Prominent New Theories

Addiction, loss of focus and motivation. 

Video games, apps, online platforms are addictive by design, not by accident.

• The business model of most of these platforms is based on engagement.

  • Their metric of success is not money but minutes.

  • Your time and attention is their commodity, the more that these rise, so do their advertisement sales.

  • There’s a reason Silicon Valley calls its customers “users”.

• Behind the code lies many influential behavioural psychologists who help design the experience in such a way to keep you engaged and staying on the platform.

Primarily they are influencing your actions via influencing your dopamine levels.

• The likes, the shares, the novelty, the levelling up in games, all of these are designed to make you release dopamine.

Dopamine has more of a motivational effect, rather than purely a pleasurable effect which is often depicted.

• It reinforces whatever behaviour led to that dopamine hit.

• Have you ever just wanted to check just one thing on your phone, and then suddenly 10 minutes go past like a flash.

• The creator of the infinite scroll estimates that it induces the average user to spend 50% more time on platforms like Instagram - he has come to regret his invention.

This can also create a craving for the behaviour that led to the dopamine release.

• Even if you’ve just checked your phone, do you find yourself itching to reach for it again and to check your favourite social media sites, emails, or favourite apps.

• You may even find yourself automatically reaching and getting your phone out, without any conscious thought.

The immediate downside of this is high distractibility, and an inability to keep our focus on a specific task.

• This has obvious professional and career implications, but it can also greatly harm personal relationships.

• This issue is particularly concerning for children and teens.

  • This is because their brains are still developing.

  • Much of their later development is in their prefrontal cortex where they learn sustained concentration and how to stop distracting impulses.

  • By not learning this skill as their brains are developing, this inability to sustain concentration can continue into adulthood.

This can develop into a narrowing of focus, motivation, and enjoyment throughout various aspects in life.

Our brains are highly dynamic and can adapt to given stimulus.

• The constant dopamine spikes caused via this technology leads the brain to down-regulate the dopamine system.

  • You may lower the sensitivity of your dopamine receptors, or even the number of receptors.

  • In addition your baseline dopamine may drop.

• This can lead to a narrowing of focus, motivation, and enjoyment throughout your life.

  • Areas where it was challenging to sustain focus become much harder.

  • Even the rewarding activities can become boring.

• This overall lowered sense of motivation often results on you focusing more times on the areas which still give you that dopamine hit.

  • These are the technologies that got you into the problem in the first place.

  • Unfortunately this only compounds the problem.

Fear, anxiety, stress and divisiveness.

​We see that as social media use rises, as do anxiety levels, particularly in girls.

This can be for many reasons, some of which are:

• With more and more time spent on social media it’s common for people to constantly compare their lives and themselves to others.

  • Being connected to lots of people can easily give the impression on your feed that people are having a great time all the time, partly because most people tend to share their highlights or successes.

  • It also doesn’t help that filters and editing software is used to make both the people and the experience look better.

  • Now that we are connected to the entire world, there will always be someone who trumps you on a given characteristic which can lower your self-esteem even if you are doing great.​

  • “Comparison is the thief of joy” – Theodore Roosevelt

• It can take moments away from your own good times and memorable experiences.

  • Due to the need of having to 'capture the moment' so you can put it up on your social media.

  • This ironically stops you from embracing these moments to the fullest.

• Popularity and connections are now fostered partly online.

  • Many are anxiously checking their engagement following posts, always desiring more likes and positive comments.

    • This can occur throughout the days/weeks, pulling them out of focus of whatever they are doing, and having that underlying urge to recheck their engagement.

  • It also doesn’t help that it’s normal for us to completely focus on any negative comments and to ignore the positive ones.

• The 24/7 nature of these technologies means that the above issues can always be occurring.

The attention economy leans on triggering your negative emotions to keep you engaged.

With the rise of digital devices, information overload, and our finite attention, the attention economy refers to the fact that many companies recognise that the world’s most valuable currency is actually our attention, and they will do whatever they can to try and capture it.

• Using fear to keep us engaged.

  • Our feeds are controlled by algorithms designed to keep you engaged and to scroll for longer.

  • They have reinforced what great orators have always utilised:

    • Invoke fear and your audience will be completely engaged.

  • Fear creates clicks, views and shares.

    • This is because it exploits the primal nature in us, an evolved sensitivity to threat.

    • This triggers our amygdala in our brain, which causes our body to release the stress hormone cortisol.

  • This has been known for some time in the news space; “if it bleeds, it leads”.

    • Flicking through news sites, articles, and programmes, is basically getting bombarded with worst possible things happening throughout the world at that moment.

  • Another adage to keep in mind is “bad news sells”.

    • Misleading and hyperbolic headlines are used to exaggerate our perception on what is actually going on.

  • This constant fear can easily build up our anxiety levels, as we are only focusing on the most extreme and negative factors, and don’t take in all the good that is happening.

    • It’s important to remember that we’ve evolved from hunter-gatherer times.

    • Our brains aren’t evolved to take in and process all this information in a healthy manner.​

• It’s not just fear that is used, controversial and extreme content is also shared.

  • These algorithms don’t have morals behind them and they’ve learnt that it’s easier for us to disengage from calm and positive content.

  • Negativity bias states that negative experiences impact us more than positive ones, enticing us to stay engaged on the relevant platform

  • Once again this can increase our stress, but it also increases our divisiveness.

    • Facebook conducted an internal investigation called “Common Ground” and found that “our algorithms do exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness”.