What Changes Could Be Made To Instagram To Reduce Screen Addiction
Ever looked up from your phone and wondered where the past 30 minutes have gone?
If so, you lot're certainly not lonely. According toMoment, a fourth dimension-tracking app with more than iv.8 million users, the average person spends nearly 4 hours on their phone every day. That's i-quarter of our waking lives, and much of that time is devoted to social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
But while we're decorated burying our noses in our newsfeeds, a strange thing is going on in Silicon Valley: tech insiders have begun to speak out against some of the very products they helped to create.
"I feel tremendous guilt… I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's former vice president for user growth, last November during a talk at Stanford Academy'due south Graduate School of Business. He added that he himself rarely uses Facebook, and that his children "aren't allowed to employ that sh*t".
Social media "literally changes your relationship with gild, with each other," said Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, at an effect in Philadelphia around the same fourth dimension. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God merely knows what it'southward doing to our children's brains." Meanwhile, Apple'south chief executive Tim Melt has said that, when information technology comes to his nephew: "There are some things that I won't allow. I don't desire them on a social network."
So what do the social media executives know that nosotros don't? And what tricks do they use to keep us coming back for more, and more… and more?
The cost of a similar
First, nosotros demand to call up why social media companies would want to get us hooked in the first place. The market place value of Facebook (which, it'south worth noting, also owns the pop social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp) surpassed $500bn before the Cambridge Analytica row. But every bit anyone with an account knows, y'all don't have to pay to utilise Facebook. It says then right on their home page: "Information technology'southward free and always will be."
Those facts might sound contradictory, merely they're not. Facebook is free to use because nosotros are not the customers. Instead, advertisers are the customers, and our attending is what's existence sold. Think almost information technology: the more fourth dimension you spend on a social media platform, the more opportunities there are for the platform to show you ads. Every infinitesimal you spend on social media is a minute spent making money for someone else.
It's also a minute spent voluntarily providing data that can be collected and sold. As Antonio García Martínez, a former product manager at Facebook, writes in his memoir, Chaos Monkeys, the company is really "the regulator of the biggest accumulation of personal data since DNA". As well equally recording and analysing our activities on Facebook itself, the social media visitor also collects information on many of our other online activities, and information technology fifty-fifty buys information from data collection companies, such as Experian, almost your offline life. This information tin can include – but is certainly non limited to – your income, your credit history, outstanding loans, your credit limits, and substantially any buy you've ever made with a card.
Facebook itself has shared numerous 'success stories' of how companies have used the social media giant's ability to slice, analyse and brand predictions off its data in guild to target specific groups of customers. And then at that place are the recent headlines revealing how this information can be used for political ends, such as the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, in which it's declared that Facebook data was used (without users' or, supposedly, Facebook'south knowledge) to deliver targeted adverts in support of Donald Trump.
Tricks of the trade
Regardless of whether yous find this level of data collection creepy or simply capitalistic (or both), it explains why social media companies would desire to capture our attending for equally long and as frequently as possible: it's profitable. And to do this, they build features into their apps that dispense our brain chemistry. These tricks are borrowed direct from casinos and slot machines, which are widely considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever invented.
Consider the 'pull-to-refresh' characteristic common to social media apps, where dragging the screen downward prompts the screen to refresh. Not only is the action itself similar to pulling the lever on a slot machine, only it takes advantage of our attraction to unpredictability. Psychologists call this 'intermittent reinforcements' (and I telephone call it 'the reason we date jerks'). Sometimes, when we cheque social media there'south something heady waiting for us (a 'reward'), sometimes in that location's not. It's the unpredictability that keeps u.s. coming dorsum.
Once y'all're plopped in front of a slot car, the casino wants to keep you at that place – that'south why most casinos are windowless with no clocks. Similarly, one time you're trapped in a screw of infinite scrolling, social media apps don't desire you lot to look upwards. That'due south why their feeds are deliberately designed to be endless.
"Companies take systematically removed stopping cues – those brief moments, like reaching the lesser of a screen, that suggest y'all might desire to move on to something else," says Adam Alter, psychologist at New York University and author of Irresistible: The Ascent of Addictive Applied science And The Business Of Getting United states of america Hooked. "Ethical video game developers introduce those cues to split their games into chapters, which liberates players to play the game in chunks rather than in long rampage sessions. The same works for tech products. Where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram make their feeds abysmal, introducing natural cease points would gently encourage users to move on to other activities."
