Hi.
How are you doing today?
What’s your name?
Where are you going?
When are you going there?
How much are you paying to go there?
Whom are you meeting there?
What are you having for lunch?
Do you like this brand?
What music do you listen to?
Whom do you chat to most often?
Who are you dating?
Where did you check in last?
How many cities have you traveled?
Who are your relatives?
Stalked someone recently?
If I ask you all these questions and more, how’d you feel? Certainly, you’d feel that your personal space is being intruded, won’t you?
There are no real life circumstances in which we would hand over all this information to any single third person willingly but ironically this is what we end up doing on a daily basis for hours.
The only difference is the questionnaire is not handed over to you as a survey form but rather it is presented to you in a very interesting and user friendly manner, you won’t even recognize it and yet tricked into providing all your information.
By now you might have guessed it, yes I’m talking about our day to day interactions with social media applications, namely Facebook, Instagram and all others tracking us, our location, our snaps, our interactions, our likes, dislikes, preferences, rides, expenses on a digital basis.
You know it or not, all of your life is being logged and being used to advertise you the things you don’t need but would end up buying. How are these being logged or why are we prone to provide all this critical and personal information? Well because they design it in a way that our biological selves are wired to respond back. A top right circled, red colored indicator on notifications, have you ever thought why are we so prompted to click it and read the notification?
They won’t ask you do you like cats? They’d show you a video on cat and if you like it, they draw an opinion that you like cats. Clicking that like button is so tempting and simple, it’s just a click, an involuntary, mindless click but that ended up giving your interest to the platform.
No, it’s not your fault, there is color psychology and dopamine reflexes combined with all other human response triggering factors that have been studied and trick-fully brought together in order for you to click on that notification icon.
Yes, it is the sad truth of today’s life that engineers are taught how to make their apps more and more addictive so that the users are hooked to it and they spend most of their times using these apps.
The more time an average user spends on these platforms, the more s/he is likely to see and interact with ads, the more revenue it will generate. Straight forward model.
Rarely do they consider the psychological addictive effects of these technologies on human beings. No doubt we are raising a generation which is socially awkward, prefers a lot of individual space and is hooked to devices and clung to apps, preferring the digital world more and more over face to face interactions and relying on the time stamped last seen more than the talks of the person. We are busy taking selfies and defining ourselves, getting engaged in a global competition of coolness and getting exposed to the amount of information and triggers that our biological selves are not designed to process. This was never our world and this choice hasn’t been consciously made but the atmosphere is just the product of the technology and we just happened to be tricked and trapped by it, given our lack of mindfulness and addictive behaviors.
This is a serious concern, right now more than ever. We need to be mindful of the impacts that tech is having on us and this blog is one initiative towards that.
Throughout this blog, we will be discussing all sorts of concerns tech is bringing into modern day lives and will try find solutions for the same.
If you want to support the cause, join in! Let’s use tech to solve the issues of tech
Subscribe to the blog, follow us on Instagram @summer.of.90s
If you want to volunteer for conducting awareness generating events on the same, get in touch on instagram or comment below.
Stay mindful!
See you in next post soon.
Comments
Post a Comment