I have been profoundly disturbed while going thru the medium article on this topic by Richard Freed. (https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-kids-c452870464ce )
When i showed it to my kid and his friends and asked them to summarise, they said the article is too long and they didn't read :) . So i tried this morning to sit and write a precis.. my precis turned out to be too long to be posted in their whatsapp group.. so i thought of returning back to my blogger site and posting it here after so many years.. so here goes.
++++++++++++++
Key message to the kids (and their parents)
+++++++++++++++
now the longer precis or my notes from the article - here goes. i have highlighted more points for boys (my target audience) than girls.. but applicable to both.
+++++++++++
Stanford Univ, has a Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.” Fogg claims that "We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do".
B J Fogg and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design. As Forbes Magazine writer Anthony Wing Kosner notes, “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg”. Instagram cofounder is his disciple. Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people.
Persuasive technology deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives. Kids spend countless hours in social media and video games. Because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood. it is particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.
Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second. Persuasive design has helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
One girl says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”"
The core of some UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities, especially our children.Building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.
The “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.” Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use. Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network. Fogg’s formula is the blueprint for building multibillion dollar social media and gaming companies
Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction. A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.” Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.” Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices. Social networks and video games use the trusted brain-manipulation technique of variable reward (think slot machine). Users never know when they will get the next “like” or game reward, and it’s delivered at the perfect time to foster maximal stimulation and keep them on the
site. Banks of computers employ AI (artificial intelligence) to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked. A persuasion profile of a particular
user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.
Persuasive technology’s use of digital media to target children, deploying the weapon of psychological manipulation at just the right moment, is what makes it so powerful. These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers.
UX engineers design features to alter video game player behavior. Their questions are: "How do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity?” and “How to make players play forever.” The parents I work with simply have no idea about the immense amount of financial and psychological firepower aimed at their children to keep them playing video games “forever.”
Video game developer John Hopson, who has a Ph.D. in behavioral and brain science, wrote the paper “Behavioral Game Design.”After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live. “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”
Not only does persuasive design appear to drive kids’ addictions to devices, but knowledge of addiction is used to make persuasive design more effective at hijacking the mind.Dopamine Labs’ Ramsay Brown acknowledges in an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”
Persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments. cyber bullying. FOMO. And, as boys transition to manhood, they can’t shake their gaming habits. Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.
Former Facebook president Sean Parker. Interviewed in Axios, he discloses: “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” He also said that Facebook exploits “vulnerability in human psychology” and remarked, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook VP says in a talk ironically given at B.J.
Fogg’s Stanford University. “We want to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible and then give you back that dopamine hit.”
When i showed it to my kid and his friends and asked them to summarise, they said the article is too long and they didn't read :) . So i tried this morning to sit and write a precis.. my precis turned out to be too long to be posted in their whatsapp group.. so i thought of returning back to my blogger site and posting it here after so many years.. so here goes.
++++++++++++++
Key message to the kids (and their parents)
- COMPANIES ARE MAKING BILLIONS. PUBG INCLUDED, BY GETTING YOU TO KEEP ON USING THE APPS.
- PSYCHOLOGY IS USED TO KEEP YOU ADDICTED.
- THEY ARE USING THE KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BRAIN DURING ADDICTION, TO BUILD APPS THAT ARE ADDICTIVE
- THE OWNERS OF THESE APPS AND GAMES, DON'T ALLOW THEIR KIDS AT HOME TO USE ANY TECHNOLOGY, BUT THEY ARE MAKING BILLIONS BY MAKING YOU WASTE COUNTLESS HOURS ON THEIR APPS (see https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/bill-gates-mark-zuckerberg-ban-technology-for-their-children-but-want-rest-of-the-world-addicted-to-it-1328462-2018-08-31 )
+++++++++++++++
now the longer precis or my notes from the article - here goes. i have highlighted more points for boys (my target audience) than girls.. but applicable to both.
+++++++++++
Stanford Univ, has a Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.” Fogg claims that "We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do".
B J Fogg and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design. As Forbes Magazine writer Anthony Wing Kosner notes, “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg”. Instagram cofounder is his disciple. Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people.
Persuasive technology deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives. Kids spend countless hours in social media and video games. Because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood. it is particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.
Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second. Persuasive design has helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
One girl says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”"
The core of some UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities, especially our children.Building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.
The “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.” Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use. Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network. Fogg’s formula is the blueprint for building multibillion dollar social media and gaming companies
Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction. A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.” Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.” Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices. Social networks and video games use the trusted brain-manipulation technique of variable reward (think slot machine). Users never know when they will get the next “like” or game reward, and it’s delivered at the perfect time to foster maximal stimulation and keep them on the
site. Banks of computers employ AI (artificial intelligence) to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked. A persuasion profile of a particular
user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.
Persuasive technology’s use of digital media to target children, deploying the weapon of psychological manipulation at just the right moment, is what makes it so powerful. These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers.
UX engineers design features to alter video game player behavior. Their questions are: "How do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity?” and “How to make players play forever.” The parents I work with simply have no idea about the immense amount of financial and psychological firepower aimed at their children to keep them playing video games “forever.”
Video game developer John Hopson, who has a Ph.D. in behavioral and brain science, wrote the paper “Behavioral Game Design.”After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live. “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”
Not only does persuasive design appear to drive kids’ addictions to devices, but knowledge of addiction is used to make persuasive design more effective at hijacking the mind.Dopamine Labs’ Ramsay Brown acknowledges in an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”
Persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments. cyber bullying. FOMO. And, as boys transition to manhood, they can’t shake their gaming habits. Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.
Former Facebook president Sean Parker. Interviewed in Axios, he discloses: “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” He also said that Facebook exploits “vulnerability in human psychology” and remarked, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook VP says in a talk ironically given at B.J.
Fogg’s Stanford University. “We want to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible and then give you back that dopamine hit.”
