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'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#321

Post by ikeyany »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #275

This article makes me question my purpose as a designer. I spend my days looking at the screen and figuring out ways to get people to spend more of their money on junk they don't need. The sad part is that I work with incredibly good people who think they are somehow contributing to our society by helping companies grow their revenue. I guess on one hand companies are selling more and perhaps hiring more people which…

Your 'purpose' is to make the company money by designing things. Isn't that literally what you signed when you started working for them?

Any 'higher' purpose comes from within.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#322

Post by amazingman »

deepGem wrote: post #242
amazingman wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re fundamentally failing to interact with the scale of the problems arising from the attention economy, basically handwaving with the word “just”. Even if I were to grant—though I don’t—your claim that addiction isn’t necessarily bad, it wouldn’t follow that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to boundlessly seek more effective ways to capture more human attention more of the time. ”Just” run the simulatio…

True, but I don't think social media addiction is as bad as addiction to tobacco, heroin etc.I will look into specific data points about the points that you have raised.

I think you’re drawing a very poor analogy, and missing the forest for the trees because of it. Addiction is a useful term here, but comparisons to drug addictions aren’t very instructive. Addictions to ingested substances have natural gating factors that simply do not exist in what we’re calling “the attention economy”. If you want to draw the drug comparison, you’ll need to include an assumption that the most addictive, most destructive drugs are freely/cheaply available in effectively infinite supply to everyone all the time. Which is a fundamentally different conversation.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#323

Post by 659087 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #194
jansho wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they also provide access to Wikipedia [etc] But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social media, games, shopping etc. In that sense, we can be called a bit zombie in the head.

If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family . Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. And it is also critical to doing anything together with other people. The Internet has lifted constraints of time and geography from communication - which is why you see people on IM in situations where, without the phone, th…

> let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family

Let's call it what it actually is, instead:

Talking to your friends and family while a stalker sits in the corner recording and taking notes.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#324

Post by amazingman »

peoplewindow wrote: post #301
intended wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the ....? Any good journalist worth their salt like any good teacher wants to make sure the most people are informed with good information and they do the best job to inform. How did that become “wanting influence”. And if being good Doesn’t make an impact - which it increasingly doesn’t- then only crap will remain.

Hah! If that's true then why do rich billionaires so often buy money-losing newspapers? Because they like burning dollars? And why are there so often easily caught factual errors in news articles that just happen to fit the journalists agenda? Here's a good example from this weekend: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-41521671/100-women-amy-cu... The BBC is running some vacuous "top 100 inspiring and aspirational wom…

I did the recommended 10 seconds of Google-ing, and was completely unsurprised to find out that the example you draw is far more sophisticated and far less straightforward as you are attempting to make it.

Given that fact, I’m left wondering what the motivations for your comment are. Especially given the nature of your target, and the thinly veiled usage of the word “feminist” as an epithet.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#325

Post by jashmenn »

archiepeach wrote: post #228

As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model. This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising: Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to al…

Cryptocurrency-mining in the browser (e.g. coin-hive.com) is one of the most interesting new models. Before you have an allergic reaction to this idea, let's first have a discussion of the best-case scenario.

Assuming that the publisher openly states they're mining instead of showing ads, and the user understands what's happening, browser-based mining is an attractive alternative to ads.

The first benefit is in privacy: you don't need to track your users personal preferences or identities. The second benefit is that there's no signup, no login, and no fraud.

It does not wholly solve the issue of attention-based revenue. That is, there is still some incentive for publishers to "manipulate" the user into long session times on the site. However, unlike ads, long session time doesn't have to mean long attention time in order for mining to happen.

Browser-based mining is sort of like micropayments: the user is paying the site in electricity. Many people don't want to pay subscriptions and they don't want to see ads. Browser-based mining is a viable alternative.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#326

Post by creatrixcordis »

the smartphone is just a tool, how you use it is up to you! nobody is making you use it, but companies spend millions to figure out better ways to psychologically mindfuck you since you have been conceived. to get you to buy things or behave a certain away which leads to them capitalizing on your behavior. this is not new, one movie which describes this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self the smartphone is simply the delivery mechanism because it is with you at all times, just like social pressure and environment, they all carry messages, but it is up to you to choose to respond and how to respond, one could argue that if you are conditioned like this since birth because of media, by the time you are an "adult" <-- whatever the fuck that means... and high on the legal stimulants and running on the hamster wheel which turns into profit, i doubt you will even notice. but the irony of all this is that it is all optional if you understand it so...

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#327

Post by ZenoArrow »

peoplewindow wrote: post #273
jansho wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is primarily intended for talking to friends and family. As others have pointed out in this thread, the reality for most people is closer to mindless browsing and addiction. That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way. I'm not suggesting in any way that social media, shopping etc are bad (I use them all the time) but as the Internet is literally at our fingertips now, I do think tha…

That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way No they aren't. Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive". They just said, hey, look, I made some neat photo filters and someone else said, hey, love the filters, it'd be neat if I could share these photos with my friends. Badaboom, a social network. The fact that so many people spend so many hours on Instagram is…

> "Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive"."

The evidence points to the contrary. Why would you not want to make, as another commenter put it, a social network site as 'sticky' as possible? You have to understand how sites like Instagram make money, using methods which rely on keeping engagement high. It's the so-called 'Attention Economy'.

Here's one article describing how Instagram's approach to generating revenue has evolved over time:

https://www.feedough.com/how-does-instagram-make-money-insta...

Here's the Wikipedia article about the ideas behind the attention economy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#328

Post by psyc »

jashmenn wrote: post #325
archiepeach wrote: post #228

As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model. This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising: Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to al…

Cryptocurrency-mining in the browser (e.g. coin-hive.com) is one of the most interesting new models. Before you have an allergic reaction to this idea, let's first have a discussion of the best-case scenario. Assuming that the publisher openly states they're mining instead of showing ads, and the user understands what's happening, browser-based mining is an attractive alternative to ads. The first benefit is in priva…

It’s only valid if, coincidentally, the market value of hashing happens to be in the ballpark of the revenue the content producer needs.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#330

Post by [deleted] »

archiepeach wrote: post #228

As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model. This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising: Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to al…

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