded users, which leads to framing your ideas for a specific audience of like-minded peers, and exacerbates in-group/out-group thinking. In certain cases, this culminates in stoking fears about out-groups and posting increasingly extreme content as that’s what gets the most attention.

Social media platforms also contribute to this by showing only cultivated content that aligns with your likes, as opposed to content that challenges your views. (This one-sided-ness is part of why I find my Facebook feed and YouTube recommendations so predictable and boring, I think.)

Read about how social media builds extremist divisions here.

Problem #5: Social Media Contributes to “Mean World Syndrome”

Mean World Syndrome is a concept originated by George Gerbner in the 1970s to describe how mass media’s content tends to make viewers believe that the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.

While Gerbner was originally focused on television’s impact on society, Mean World Syndrome has been argued to apply to many other mass media technologies, including social media.

When you log onto Facebook or Twitter and scroll through a list of grievances, horrors, tearjerkers, and nastiness, the feelings you come away with are fear, hopelessness, anger, and jaded cynicism about humanity. That is Mean World Syndrome.

Learn more about what Mean World Syndrome is and how it manifests in television and social media here.

Read about ways to combat Mean World Syndrome thoughts and perceptions here.

Have you experienced any of these problems with social media yourself? Share your thoughts below.

An Abstainer Reflects on Social Media

Social media users – in addition to paying attention to issues of security and privacy – should make an effort to be aware of how their social media usage is affecting their mental well-being.

Our class is currently discussing issues of safety, security, and privacy in social media. I would like to add to this a topic that I consider equally valid when considering the pros and cons of social media use: mental health.

Let’s start with the basics: I am a social media teetotaler. In this social-media-saturated world, I abstain.

To be clear, this online reticence doesn’t originate in anything nefarious. I am not conducting clandestine criminal acts in my spare time. Nor do I subscribe to conspiracy theories about surveillance programs carried out by a secret overclass of lizard people (a purely fictive threat), or think every post has the potential to bring down the doxxing-wrath of the misogynists of our modern era (a genuine threat faced by many women).

I’m simply one of those folks who suffer from an unfortunate combination of social anxiety and over-analyzing online interactions. And I am not alone.

A quick recap: Around 2015, after experiencing increasing issues with anxiety and depression, I started tapering off the amount of time I spent on sites like Facebook and Twitter. My rationale was simple – I noticed that I seemed to feel worse after visiting these sites and wanted to see if reducing my visits would also reduce my psycho-emotional distress. It did.

By 2017, I had whittled down my social media usage to nothing. It would remain “nothing” if not for my MA program, which requires us to create a personal website, blog, and tweet. Other than these MA-mandated posts, I refuse to touch social media with a ten-foot pole.

While I acknowledge that my experience is in no way representative of every human ever to log onto the internet, it is worth noting that scientific research indicates many other people my age are experiencing the same social-media-anxiety connection.

Let’s take a quick look at the top-cited peer-reviewed research on this topic from the last three years.

Up first: a 2017 study analyzed a nationally representative sample of Americans between the age of 19 and 32, comparing their symptoms of depression and anxiety against their use of multiple social media platforms.

The results? Compared against participants who used 0 to 2 social media platforms, participants who used 7 to 11 social media platforms had “substantially higher odds of having increased levels of both depression (Adjusted Odds Ratio [AOR] = 3.0, 95% CI = 1.9–4.8) and anxiety symptoms (AOR = 3.2, 95% CI = 2.0–5.1). Associations were linear (p < 0.001 for all) and robust to all sensitivity analyses.” From this, the researchers concluded that use of multiple social media platforms is independently associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, going so far as to recommend that “it may be valuable for clinicians to ask individuals with depression and anxiety about multiple platform use and to counsel regarding this potential contributing factor.”

Another study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders highlighted a connection between social media use and anxiety in young adults ages 18 to 22. Their main takeaway: more time spent using social media was linked to a higher chance of having an anxiety disorder.

Finally, in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, researchers correlated participants’ responses to questionnaires about anxiety, depression, loneliness, and “fear of missing out” (or FOMO) with data from their phones showing how much time they were spending on social media apps. Over a three-month period, the participants who limited their social media use to 30 minutes or less reported experiencing less depression and loneliness.

Following an in-depth analysis of their results, one of the researchers concluded: “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study.” (Melissa G. Hunt, quoted in this article)

So what can we learn from this? Should we all be social media abstainers?

I think that would be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For most functioning adults, using social media doesn’t immediately lead to a panic attack or feelings of overwhelming Weltschmerz.

However, I DO think that social media users – in addition to paying attention to issues of security and privacy – should make an effort to be aware of how their social media usage is affecting their mental well-being.

Every now and then, check in with yourself. How do you feel when you are on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or Reddit? For that matter, how are you feeling in general? If the answer is “not great,” then it might be worth stepping away for a few hours or reducing the amount of time you’re spending in that site or app.

And—if you’re like me and notice a massive, painful correlation between scrolling through your Facebook feed and the desire to hyperventilate—it’s okay to step away permanently. Missing out on social media doesn’t mean you are missing out on life. What matters most is that you’re able to enjoy life.

References

Hunt, M. G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751-768. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751

Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: a nationally-representative study among U.S. young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.013

Vannucci, A., Flannery, K. M., & Ohannessian, C. M. (2017) Social media use and anxiety in emerging adults. Journal of Affective Disorders, 207, 163-166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.08.040