How the Internet Dumbs Down Smart
Phone and Social Media Users
By Edwin Benson
Perhaps the truest thing ever
said about the Internet is the axiom, “If you aren’t paying for the product,
you are the product.” Never has so broad a set of service and entertainment
options been laid before humanity at little or no charge.
However,
“no charge” does not mean at “no cost.” So many options can inhibit the ability
of the human brain to work effectively.
Douglas Rushkoff makes this point in his book Team Human.
“We now know, beyond any doubt, that we are dumber when we are using
smartphones and social media. We understand and retain less information,
comprehend with less depth, and make decisions more impulsively than we do
otherwise. This untethered mental state, in turn, makes us less capable of
distinguishing the real from the fake, the compassionate from the cruel, and
even the human from the nonhuman.“
Dr.
Rushkoff studies human interaction with the Internet. He is Professor of Media
Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory
for Digital Humanism.
The Selling Machine
The
dumbing down of consumers through science and technology has a long history.
Authors freely admit the need for companies to change people’s mentalities and
habits.
During the fifties, a pseudo-science called “behavioral
research” was widely promoted. Its most successful proponent was Ernest Dichter. He applied Freudian psychoanalytical techniques
to the American marketplace. The National Broadcasting
Company translated his insights into the language of commerce
with its 1953 film, Strangers into Customers.
“Our report details how advertising, through television, transforms strangers
to your product into acquaintances, and acquaintances into friends, and friends
into customers. You could almost say, as a result, that television puts into
every living room a selling machine.”
Dr. Dichter’s work was bemoaned
in the 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, “The use of
mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a
multimillion-dollar industry. Professional persuaders have seized upon it in
their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares.”
The
advertising of the fifties looks very crude by today’s standards. Most people
would claim that they would never be taken in by the amateurish animation,
absurd jingles, and sonorous narration of those early commercials. However,
don’t judge the fifties generation too harshly. Back then, critics condemn
television for reducing the average attention span to a half-hour. Today,
thirty minutes of focus is beyond the abilities of far too many people.
Too Much Information, Too
Little Understanding
Indeed,
Facebook is tailor-made to discourage concentration. It consists of a hodge-podge
of old friends, political candidates, products for sale, shared interests,
celebrity sightings, and quizzes that serve no purpose. A person views each
message for a second or two and then scrolls to a new unrelated entry. Most
posts are quickly forgotten. Facebook is so entrancing that many who glance at
it at eight p.m. are still scrolling at midnight when their burning eyes can
take no more.
Unfocused as Facebook is,
Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat are much faster paced and more popular among
the latest generations. Z-geners will frequently refer to Facebook as social
media for “old people.”
In
some homes, family members watch television in their living room, use the
laptop to engage in social media, and play a video game on their smartphone –
simultaneously. Such activity may look like multi-tasking, but it reflects an
inability to focus on any one set of stimuli.
Who Controls the Information?
All
the while, the purveyors of the movies, social media and video games are
watching. Every click of the mouse is recorded and becomes part of an
algorithm. The users are being weighed and measured so that the next ad they
see will be more effective. Is the user young or old, athletic or sedentary,
likely to dine out or eat in, willing to read a whole article or just the first
paragraph?
This
information is used to make predictions. Such data is valuable to retailers,
industries and politicians. While the consumer is unfocused, the data buyers
are extremely focused on getting the right subset of the groups to maximize
their desired results. The algorithm predicts outcomes, and data mining
companies are willing to sell information to those who will pay the right
price.
The Implications of the “Pareto
Principle”
At
the heart of much of this analysis is something called the “Pareto Principle,” also known as the 80/20 Rule. It is named
after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist from the turn of the twentieth
century. He noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth. He later
observed a similar ratio relationship with other aspects of economic life. The
Balance Careers Website cites other examples:
·
80% of a
company’s revenues are generated by 20% of its customers.
·
80% of
complaints come from 20% of customers.
·
20% of investors
provide 80% of funding.
·
20% of employees
use 80% of all sick days.
To
oversimplify, data giants found that algorithms can accurately predict about
eighty percent of human interactions. They are constantly tweaking the system
since increasing the eighty percent to eighty-two can be immensely profitable.
The Organic and
Virtual Worlds
Douglas
Rushkoff believes that the digital world’s artificiality confuses the mind
because the brain normally relies on “organic” information obtained from
genuine interactions with the real world. The abusive use of the
Internet, he speculates, makes people more machinelike and predictable. To the
managers of the Internet, this is very good news.
As Dr. Rushkoff posits, “Team
Human’s real enemies, if we can call them that, are not just the people who are
trying to program us into submission but the algorithms they’ve unleashed to
help them do it.”
Indeed,
the Internet is free, but users must beware lest they become the product.
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