Social media trains and programs us like rats were trained to get hits of dopamine in well known experiments
On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take the stage at the search giant's I/O event, where he'll likely make similar exhortations.
But amid the calls for more apps and gadgets, a group of tech insiders - some of whom worked closely with Facebook and Google's top brass - are preaching a different Silicon Valley gospel: Slow down and think about what you're doing.
The Centre for Humane Technology, a non-profit organisation formed earlier this year by engineers and investors who profited from the past decade's social and mobile boom, is having a moment, as concerns over the reach, power and influence of tech grow.
The problems, they say, go beyond headlines about data leaks, password breaches and election interference. Tech giants like Facebook and Google have gained sway over billions of people through subtle Pavlovian techniques that keep them coming back for more.
The examples stare at you from your smartphone's home screen:
- The red badge on Facebook's app that signals a posted comment or message.
- YouTube and Netflix videos that automatically cue up to play one after the other.
- The Snapchat orange fireball emoji that signals a streak of daily chats between friends.
Tristan Harris, the centre's co-founder and executive director and a former Google designer, wants people to realise those attention-grabbing techniques are intentionally designed to "hijack our minds and our society".
Comment: This is not mere hyperbole or metaphoric. Our minds are literally being hijacked by design:
There was a surprise in the UK last week when statistics showed that throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the refusal of CEO Mr. Mark Zuckerberg to appear before parliament, not a single user had been lost by the social media network. Their numbers were in fact still growing.
Worldwide, Facebook recorded some 2.13 billion monthly active users, which is a 14% increase from a year ago. For the first quarter of 2018, the company made $11.97bn or revenues up some 49% on last year.
All that despite the scandal surrounding it's data privacy issues.
But now Ms. Natasha Schüll, the author of a bestseller on slot machine behavior called Addiction by Design, revealed that most social media companies are simply copying gambling methods 'to create psychological cravings'.
These instances of seeing what is happening online create the "same brain mechanisms as cocaine"
"Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites."
"In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention, which is measured in clicks and time spent."
The small sounds and beeps are also not there by accident. By making these recognizable, the moment you disengage from the site, "you get peppered with little messages or bonus offers to get your attention and pull you back in."
She, therefore, urges people to start taking a break from social media, for the sake of your own wellbeing and recognize that it is nothing but an addiction.
"We have to start recognizing the costs of time spent on social media. It's not just a game, it affects us financially, physically and emotionally."
"Technology is supposed to be a tool, it is supposed to give you superpowers," he said. "That's not what we're doing right now. We are handing over our values to a nonhuman entity that does not have our interests in mind."
The organisation isn't suggesting people delete their Facebook accounts and chuck their smartphones and laptops into the bay. Nor is it suggesting Facebook or Google shed hundreds of billions of dollars in market value and turn into non-profits.
"We're not attacking anybody. The centre is entirely about trying to make all of these products we love more humane," said Roger McNamee, a founding adviser who as a venture capitalist made profitable investments in Facebook, Palm and Yelp.
"The goal is to bring together policymakers and medical professionals and technologists to talk about the dark side of social media and other apps that are on smartphones," he said.
The centre hopes to educate consumers and persuade tech executives to change business practices that don't help consumers, said Chris Hughes, one of Mark Zuckerberg's original dorm-room co-founders. Hughes joined the centre as an adviser last month.
Facebook's recent controversies over election manipulation, hate speech and the Cambridge Analytica data leak are helping to focus more attention on the center's messages.
"It's time for a deeper, broader conversation about the data, who owns it, who gets paid for it," Hughes said. "We have to challenge the leaders of these companies and leaders of societies to make sure these technologies are working for us."
Hughes is the latest high-profile tech luminary to join the centre's leadership team, which has deep roots in Silicon Valley, starting with Harris, a former Apple software engineer who was a Google design ethicist and product philosopher. He left in 2014 to start a movement called Time Well Spent, using public venues like the TED conference and 60 Minutes to make people more aware of how technology is used to steer behaviour.
Companies like Facebook and Google offer their technologies free. That means they depend on increasing time spent on their apps and websites to increase advertising revenue or to mine information about users habits and preferences. Behaviour-changing technology became crucial as they competed against each other for the attention of users, Harris said in a recent interview with The Chronicle.
So, for example, seeing a red notification badge on Facebook has conditioned people to stop what they are doing, open the app and gain instant gratification by checking their feeds. Videos that play automatically encourage binge watching, which keeps viewers on YouTube or Netflix longer.
And Snapchat's streak emoji encourages friends to launch the app at least once a day, which takes over as "the way you know that you are still friends," Harris said.
