![]() ![]() Take a 30 day break from optional technologies in your life.ĭuring that break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.Īt the end of the break, slowly reintroduce optional technologies in your life. Much like cleaning out a house that is filled with things that provide little to no value to one’s life, Newport suggests doing a digital declutter in which you clear away distracting tools and compulsive habits. If the post doesn’t do well or doesn’t get as many likes as the last post, people will often delete it.Īs Sean Parker, the founding President of Facebook, once said that features like these are part of a “social-validation feedback loop.exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” If the post gets a lot of likes, hearts or comments, people feel a surge of dopamine. ![]() When someone shares a new post, they aren’t sure whether ‘their tribe’ will approve of it or not so they constantly monitor its progress. “In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it.” Today, new technologies hijack this deep drive to create a behavioral addiction. Social media is also designed to encourage users to seek social approval. Infinite scrolling allows users to see post after post for hours on end–it’s difficult to stop when there is no finish line and the fear of missing out (FOMO) on an interesting post is always in the back of your head. So they changed the color to red–an alarm color–and clicking sky rocketed.”Īlmost every social media platform has copied this concept and also added a news feed with infinite scrolling. The original Facebook notification symbol was blue to match the rest of the site, “but no one used it. One way is by creating attention-catching notifications and making it easy to find the next interesting post. So how do these companies design tech to grab as much of your attention as possible? ![]() Since many tech giants operate on an attention driven model (the more eyeballs they get, the more ads they can sell), these companies don’t have much incentive to become less addictive. Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer and whistleblower of tech addiction, explains that minimizing distractions and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue for companies such as Google. The average modern user spends around “two hours per day on social media” and checks their phone “eighty-five times a day.” People text while driving, they cross the street while looking at Instagram and watch YouTube videos while using the bathroom–the addiction is widespread. Fast forward a decade and almost everyone who has a smartphone is addicted to it and social media. When the first iPhone was released in 2007, there was no App store, no social media notifications and no Instagram. ![]()
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