In other words, posts on your newsfeed could exist presented every bit pages, merely like Google search results. But and so yous would have to exercise something active (click through to the next page) in gild to go on, which is exactly what app designers want to avoid. Video platforms like YouTube and Netflix use the aforementioned technique: they automatically commencement playing the next video or episode in your queue inside seconds of the previous video's cease. Certain, you could press stop, only wouldn't information technology be easier to merely go on watching?
The dopamine event
Many of these attention-capturing tricks harness our brain'due south dopamine arrangement. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is at the heart of all of our habits. "Dopamine is our brain'due south fashion of recording what'south worth doing over again," explains Ramsay Chocolate-brown, co-founder and master operations officer at Boundless Mind, a tech starting time-upwardly that uses our encephalon'due south dopamine organization to nudge us toward behaviours that we actually want to engage in. "It'southward how nosotros acquire from our positive experiences."
This is of import from an evolutionary point of view – dopamine is released, for case, in response to eating or having sex. But the dopamine organisation of the human brain isn't able to distinguish between useful habits, such as feeding ourselves or paying the rent on fourth dimension, and those that are destructive, such every bit smoking or doing drugs. When released in response to the wrong trigger, dopamine can reinforce habits to the bespeak that they go addictions.
The question of whether we can be 'fond' to our phones in the same way that nosotros tin can be fond to substances such every bit alcohol and drugs is controversial. But there's no denying that the dopamine system is involved in both. Every time nosotros cheque our social media feeds and notice something novel or exciting waiting for us (in other words, every time we check social media), our brains release dopamine, which tells our brains that checking social media is worth doing over again. And when you add together in notifications and alerts, it isn't long before our brains begin to release dopamine just in anticipation of checking our phones.
There'south no shortage of dopamine triggers baked into the design of the social media apps. 'Similar' buttons take reward of both our desire for social validation and our love of seeing our 'score'. Gamification elements, such as Snapchat'south 'streaks' characteristic, which publicly keeps track of how many days in a row yous've used the app, make users feel compelled to check their apps every day in order to go along up their rating.
Our phones and apps also accept advantage of our inherent social impulses and anxieties, including our fear of missing out (FOMO) and the impression that we need to reciprocate when we feel someone has done something for u.s.a.. Take, for example, those ticks on Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms that indicate when your friend has read your message. Your friend knows yous've seen those ticks, then there's now a social pressure for them to answer. You might even get emails telling you that you lot have unread letters and notifications, piling on the pressure to log in, lest yous miss out on some news or leave someone hanging. And so there are those little dots that indicate when someone is in the process of replying to your message. What'due south the likelihood you're going to put down your phone before you've seen their response?
Time for change?
At that place's no question that these design features are constructive. But what'south practiced for profits is not so great for our mental health. Studies have linked excessive social media use to sleep deprivation, anxiety, loneliness and depression in teens, and given the pattern tricks nosotros've revealed here, this is perhaps no surprise. The attending-based business model of social media platforms means that their goals and the goals of their users are often inherently at odds. "Social media isn't designed with your long-term happiness in mind: information technology's designed to capture as much of your attention as possible right now," says Kevin Holesh, creator of the Moment app.
As long as social media platforms continue to make money by selling our attention, they are unlikely to change their practices on their own. "There'due south an arms race for attention," says Alter. "And if you don't use every tool at your disposal to ensnare consumers, yous'll be left behind. Brusk of force per unit area from consumers or government intervention, it'due south hard to imagine companies abandoning the hooks that make their products hard to resist."
Thankfully, there are signs of pushback. In January this year, two of Apple tree'southward major investors wrote an open letter to the company demanding that it offer amend parental controls. Soon thereafter, a group of children's health experts begged Facebook to abandon Messenger Kids, its recently launched platform targeting children nether the age of 13. In February, a group of disillusioned tech insiders and investors launched the Center for Humane Technology, an organisation dedicated to advocating – and lobbying for – a more ethical design.
These efforts, if successful, will be slow. But in the meantime, there are things we tin – and should – do to develop a healthier human relationship with our devices. "If y'all feed the beast, that beast volition destroy yous," said Palihapitiya to his Stanford audience. "If you push back on it, we take a chance to command it and rein it in."
This is an extract from effect 321 of BBC Focus mag.
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[This article was first published in May 2018]
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What Changes Could Be Made To Instagram To Reduce Screen Addiction,
Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-to-be-addictive-and-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/
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