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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

#351

Post by TeMPOraL »

folksinger wrote: post #312
TeMPOraL wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you looked a bit closer on their screens (easy to do in public transit), you'd see that they're mostly a) reading stuff, b) talking with friends, c) sending cool stuff to their friends. All standard ways of spending time with other people, except with the constraints of time and space lifted.

Do you work for Facebook? It's OK if you do. It's OK if you don't accept what they do. It's OK if you don't love your job. We need to go out into the world and destroy parts of it just to survive. From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more: I wish I enjoyed how I made my living, Did what I do with a willing hand. Some may run but that ain't like me, So I just dream, keep on being the way that I am.

Wait what? No, I don't work for Facebook, nor am I affiliated with them in any way.

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

#352

Post by TeMPOraL »

folksinger wrote: post #305
TeMPOraL wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is an ad-subsidized and for-profit business deeply and fundamentally required to talk to your friends and family? If interacting with friends and family is what is important, is Facebook the best way to do so?

It's not, but it's what we have. Phones are controlled by private for-profit companies too (with different business, though). And the post is funded by taxes.

Point being, the business models are not inherent to communication mediums, but due to history, those mediums are provided through the particular business models we have.

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

#353

Post by Scarblac »

freshhawk wrote: post #316
KirinDave wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Advertisement as a revenue model exacerbates this problem, but I submit the problem stems from how we define success for mobile apps and websites. We directly designate "engagement" as success, rather than customer value provided or…

But the choice of "engagement" as the success metric directly stems from the advertising revenue model. That's why it is chosen as the definition of success. Because it triggers ad payments. All the "customer value", "customer happiness" and all the rest is inward facing PR. Creative people need a better motivation to build these attention traps than "suck em in so they watch ads" so it has to be phrased differently…

I think it was chosen as definition of success because it is _easy to measure_.

From the beginning of the Web onwards, you had very little idea of what people actually did on your site, but the fact that they visited was an easily counted line in a plain text log file.

The moment something else was available (e.g. actual clicks on an ad, or conversion rate), that was used.

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

#354

Post by TeMPOraL »

walterstucco wrote: post #310
TeMPOraL wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A smartphone has only so much battery. It's best suited for frequent but short uses. If you want to replace TV, novels and bars with social media, your best bet is still the PC.

There's a flaw in the original comment, and I wanted to make it clear through a provocation. You don't replace social media with books, there are books I never get bored by, I've read Dune almost 20 times, and I'm sure I will read it again sooner or later. Social media content is based on engagement, not on enjoyment. You don't enjoy the content, you enjoy scrolling through the content at the point that once posted,…

> Think about it: when was the last time that you interrupted reading a book for watching the TV or a movie?

> But how many time you've watched your phone while doing something else?

I don't think this example proves your point. For me, a book engages ~100% of my cognitive resources; a movie also engages a large amount. Therefore, those activities can't be done simultaneously with other stuff if I'm to enjoy them or benefit from them. OTOH, social media usually engages less than 50% of my brain power, so it's a perfect thing to do simultaneously with other things that barely engage my brain and otherwise would bore me out of my mind. Hence: yes, it's reasonable to watch your phone while doing something else.

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

#355

Post by JPLeRouzic »

saladeen wrote: post #201
burnte wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?

I'd like to chime in: I believe one of their goals was to lower testosterone in general population, to make for a meeker and more easily controlled population. This probably wasn't a 'fully evil' goal, since the horrors of WW2 were recent, and some of them thought that they could prevent that from happening again by engineering a less aggressive population. From the onset of 20th century at least, it was known that t…

It is sad that you are downvoted (however you may have told it without hints to conspiracies), because there are parallels to what you say about that time's mentality in for example the "Morgenthau Plan" that was fortunately dumped in 1947 and replaced with its opposite the "Marshall plan".

During implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, Germans had to live with 1200 calories per day:

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

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #197
firebones wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many wikipedia articles have you read on your smartphone vs. ones you've read on your laptop/desktop? "In your pocket" represents a world of difference.

A fucking lot. Probably as much as on the computer - and I'm in front of the computer for 10-12h / day. Most of my mobile searches are related to a) things I'm learning right now, or b) things I've just read about and I don't know what they are.

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by intended »

whytaka wrote: post #41
jgibson wrote: post #4

Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consumed in excess, and now we are starting to realise that and demand better. I wonder if society will go through the same rejection phase with attention-seeking media consumption. Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves.

Our phones, their glitziness, and the way they captivate definitely hijack the mind's operations when it's saturated by them. It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds. That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.) I'm excited abo…

This is amused cynicism to your happy optimism.

I look forward to making more addictive programs that make me and shareholders more money. I am eager to see the next evolution of UI/experience and code, where we manage to get ever stronger feedback loops in place.

The end goal is to make money and have a good exit. To find a way to part people from their money, for the minimum effort on our our part and the best competitive release of value from our product for their time.

There’s of course diminishing returns to product quality - I mean after all, who wants to be craigslist and just do the one job good enough?

No no. We will buy out the competition or interesting startups and then expand our reach and label beyond the core product which must plateau out eventually.

Then we leverage this cross platform ability to gain more market share and dominate multiple verticals which lets us disrupt other industries.

Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. And this also has such amazing RoI!

And look at the amazing value we unlock, surfacing relevant ads all over our network.

But hey, you know not enough people are clicking on ads, so let’s push them Harder, we could model ourselves like those old companies we removed. Let’s hire some tv execs for their insight.

As For the big picture - well I’m sure there’s someone else whose job it is to worry about that.

If there is a problem we will solve it ourselves, us being the duty minded, un-incentivized corporations.

Yup. The future is shiny and usefulness is incidental.

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

#358

Post by igravious »

pls2halp wrote: post #138
vinceguidry wrote: post #131

These guys clearly weren't around for the introduction of television. If ever there was a technology tailor-made to hijack our minds with, it was TV. It wasn't the end of the world.

There’s a very solid argument for TV as stunting people’s development. There’s lack of reading, albeit not necessarily due to television ( https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec... ) There’s a direct link between television and obesity ( http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807 ) And more general health dangers ( http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-tel... ) Etc…

Etcetera is not a reason.

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

#359

Post by peoplewindow »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #327
peoplewindow wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ins…

What evidence?

The article you link to just says they make money through advertising. Yes, and?

Your argument is 'their business relies on their users being happy and using their service a lot' which is an empty statement: it's true of all businesses. It's not a sign of addictiveness or anything like that.

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

#360

Post by gadders »

barrkel wrote: post #239
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…

I somewhat agree with your examples, except Wikipedia. It has no business being much more than a server farm and software tweaker. That's not something that needs large ongoing investment by many people. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-fr...

Wikipedia has Cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
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