CRyder Design

Consider your average workday. Where do you get your news to start your day? How many times do you check your phone? How many emails or instant messages do you send and receive? If your answers shocked you and made you think about your technology use, you may be surprised to find out just how much technology is impacting our lives more than we may understand.

In today’s technological and media landscape, programs are designed to form addictions. This may or may not be surprising to you. When we open an app, we are given some sort of positive reinforcement that keeps us coming back. It is sort of like classical conditioning in a sense. Classical conditioning is a form of learning that is done unconsciously to our minds. Typically it is when we associate some sort of stimulus with a specific response. In most social media platforms, we are presented with certain stimuli that make us elicit a certain neurological response. The article, “What is Brainhacking? Tech Insiders on Why You Should Care” mentions Snapchat as an example of this idea. A few years ago Snapchat started something called ‘streaks’ which shows users the number of days in a row they have messaged back and forth with someone else. Users continued to use Snapchat every single day, so they would not lose their streaks. This almost evoked a panic when a user was confronted with something that did not allow them to use Snapchat out of fear that they would lose their streak with another person. In this case, one stimulus would be the streak, and the response would be a relief. Another stimulus would be, lack of the streak, and the response would be panic. The program was designed to keep users coming back consistently and to form an addiction. Also in the article Tristin Harris, a former employee for Google stated, “And so you could ask when these features are being designed, are they designed to most help people live their life? Or are they being designed because they’re best at hooking people into using the product?” In most cases, the more an app is used, the more money the company makes. This is the motivation for programmers to create addicting features within an app. The more significantly a user is addicted, the more they will keep coming back, and the more money the company will make.

Since these programs are being designed to form these addictions and successfully doing so on such a large scale, tech companies group us, as users, together. They consider us to have one collective personality rather than having individual personalities of our own. By doing so, simplifies their process to create something that users will respond to as a whole. They would rather create one algorithm that works for everyone than take the time and resources to create millions of algorithms that work for each user. The idea of individuality complicates things for the big tech companies and would cost them a lot more money, so it seems that they are trying to eradicate it however they can. The article, “How Silicon Valley Is Erasing Your Individuality” states, “The big tech companies think we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole.” These companies will design their content and features with a small number of ideal users in mind, and make the app useful for all users. The concerning truth of the matter is, individuality is just an obstacle that big tech companies could overcome, but choose to ignore. 

Technology has especially affected the way we form opinions on social media and news topics. Now, more than ever, are we seeing forms of hostility on social media as a result of the modern presentation of news and politics. The concept of fake news and censorship is so prevalent in the social media landscape. We tend to agree more with information that aligns with our values and beliefs and disagree with information that does not. This idea is called confirmation bias, and it can significantly intensify the existing hostility on social media platforms. The article, “#COVID19: Social Media Both a Blessing and a Curse During Coronavirus Pandemic” states, “Racist content spread through social media may reinforce already pre-existing biases and prejudices…social media also facilitates a form of prejudiced collective organizing that, similar to crowdsourcing, rapidly enlists a large number of people, yet does so on the basis of questionable beliefs.” A large number of news sources tend to make their content align with either left or right winged beliefs and potentially form the news to conform to those beliefs. Readers will choose a source of their content based on their pre-existing beliefs and disagree with the content of other opposing sources. This results in a divided society. The way that today’s news is being presented leads the audience to question whether what they see is something that they can trust and believe because of these biases.

Needless to say, the internet has changed the way media is presented and understood. Traditional media has drastically changed in its structure to conform to the norms of today’s technological landscape in hopes of staying relevant. As developers and programmers attempt to understand the user’s thought process and decision-making process the media has changed to fit within them. The article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” states, “When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all other media it has absorbed.” Media is now programmed to fit our shortened attention spans. The article also mentions the idea that news is being presented in short snippets that can be quickly read. News and media are now synthesizing information so readers can read it, and get the gist of the information in a short amount of time. This is the result of a lack of views on longer articles and excessive skimming to get to the heart of the content. This is an example of how media was altered to fit the landscape of the net, but the issue runs much deeper.

All in all, it is easy to become blind to all of the ways technology is affecting our lives. Yet, it is still important to remain aware of all of these effects. We can not continue to move forward being mindlessly aware of what is going on with the technology we use every day. For your peace of mind and understanding, conduct your own research to make yourself aware of what is happening, and be sure to make time to separate yourself from technology every so often to stop the addictions.