About — Compelling Attention Devices
What is time well spent?
In an average day, walking, driving, whatever we may be doing, there are so many things demanding our attention, so much information for our brains to sort and process. How do we know what to pay attention to and what not to? Well, in this age of automation and technology, often times we do not choose what we pay attention to, so much as we pay attention to what is presented to us. As said in an article by Tim Wu,
“…we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
Technology companies employ compelling attention-grabbing systems that are designed and proven to be addicting to users. Think about the push notifications we receive from apps like The New York Times, CNN, or The Weather Channel. Think also about the little red number that pops up by your facebook, instagram, calls, and text applications on your smart phone. That little number makes you want to click on it. Doesn’t it? And when there’s no number there, you wish there was. It’s an intuitive reward system of which technology companies have taken great advantage.
This isn’t new, but what is new is the Time Well Spent movement. What if technology could make our lives easier and more efficient, instead of taking up time and energy compelling us to compulsively check our screens for notifications. What if instead of programming us into scheduled time sinks, our technology encouraged and pushed us to be better people?
Steve Downs is the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, America’s biggest health focused philanthropy. He talks in his article about how health has been engineered out of American life, and looks to start “building health into the OS.”
“We have rapidly and dramatically re-engineered our environments. When we see one of nature’s great creatures — a lion, a cheetah, a zebra — in a zoo’s cage we often recoil, thinking how that creature belongs out on the savannah, where it can roam free.” As slaves to notifications on our tech, Downs argues, “That creature is us.”
Essentially, Downs proposes that instead of making it a chore to exercise, eat healthy, and be healthy, technology and our society would intuitively prompt us to do these things naturally as people go about their day, just as it prompts us to check notifications now. Rather than enticing us to tune in to the digital world, our tech might encourage us to tune it out instead, and invest more in the physical world and bodies we inhabit.
Consider this: If I shout “FIRE!” in a movie theatre, I get arrested. If I do so online, nobody cares. What’s the difference?
When that phrase is shouted in a theatre, one demands the attention of everyone around them, and by nature are causing a panic to occur. (I’m not going to go into the problem of ‘fake news’ on these attention seeking platforms, because it’s just the byproduct of the system that demands attention.)
When something is ‘shouted’ online, say in a chat room, an algorithm decides if you are in the hypothetical movie theatre, social circle, or vicinity of the message, and if you are, it will try to get your attention, whether it’s really important or not. Chelsea Howe, an indie game designer who worked on Farmville to boost player retention, calls this ‘dark design.’ In her GDC 2017 talk “The Design of Time”, she describes how mechanisms kind of like the aforementioned chat room notification algorithm are bad for the human-tech relationship. Dark design breeds the opposite of trust and faith in the system or app. Instead of allowing users autonomy over their actions of when or if to check notifications, it reduces human interaction with the system or app to primal instincts, sourced from the reptilian brain.
In Howe’s talk she discusses the free-to-play mobile game Clash Royale. Games employ and have been employing the same compelling attention devices as big tech companies. According to game designers and business partners, it is essential to a product’s survival in the free to play games market. I’ve already talked about selling power and microtransactions, but when combined with dark design, it provides a recipe for not just a normal money paying skinner box, but something much more insidious in the mind.
To wrap this up and give a more complete picture, here is a link to a CGP Grey video, about how bots learn from the data mined from our software usage.
If our civilization is an operating system, we have incentivized exploitation of people, customers, as a means for big companies to make profit. Disregarding how people feel about the way we operate our business, we as game makers and designers have become subjected to the results of unsustainable behavior. It is up to us to update, and rebuild our civilization’s operating system. Building health and time well spent into the pursuit of happiness may be a good starting point for the future.
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