Is it any coincidence that the race to the bottom in media—toward clickbait headlines, toward the vulgar and prurient and dumb, toward provocative but often exaggerated takes—has accelerated in lock-step with the development of new technologies for measuring engagement?
Increase Your Web Traffic And Decrease Your Quality With This One Weird Trick!
From yesterday’s paper: validation for my own feelings on this matter.
Q. What makes you think that people have become addicted to digital devices and social media?
A. In the past, we thought of addiction as mostly related to chemical substances: heroin, cocaine, nicotine. Today, we have this phenomenon of behavioral addictions where, one tech industry leader told me, people are spending nearly three hours a day tethered to their cellphones. Where teenage boys sometimes spend weeks alone in their rooms playing video games. Where Snapchat will boast that its youthful users open their app more than 18 times a day.
How do you define “addiction?”
The definition I go with is that it has to be something you enjoy doing in the short term, that undermines your well-being in the long term — but that you do compulsively anyway.
But those two months I did nothing but play Crossy Road—that was just time well spent.
We’re biologically prone to getting hooked on these sorts of experiences. If you put someone in front of a slot machine, their brain will look qualitatively the same as when they take heroin. If you’re someone who compulsively plays video games — not everyone, but people who are addicted to a particular game — the minute you load up your computer, your brain will look like that of a substance abuser.
Seems like we can’t go two minutes without our phones buzzing, trying to pull us away from whatever we were doing to instead look at a screen.
This started out innocently: as a way to let you know that someone was personally communicating with you; a figurative tap on the shoulder through the magic of the internet.
But at some point this snowballed into us defaulting into allowing the entire world to tap us on the shoulder in the middle of family dinner.
Not only is that just annoying, but it’s partially responsible for actually changing our brains, which I will demonstrate to you using this simple test:
Next time you drive somewhere… don’t look at your phone until you get to your destination. Wait at those stop lights like you used to: existing in the physical space, and thinking the thoughts that came from your own brain.
I can already tell you that it’s not going to be easy. Having a magic device in my pocket that randomly pays out a sweet dopamine rush is the addictive slot machine my brain dreams of. And the more I think about it, the more I hate it.
I didn’t want to lose my attention span to digital junk food. I did not opt-in to this. But here I am, helpless but to compulsively pull my phone out of my pocket for no important reason at all.
What’s interesting to me is that we already know all this — that we just can’t stop looking at our screens — and we just accept it. We as a society also know that we can’t stop looking at our screens while driving and our best attempts to stop people from doing that have been about as effective as shaming an alcoholic into not drinking again.
Is this why we’re so excited for self-driving cars? So we can finally check our tweets safely on the way to work?
It seems like phone addiction (specifically, social media addiction through our phones) is what cigarette addiction was 50 years ago: Looks good, feels good, what’s the problem? A few people say it’s bad for your health, but those people are fringe weirdos. Everyone thinks they could cut back a little, but it’s so hard.
](/images/notifications-post/social-media-addict.jpg)
Recently after being delivered a heavy dose of life-perspective and deciding that “no, spending hours a day on my phone is not how I’d like to use my time”, I took some desperate measures. I neutered my notification settings, I deleted all apps with an infinite feed, and stopped charging my phone next to my bed.
Moving my phone charger six feet away to my dresser was the easiest and most effective, because that small distance is enough to keep me in bed reading a book, and not fall for the classic trap of “but I’ll just look up this one thing quickly” while my book rests unread in my lap.
Deleting those apps was harder than I imagined it would be, though. After a few weeks of picking up my phone only to remember that “oh, I deleted that”, it has confirmed my initial hypothesis: most of the stuff on our phones that we think we absolutely need and can’t live without… we don’t actually need.
“Funny, how the things you have the hardest time parting with are the things you need the least”
Personally, I am loving the little bit of regained space in my brain I unintentionally gave up. It made completing this art and societal commentary project possible, for one, and is finally making a dent in the stack of books next to my bed I’ve been meaning to read forever.
What will you do with your regained brain space?
Give these things a try in an attempt to reclaim your attention span:
I’ve been working on features for this website lately, one of which has been figuring out silly social sharing links. I’ve had a website long enough to remember the days of building a comment system in Perl, having a hit counter, and that being good enough.
Now you need to have all sorts of crap on a page in order to make sharing as easy as possible. One option is to piecemeal all the different networks together, but that requires giving up some control of your aesthetic, which I am not a fan of.
Or you use a plugin like AddThis, which makes all that easier, maintains some control of your aesthetic, and also allows the people on your site a comical number of options for sharing.
Personally, I don’t like either of these, which left me to write my own. Here’s the problem:
As a user, how does knowing the breakdown of how many shares your content had on each social network influence me about your content, or where I should share it? If it’s blowing up on Facebook but not on Twitter, should I be more compelled to Tweet about it, or post it on Facebook?
You shouldn’t really care. The thing you’re trying to communicate is: “Hey! This is popular! People are sharing this!” Or if nobody has shared it: “You can share this if you want” and then making that process easy.
If that person only uses Facebook, they’re not going to sign up for Twitter just because that post got more retweets than likes, so why all this extra information?
Some of my content has been scattered around posted in various places, and it all doesn’t come back nicely to one URL. If I write a new song, I’ll post the soundcloud song URL to Facebook and Reddit, and then I might write about it a bit on here. The Facebook link wasn’t pointing back to here, so any sort of share button I put on the blog post isn’t going to indicate how many shares that song got. Because things are scattered now.
Everything’s getting siloed off, and everybody wants to have a platform for content with their own ranking system. Meanwhile, I’m trying to reel everything back under one roof and consolidate things. More on that later.
Step one in implementing a consistent indication of popularity on this here website was to write something to go out and fetch social metrics for multiple URLs. That part is done. I wrote a Ruby Gem (aptly named Popularity). Given a url (or multiple urls) it goes out and fetches the social metrics across the major networks, and gives you the total number.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
search = Popularity.search(
"http://jeffkeen.me/p/I-know-its-you/",
"http://soundcloud.com/jeffkeen/i-know-its-you")
search.facebook.shares #=> 38
search.twitter.tweets #=> 0
search.pinterest.pins #=> 0
search.reddit.posts #=> 1
search.reddit.comments #=> 34
search.reddit.score #=> 626
search.soundcloud.plays #=> 14732
search.total #=> 15407
It was pretty fun to write, and I’d like to add some more features to it. But not before I do the next step of actually hooking it up to this here web site.