We Are Hopelessly Hooked

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Apollonius
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Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

We Are Hopelessly Hooked

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We are hopelessly hooked - Jacob Weisberg, New York Review of Books, 25 February 2016
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02 ... ly-hooked/



Review of:


Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle (Penguin)


Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle (Basic Books)


Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (MIT Press)


Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover (Portfolio)


... In her new book, she expresses a version of those concerns that is as much philosophic as psychiatric. Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, she contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize. “It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent,” Turkle writes. Without an ability to look inward, those locked into the virtual worlds of social media develop a sensibility of “I share, therefore I am,” crafting their identities for others. Continuous digital performance leaves teenagers experiencing what ought to be the satisfactions of solitude only as “disconnection anxiety.”



[...]


The thing young people never do on their smartphones is actually speak to one another. Their comments about live conversation are telling: “I never really learned how to do a good job with talking in person.” “Even when I’m with my friends, I’ll go online to make a point…. I’m more at home.” An Ivy league–bound high school student worries that college is going to require “a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.” Collectively, teens “make it clear that the back-and-forth of unrehearsed ‘real-time’ conversation is something that makes you ‘unnecessarily’ vulnerable,” Turkle writes. Reading these accounts, one is caught between dismay at the flight from personal contact and admiration for human ingenuity in devising new modes of communication. One group of students explains that when they get together physically, they “layer” online conversations on top of face-to-face ones, with people who are in the same room.


[...]


Anonymous comments are the worst, leading to vicious mob behavior. But flamers, cyberbullies, and trolls (who all rely on insults) ruin even identity-based, moderated conversation. No one has figured out how to prevent the operation of Godwin’s law, which says that online debates always devolve into comparisons to the Nazis. Worse still is the hate and harassment that attend any discussion of feminism, or just expressions by women. Menacing phenomena include “doxing,” exposing the personal information of anonymous users, like someone’s home address or children’s photos, in order to intimidate them. Another form of abuse is “image-based harassment and visual misogyny,” which involves manipulating photos and pornographic images in a threatening way. Threats of rape and violence may arrive at the rate of fifty an hour with the formation of a “trollplex,” which Reagle defines as an uncoordinated attack on a target in a digital venue.

He diagnoses this casual cruelty as stemming in part from a male urge to quantify female attractiveness, reminding us that the origin of Facebook was Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm-room project Facemash, created as a way to rate Harvard students on their hotness. Twitter has been no better. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Dick Costolo wrote in an internal company forum last year, shortly before he was pushed out as the company’s CEO. A newer, campus-based social platform called Yik Yak seems purposefully designed for students to denigrate their teachers anonymously and share bullying gossip. But despite all of the ugliness he documents, Reagle doesn’t want to abandon comments, as publications including Reuters, Tablet, and USA Today’s online sports section have done recently. “Comment is with us, and we must find ways to use it effectively,” he writes.


[...]


Some of Silicon Valley’s most successful app designers are alumni of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, a branch of the university’s Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. The lab was founded in 1998 by B.J. Fogg, whose graduate work “used methods from experimental psychology to demonstrate that computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways,” according to the center’s website. Fogg teaches undergraduates and runs “persuasion boot camps” for tech companies. He calls the field he founded “captology,” a term derived from an acronym for “computers as persuasive technology.” It’s an apt name for the discipline of capturing people’s attention and making it hard for them to escape. Fogg’s behavior model involves building habits through the use of what he calls “hot triggers,” like the links and photos in Facebook’s newsfeed, made up largely of posts by one’s Facebook friends.

One of Fogg’s students, Nir Eyal, offers a practical guide in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. A former game designer and professor of “applied consumer psychology” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Eyal explains why applications like Facebook are so effective. A successful app, he writes, creates a “persistent routine” or behavioral loop. The app both triggers a need and provides the momentary solution to it. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” he writes. “Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers.”

The financial value of an app is largely determined by how much time consumers spend using it, on the assumption that usage translates into advertising revenue. For US users of Facebook, the average “time spent” figure is an extraordinary forty minutes a day. What compels this level of immersion? As Eyal writes, Facebook’s trigger is FOMO, fear of missing out. The social network relieves this apprehension with feelings of connectedness and validation, allowing users to summon recognition. On Facebook, one asserts one’s social status and quantifies its increase through numbers of likes, comments, and friends. According to Eyal, checking in delivers a hit of dopamine to the brain, along with the craving for another hit. The designers are applying basic slot machine psychology. The variability of the “reward”—what you get when you check in—is crucial to the enthrallment.

Eyal thinks the photo-sharing app Instagram is an even itchier trigger. “Instagram is an example [of the work] of an enterprising team—conversant in psychology as much as technology—that unleashed a habit-forming product on users who subsequently made it part of their daily routines,” he writes. Its genius, in his view, is moving beyond generalized FOMO to create angst around “the fear of losing a special moment.” Posting a photo to Instagram assuages that unease. Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram, a startup with thirteen employees, for the bargain price of $1 billion, “demonstrates the increasing power of—and immense monetary value created by—habit-forming technology.” In other words, Instagram was so damned addictive that Facebook had to have it.

Of course, posting to Facebook or Instagram also contributes to the global accumulation of FOMO. What Eyal describes, without seeming fully to appreciate it in human terms, is a closed cycle of anxiety creation and alleviation. What are others doing? What do they think of me? What do I think of them? In the last part of his book, Eyal raises ethical considerations and says developers ought to peddle only products that they believe in. But in the main, his book reads like one of those tobacco industry documents about manipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes. Designers can hook users through the application of psychological phenomena such as investment bias—once you’ve put time into personalizing a tool, you’re more likely to use it. But an app, Eyal writes, should ask for investment only after offering rewards, such as tidbits of interesting information. Another tool is rationalization, the feeling that if one is spending a lot of time doing something, it must be valuable.

Turkle argues against using the term “addiction” because it implies that “you have to discard the addicting substance,” and we aren’t very well “going to ‘get rid’ of the Internet.” But in describing what they’re doing, many of her subjects fall naturally into the language of substance abuse, abstention, and recovery. People colloquially describe sessions online as getting a fix, or refer to disconnection from social media as detoxing or going cold turkey. The industry can’t help talking that way either, about “users” and “devices.” The toll of technology is emotional rather than physical. But the more you read about it, the more you may come to feel that we’re in the middle of a new Opium War, in which marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy. This time the pushers come bearing candy-colored apps. ...
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: We Are Hopelessly Hooked

Post by noddy »

no doubt some folks seem to spend far too much time in the virtual world getting virtual approvals.

having said that, previously it was book reading that let the quieter folks hide away from the rest of the hoomans and its quite often the book reading types that get hypcrotical about the internet connected types.


personally i take it back to the invention of language, we used to pay much more attention to each other when it was 100% body language and eye brow based.
ultracrepidarian
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