Twitter and Facebook displayed infinitely scrolling news feeds that could be pulled down to be refreshed, just like a slot machine. The repeated use of red indicators and notifications made users come back time and again to see who had responded and what they had said. The slot machine variable reward function made people spend more money. The social media variable reward function made them spend more time. And people kept spending the time. A tsunami of information started to overwhelm their lives. Drag, scroll, click, repeat. On every device. All the time. Friend requests, likes, Facebook
Twitter and Facebook displayed infinitely scrolling news feeds that could be pulled down to be refreshed, just like a slot machine. The repeated use of red indicators and notifications made users come back time and again to see who had responded and what they had said. The slot machine variable reward function made people spend more money. The social media variable reward function made them spend more time. And people kept spending the time. A tsunami of information started to overwhelm their lives. Drag, scroll, click, repeat. On every device. All the time. Friend requests, likes, Facebook posts, tweets, retweets, WhatsApp messages, blogs, video clips, memes, gifs, real news, fake news, audio clips. An endless incessant wall of noise which users kept returning to, several times an hour, every day, all the time. Humankind’s basic relationship with the world – the way it received news, discussed politics, bought things, socialised, heard music, celebrated birthdays, communicated with parents, and accessed entertainment – was suddenly sucked into an advertising model which pulled every psychological trick it could find to encourage further engagement. The internal space that Taylor and Mill demanded started to shrink. Calm, properly contemplated rationality was alien to the advertising model. It operated instead in the world of emotional automaticity – desire and reward. People lost the time they needed to think, to define and pursue their goals, to reflect, to remember, to ...
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