Your Personal Slot Machine

Each one of us carries a personal slot machine. Sometimes we hit the jackpot, but for the most part, we lose...

Every morning, the first thing most of us do is check our email, WhatsApp, Instagram, or the news. This is probably true for most of us. Eighty per cent of smartphone users check their phones within fifteen minutes of opening their eyes. The majority of us sleep with our phone under the pillow, or within arm’s reach, and we instantly begin scrolling come morning. Your phone screams at you, “Here is what you missed whilst you were wasting your time sleeping!” The fear of missing out (FOMO, for short) is prevalent not only in teenagers, but throughout the vast majority of individuals in the modern world. We have allowed ourselves to become a commodity.

The majority of social media applications are injected with psychological techniques to keep you coming back for more. This could be in the form of ‘likes’, where our dopamine systems are hijacked and preyed upon, on the desire of us to be accepted and validated by others. The three dots that let you know someone is typing also means you’re probably going to wait around to find out what they have to say, even if that means you swipe off the chat to avoid the read receipt. Infinite scroll now means that you never have to click ‘next’ and also that you never have a reason to cease mindlessly absorbing any content. The inventor of inline scroll, Aza Raskin, has since said he feels guilty for this creation, though he explained it away by saying “in order to get the next round of funding, in order to get your stock price up, the amount of time that people spend on your app has to go up.” How can we forget push notifications? They call out from our phones at inopportune moments to let us know we’ve received messages or notifications, without letting us know what those messages and notifications are. This way, we’re going to log into the apps in question to find out what is waiting for us. According to a 2019 Common Sense Media poll, the average American teenager spends over seven hours per day staring at a screen. Children of today are the worst victims of this.

During a talk at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the former Vice President of user growth for Facebook literally said that his children ‘aren’t allowed to use that sh*t’ and that he feels ‘tremendous guilt’ for having created something that is ‘ripping apart the social fabric of how society works’. When we feel depressed, anxious, lonely, or alienated, we often cease to value our own time and we become more than happy to waste it on things that we know will prove unfulfilling. I am not here to tell you to get off social media, or to stop using technology. Unless you’re going int complete solitude (which I doubt you want to), it’s near to impossible. I know this because I use it too. Social media and technology is here to stay; it’s a part of everyone’s daily life. But what is important is how we utilise these tools available to us, so that they don’t affect our mental health, and so that we can find inner peace. A 2018 study carried out by Persil, claimed that by the time a British child is seven, they’ll have spent double the amount of time looking at a screen (on average, 456 days), than they will have spent playing outside. The key lies in making sure that we control technology, rather than letting it control us. Young people today are predominantly unhappier than ever than ever before, and I don’t think it would be a wild speculation to lay some of the blame at the feet of the things designed to hijack our minds.

A 2019 survey of nearly 2,000 US smartphone users found they check their phones an average of 96 times per day, that is around once every 10 minutes. This was a twenty per cent rise from just two years earlier. Another study of 1,200 users revealed that twenty-three per cent check their phones within a minute of waking up, whilst another thirty-four per cent manage to wait between five and ten minutes. Congratulations. Only six per cent of people were able to wait two hours or longer. I know it’s hard to get away from our smartphones, even mine has become my constant companion.

I want to introduce you to the Dumbledore of the technology world now. If the magic of technology is Hogwarts, Dr. B. J. Dogg is Dumbledore. He is the creator of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, Silicon Valley’s favourite educational institution. Fogg’s fame rose in 2007 when he began offering classes on how to use his persuasive techniques to build apps for Facebook. His students had amassed 16 million users by the end of the 10-week course, and made $1 million in advertising income in the process.

In 2003, he published Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. He did this before the invention of the smartphone, and in this book he outlined his vision of a connected tomorrow: “Someday in the future, a first year student named Pamela sits in a college library and removes an electronic device from her purse. It’s just smaller than a deck of cards, easily carried around, and is used as Pamela’s mobile phone, information portal, entertainment platform, and personal organiser. She takes this device almost everywhere and feels lost without it.” His ideas were further defined in the ‘Fogg Behaviour Model’, which he named himself. According to this model, when three factors collide in a moment: motivation (we must want the thing); trigger (something must happen to trigger a desire to get more of it), and ability (it must be easy), then a person is compelled to act. Take, for example, LinkedIn. In it’s young years, it had a hub-and-spoke symbol that graphically represented the size of a user’s professional network. The bigger the icon, the greater the status. People desire status (there’s your motivation), the symbol makes them want more (your trigger), and LinkedIn conveniently offered a simply solution, in the use of the site to generate more connections (that’s ability).

If a programmer wants to create a certain action in a user, they should reward them with a sign of reinforcement once they have completed the required ‘target behaviour’. The catch, though, is that positive reinforcement is inconsistent. You never know what you’ll receive all of the time. Dogg likened it to gambling on slot machines “Winning a payoff of quarters streaming into the metal tray is a reinforcer, but it is random. This type of unpredictable reward schedule makes the target behaviour – in this case, gambling – very compelling, even addictive.”

We are judged every time we upload a photo, video, or comment. We eagerly await replies, likes, or uploads, and just like a gambler never knows how the slot machine will pay out, we’re never too sure what we’ll get in return for our contribution. Will we go up? Will we go down? The grand reward is different every time. This variation creates compulsion. We just want to keep pulling the lever…

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This article on the effects of social media is an excerpt from my second book Keshav, available anywhere in the world from here.