How your smartphone hijacked your mind (and how to reclaim it)
We used to live in an age where information was a finite resource. Now we live in an age where the finite resource is our own attention. Our attention is like a currency that every platform needs to survive, so it's only right that we consider what these powerful influences would do - and have done - to attain it.
At the start of 2019, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit a total of 6.6 billion active accounts. That’s more people than the 2.4 billion people that Christianity reaches globally, andno doubt, an incredible amount of psychological and behavioural influence to play with.
With every platform now profiting from an attention-driven model, organizations like the Centre for Humane Technology are calling crisis on how much tech companies are impacting the quality of human life. Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google, founded the project to change the way technologists think about building products, and create conditions to realign technology with humanity.
The impact of the attention economy was almost inevitable. But was it always meant to be this way?
Technology as a bicycle for the mind
Steve Jobs, who changed the way humankind interacts with technology forever, had his own analogy for our use of computers: the bicycle. Taken from the documentary ‘Memory and Imagination’, Jobs’ vision is as follows:
"I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometre. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list...That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
In essence, Jobs’ vision was to create a tool that took humanity further. Ironically, perhaps, Mark Zuckerburg expressed a similar opinion all the way back in 2005 in a Stanford University interview, comparing Facebook to an ‘address book’ and calling it a ‘social utility’.
These are the products that now run the world and public belief systems. We saw, in the example of The Great Hack documentary, how incredible harnessing this power can be, and how they can be manipulated to shape the world around us.
In the end, a business like Instagram only grows through attention. And once it was acquired by Facebook, they had to keep growing and they had to get more attention to do so. When tech attached financial success to the capturing of behaviour, it led with a key question: ‘how can we keep users engaged?’
How to build a habit-forming product
When was the last time you took your phone from your pocket because you felt it buzz, but it didn’t?
Nir Eyal, in his book ‘How to Build Habit Forming Products’ explains how these hijacks work through a loop he calls ‘The Hook Model’.
Source: Hook Model, NirAndFar.com
Essentially the model works like this:
External trigger: The first meeting between yourself and a product, app, or website.
Action: The trigger is followed by an action created in anticipation of a reward.
Variable reward: You receive a reward - which, like a slot machine, could be anything the product decides to give you.
Investment: The user puts in their bit of work, for example, a post or share. This phase increases the likelihood of the user passing through the hook cycle in the future.
Pretty soon, with enough loops from external triggers, an internal trigger gets created and attaches itself to our emotions. Feeling lonely? Open WhatsApp. Feeling FOMO? Open your email. Feeling like you need validation? Open Tinder. There is an app to jump down every emotion -- it just needs an emotion to hook itself to.
In the end, we are the protagonist of the soap opera called ‘our life’, and when your phone buzzes, you have a deep-seated emotional need to see what someone thinks and feels about this character. Understanding this is key to not jumping into the investment phase in the first place. But if you’re concerned about your current use of technology, there are a few ways you can untether its attachment to your nervous system:
Change your phone to greyscale
The colours on your phone screen tap into the primordial parts of our brain, much like a monkey when it sees a bright piece of fruit. However, you can make your iPhone screen look like a black and white movie, instead. Without the notifications screaming brightly, it strips out the colour rewards and reduces the lustre that impacts your nervous system.
Set screen time restrictions
Apple has built a feature into IOS called Screen Time, which enables you to see the amount of time you’ve spent on your phone and on which applications. It also allows you to set a ‘downtime’ and set limits for apps. Even better, you can set a ‘Screen Time Passcode’, which sets apps to downtime after a certain amount of use, and is blocked by a password which can be set by a partner or friend.
Hide your app icons
Searching through a folder for an app, or swiping right to type the name of the app into the iPhone, is a lot more of a conscious choice than the hard-wired app-opening your fingers and thumbs are used to. Moving distracting apps from your home screen, and into a folder on the second or third page, can leave primary space for tools and utilities like Uber or Google Maps.
Progressing towards regenerative technology
According to Tristan Harris, there must be a mass decoupling between business success and imprinting new human behaviours for our relationship to technology to shift. And one of the reasons we’re not getting another business model is that it’s impossible to breach the attention monopoly of the leading platforms.
When Harris alerted some businesses that their model was basically ‘addiction’, their response was: “Maybe you’re right, but maybe culture will wake up and see it on its own.” The lack of understanding of the impact technology can have on the social and cultural landscape has led to renowned and well-documented mental-health harm at unfathomable scale. Comparisons can be immediately drawn to the impact of climate change, where the transition must be made towards something renewable.
We must focus on using technology in ways that empower, otherwise, it’s going to be completely self-terminating if we don’t.
