How technology is designed to addict us

[humble3d]

How technology is designed to addict us

Time Well Spent founder Tristan Harris wants techies to think about the consequences of their design choices.

'Minds shaped and manipulated'...

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NO ONE WINS...IT'S THE WAR OF MAN ... NO ONE WINS

 

 

How tech companies value your attention is a “crisis,” Time Well Spent founder Tristan Harris says — and a lot of people in the industry won’t even admit it’s a problem.

“One of the common arguments in the tech industry is, ‘Look, users are free to make choices.

They can make their own choices,’” Harris said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.

“And it’s really just not 100 percent true. People's minds are shaped and manipulated in these moments.”

Harris spent nearly three years educating colleagues at Google about the ethics of tech design.

Today, as an investor in and adviser to other companies, he urges all techies to question themselves about the consequences of what they’re developing.

“Product design used to be about building a product that functions well, that helps people,” he said.

“Now I recognize that design became subsumed into, ‘How do I get people to use it?

How do I get people’s attention?

How do I hold them here?’

Almost all designers are now in this totally different role of just getting people’s attention.”

“What scares me more is when, because there is a positive intention in this industry to make things better, the assumption is that to impact them at all would be to impact them positively,” he added.

Every little thing your apps and services do — push notifications to your locked phone, autoplaying YouTube videos, or the little delay between when you open Twitter and when you see if you have any new notifications — is a bid for your attention and engagement, Harris said.

Tech and media companies are engaged in a constant game of one-upsmanship to convince you to spend more time with them and not the others.

“Right now, Apple, Google and Facebook are kind of like these private companies who, collectively, are the urban planners for a billion people’s attentional landscape,” Harris said.

“We all live in this invisible city, which they created.”

“Unlike a democracy, where you can have some civic representation and you could say, ‘Who’s the mayor?’

or, ‘Should there be a stoplight there?’, we don’t have any representation except if we don’t use the product or don’t buy it,” he added.

“And that’s not really representation.”

http://www.recode.net/2017/1/30/14432142/technology-app-addiction-time-well-spent-tristan-harris-recode-podcast

 

[luisam]

4 hours ago, humble3d said:

“Right now, Apple, Google and Facebook are kind of like these private companies who, collectively, are the urban planners for a billion people’s attentional landscape,” Harris said.

“We all live in this invisible city, which they created.”

“Unlike a democracy, where you can have some civic representation and you could say, ‘Who’s the mayor?’

or, ‘Should there be a stoplight there?’, we don’t have any representation except if we don’t use the product or don’t buy it,” he added.

“And that’s not really representation.”

 

May this Mr. Tristan Harris excuse me, though most probably he never will read this comment. When he tries to compare Apple, Google, Facebook etc. with "democracy" and claims the lack of some kind of civic representation of the users in the decisions made by them, he is talking nonsense.

 

Can you imagine world-wide elections to select some representatives of consumers in Google's or Apple's board of directors?

 

Actually consumers apply their decisions rather decisively using or buying a product. There are more then enough examples of hi-tech product failures because they couldn't convince consumers about the real worth or usefulnes of it. Or tech products that were widely popular until they were rejected in favor to some more useful one.