The tech industry is designed to take advantage of your mind. Money comes from advertisers Google is no exception. The bulk of its $89.5 billion revenue came from AdWords. Websites, apps, and search engines, all want your attention. By giving them your attention, you see their ads. By clicking on ads, you become their revenue stream. Websites receive this ad money and use it to create more content to bring you back. For example, the New York Times reinvests the money from ad clicks back into to the production of journalism.
It is an important distinction that social media sites and companies don't produce news. In fact, social media sites don't produce any of their own content. Social media sites act as an aggregate for their users to produce the content that keeps users entertained. But it doesn't matter; social media sites have the same end goal of advertiser money. Capturing people's attention = money. As the former Facebook executives pointed out in their interviews from last week's post, the internet is being built around algorithms that are designed to monopolize your attention.
Before the advent of the ubiquitous internet as we know it today and the always updating social media apps, there was still technology. Modern electronic tech has been developing for the past century with personal computers and video games becoming mainstream in the 1980s. If social media addiction is the crisis buzzword of parents in the 2010's, video game addiction was the 1990s equivalent.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has only just announced in January of 2018 they will classify "video gaming addiction" as a disorder. This will mark the first time a technology-related disorder with a large body of research behind it is confirmed to exist. It is important to note that video games and social media are not the same. Compared to video game addiction, social media is new and ready for research. Jumping to significant conclusions about social media addiction would be unwise. That hasn't stopped predictions about where future research will point.
In 2013 a large group of former tech company employees founded an organization: The Center for Humane Technology. The goal: Spread awareness about social media and technology addiction. Its members are former executives and employees at companies like Facebook and Google. The Center for Humane Technology believes that tech is here to stay and despite its accomplishments, in some aspects, it is irresponsibly handled to the detriment of society. They think a revision of the algorithms behind advertising and attention is necessary so that they should be created humanely within a framework of ethical morals. The Center for Humane Tech knows in the competitive, cutthroat atmosphere for users attention it only makes financial sense for companies to invest significant amounts into their manipulation of users attention and therefore change isn't likely.
That is why The Center for Humane Technology has teamed up with the non-profit Common Sense Media, Comcast and DirecTV to make a public media ethics campaign a reality. Common Sense Media has already donated $7 million in funding for the project, while Comcast and DirecTV have donated around $50 million in free media and airtime for the tech ethics campaign. The actual campaign itself targets 55,000 American public high schools. It has been dubbed "The Truth About Tech campaign," and will be modeled after successful anti-smoking campaigns of the past. The campaign intends to use their voice to spread the word about the current research being done on social media's influence. Social media use has been linked to depression with studies finding that the more social media platforms someone uses, the higher their risk of depression and anxiety is.
This isn't to say as a society we should refuse all social media and tech use outright. Some research has found that in moderation there is a positive correlation between various forms of screen time and mental well-being, but only to a point. After the initial improvements in wellbeing the more time someone spends on their chosen activity, the worse off they become. In general 1-2 hours per day seems to be the sweet spot for maximum benefit to wellbeing.
Our research suggests that some connectivity is probably better than none and there are moderate levels that as in the story of Goldilocks are "just right" for young people - Dr. Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute
Moderation is key. Social media continues to be omnipresent in our daily lives and it isn't leaving anytime soon. If you use your phone in moderation, you would be hard-pressed to find someone telling you that you were making a poor decision. Anything more than a few hours a day though, and the research starts to stack against you. As always regardless of the current research, our choices come down to us as individuals and how we spend our time.