While reading an article from The Guardian recently, I couldn’t help but notice the irony in journalist Paul Lewis’s description of tech engineer Justin Rosenstein’s technology habits. Rosenstein, the brain behind Facebook’s “like” feature, keeps parental controls on his iPhone to stop him from downloading apps and blocks himself from popular online platforms such as Snapchat and Reddit.
Imagine creating a series of safeguards to keep yourself from feeding the monster of your own creation. Although I would argue that the rise of technological developments were made with good intentions for the most part, it’s unsurprising that they’ve resulted in numerous negatives. “There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called ‘continuous partial attention,’ severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ,” Lewis writes in his article, " 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia." It’s funny how our egos can be fed by something so trivial as Facebook “likes.” Though Facebook’s “like” button was engineered with the goal of allowing Facebook members to give their friends self-esteem boosts throughout the day, it’s become a source of addiction. The bits of affirmation social media apps provide strengthen users’ impulse to check their smartphone devices for notifications. And often, these social media users will log into their accounts to numb the negative emotions they feel, such as boredom and loneliness. Lewis interviews Tristan Harris, a former Google employee and vocal critic of the technology industry. For Harris, the issue goes beyond the distraction caused by smart devices. He believes tech engineers are helping decrease the quality of our relationships with each other. Harris compares the addictive qualities of smart technology and social media to gambling. He says, “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine. You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.” Given that the average person swipes, taps, or touches their smartphone more than 2,500 times each day, it’s unsurprising that Lewis compares the allure of today’s technology to addictive drugs and gambling. Expanding on this drug/gambling addiction comparison, Lewis writes on Twitter engineer Loren Brichter’s creation, the pull-to-refresh app. He calls it “one of the most widely emulated features in apps” and “as intuitive as scratching an itch.” Apple engineer and aspiring neurosurgeon Chris Marcellino seems to agree with this assessment, describing to Lewis the similar effects technologies and gambling and drug use all have on our brains: “These are the same circuits that make people seek out food, comfort, heat, sex," Marcellino says. I can vaguely remember a time in high school when I asked my sister to temporarily change my Facebook password so that I could focus on that semester’s finals. Since then, I haven’t taken similar measures to keep myself concentrated on college papers, work projects, or the like, partly because not being easily able to check my phone or social media accounts can be more distracting than the original source of distraction. While typing all this, I’ll occasionally pat my pocket thinking my phone has vibrated when in actuality, it has not. And if I do choose to play around on my phone for a bit, I find myself slightly disturbed by the targeted ads displaying the accent table or jacket I had just been looking at on Target.com. I don’t believe that the rise of what Lewis describes as an “attention economy” will be going away anytime soon. As long as capitalism is alive and well, we can reasonably expect to be inundated with technology's advancements. Profit maximization will always be a priority in Silicon Valley, rather than the work-technology-life balance of consumers. To reverse the negative effects of technology and app addictions, the tech industry would be forced to fold. I consider myself somewhat of a late bloomer when it comes to smartphone ownership. While reading a different article, “What is ‘Brain Hacking’? Tech Insiders On Why You Should Care” I thought about how fortunate I was to not have had the distraction of an iPhone during my grade school, high school, and early college years. In his CBS News “60 Minutes” special, Anderson Cooper (forever one of my journalism icons) describes “brain hacking” as computer programmers’ ability to engineer their products so that users are prompted to check in constantly. Tristan Harris again provides his expertise on the matter, once more comparing smartphone addiction to gambling addiction. Instilling habits such as checking Facebook notifications every hour, one way of hijacking people’s minds. Harris says: “What you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever, sometimes they get a reward, an exciting reward...There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible.” I wholeheartedly agree with Harris’s fear that tech companies have the potential to enslave consumers to their screens. We're already seeing this happen. This may not be the tech companies’ intention on paper; they’ll release the latest and greatest tech features under the guise of enhancing user engagement. It all boils down to making money and successful advertising. It would be futile to ask the brains of Silicon Valley to stop making technological advancements and creating apps, not as long as these tech engineers want to earn their paychecks. Similarly, it would be pointless to ask Las Vegas casino owners to shut down their slot machines because of all the lives ruined by gambling addiction. If it’s true, as Anderson Cooper asserts, that there is an “addiction code” that technies use to predict our needs and desires, we the consumers will have to keep up; find ways to break the addiction.
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