endlessly scrolling

 

Last week in an interview, Facebook founder Dustin Muskovitz revealed and criticized that Facebook aggressively works to make its app addictive to maximize the amount of attention we give it. They’re not the only ones. Across all services, developers craftily give us series of cues and rewards engineered to make us swipe, tap, and scroll more. When you walk through Doheny Library at USC, you can see students sporadically switching their screens away from work to scroll on filtered pictures of hipster food to get a hit of dopamine. What are the ramifications to a society where mechanics of our brains are massively exploited to aggregate attention for corporate revenue? It’s not only attention that app developers have been able to hack — we live in a technology landscape where it is acceptable for Facebook to accurately manipulate your emotions to improve ad placement, and for game companies to encourage children to pay microtransactions and gamble away money. The internet generation is losing its capacity to mindfully use technology, and instead is having the technology use us.

This isn’t totally new — in the book The Attention Merchants, technology law scholar Tim Wu shows us that advertisers and media makers have been exploiting the neural mechanisms of our attention and social processing since the beginnings of our country.

However, in this modern hyperconnected generation, these technologies command inordinate sway over every aspect of our media, influencing our politics, our culture, and our relationships. Compromising and manipulating these technologies have huge adverse effects — just look at the capability of Russian actors and Macedonian teenagers in cultivating campaigns of misinformation, swaying our election.

The answer for our generation could not be a Luddite rejection of these technologies. It’s practically impossible to boycott these exploitative services because their network effects are too great. With tools like Facebook, I am two degrees away from anyone in the world, and I can instantly rally my community to events or coordinate logistics via group chat. I wouldn’t be able to give up scrolling through memes and cute cat pictures during idyllic moments.

The concept of digital rights is a new one, and to be honest, scholars, governments, and corporations are still trying to figure out what they should be and how we can properly implement them. The European Union has recognized digital rights that guarantees its citizens fundamental protections and services from technology companies — including privacy rights, the right to be forgotten, and protections similar to our First Amendment.

One part of the solution would be implementing digital rights in this country. Just like European citizens, we should demand transparency from corporate tech giants whose rampant data mining and news feed algorithms may be harming our society. We should ask that our First Amendment rights are not selectively curtailed on digital forums and spaces.

Another part of the burden falls on the coders and developers of technology. Engineers and designers must be mindful of the way a technology impacts individual lifestyles, and how its widespread adoption could change a community or society. Coders need to be especially mindful of the way kids and the mentally vulnerable could be affected addictive design features.

The rest of the burden falls on us, the consumer. We must ensure that we lead healthy digital lifestyles, making conscious decisions when and why we use applications and services. We should stave off the urge to scroll and swipe and curtail our use of addictive apps. Even though the technology environment is enormously powerful, most modern services have settings and options that allow you to increase your privacy and tailor the way the media is presented to you.

Navigating the new problems presented to us by modern technologies is going to be difficult as these services and apps become an irreplaceable part of our life. I’m confident that if we can start having the discussion of the role technology should play in our lifestyle, we can be a generation that has a mindful relationship with our technology, rather than on that is conquered by our screens.