Google and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment about the centre. A Facebook representative cited a December post by two Facebook researchers who said the company has pledged US$1mil (RM3.94mil) to research into how media technologies affect well-being of youth. The post said Facebook is also investing in research "to better understand digital distraction and the factors that can pull people away from important face-to-face interactions".
To be sure, ad-supported television, radio and newspapers also compete in what Hughes called the "attention economy". But the rise of smartphones and social media has intensified the battle.
Tech addiction explains why people feel lost without their smartphones. A survey released in November by Deloitte found that the average American looks at a smartphone 47 times per day. Those ages 18 to 24 look at their phones 86 times per day, the survey said.
"It's the first thing that we look at when we wake up, the last thing we look at before we go to sleep," said Aza Raskin, center co-founder and former head of user experience for Firefox browser creator Mozilla. He also founded Internet radio startup Songza, which Google bought in 2014.
"This is like a middleman that sits between us and all of our friends," said Raskin, whose father, the late Jef Raskin, was an Apple project manager credited as the father of the Macintosh. "So it controls our social interactions. We think we are in control because we are scrolling down the News Feed, but Facebook is the one deciding whose update we see, who we stay in close contact with."
Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, applauded the centre's efforts, but noted that mental health experts like himself have been warning for years that technology was rewiring our brains.
"The message from the research community has been loud and clear all this time, which is that these technologies are wonderful in many ways, but they come with risks," said Aboujaoude, author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, based on his experience treating patients for Internet addiction.
Aboujaoude said he doesn't think the centre alone is going to "make a huge difference. This is a global phenomenon, and it's going to take folks from different backgrounds coming together to have an impact".
And such a movement might have been more effective five or six years ago, he said. "The big question is, is it too late? I hope not. We have become so dependent on these technologies. We allowed them to basically take over our lives."
While short on specifics, the centre's website lists four broad ways it plans to redefine technology's future:
- Inspiring companies like Apple, Samsung and Microsoft to design device screens that minimize constant distractions.
- Lobbying government agencies to pressure tech companies to better protect consumers.
- Creating a "cultural awakening" so consumers recognise the "difference between technology designed to extract the most attention from us, and technology whose goals are aligned with our own".
- Engaging engineers and other employees to advocate internally against a system "that ruins society".
Hughes, whose net worth Forbes recently estimated at US$430mil (RM1.69bil), largely thanks to his Facebook stake, acknowledges he has profited from the company's success. "I do feel some responsibility for what Facebook has become," he said. But, he added, "everyone who has worked for these companies has a particular responsibility to think about how they should be forces for good and not be forces that are destructive."
The centre has raised an undisclosed amount of money from individuals, trust funds and foundations, while some of its own leaders and advisers have also contributed, said centre public relations director Lynn Fox, who during her career has been a spokeswoman for Apple and Google.
It operates from the office of Common Sense Media, a San Francisco non-profit that advises parents and teachers about video games and other media that are appropriate for children. Both groups partnered in a Truth About Tech campaign to raise awareness of digital addiction.
The centre is pushing its agenda at a time when Facebook's privacy and data problems are causing consumers to re-examine their reliance on tech, said Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer.
"What it's ultimately going to lead to is a much more healthier, balanced approach to technology," Steyer said.
And there are signs the centre's mantra might be getting through. Zuckerberg, who previously wrote that his company would focus this year on ensuring time spent on Facebook "is time well spent", told Wall Street analysts on April 25, in a call to discuss the company's record US$12bil (RM47.31bil) in quarterly revenue, that he had a three-year plan to "keep building Facebook to not only be a service that people love to use, but also one that's good for people and good for society".
Taking control of your phone:
1. Turn off all notifications that don't come from people - messaging apps are OK, but alerts about other activity could be trying to trick you into engaging.
2. Use the grayscale setting for phone apps to avoid colourful icons that act as shiny rewards.
3. Limit your apps on the home screen to essential tools, like maps or calendar apps.
4. Launch other apps only by searching and typing their names - this might be enough to make you pause and ask if it's really necessary.
5. Charge your phone outside your bedroom, to avoid the temptation of checking at night or in the morning.
6. If you have trouble cutting back, go cold turkey and remove social media apps from your phone. You can still use most of them on a computer or a mobile Web browser.
7. Send audio messages or make calls instead of texting.
8. Download apps that help reduce screen time. The Centre for Humane Technology has a list here. - The San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
(Source: Center for Humane Technology)
Comment: If the above doesn't put things into better perspective, the following video surely will; warnings straight out of the mouths of social media programmers: