[...]
How do the Internet and
social media apps threaten democracy?
Democracy assumes a set of capacities: the capacity for deliberation,
understanding different ideas, reasoned discourse. This grounds
government authority, the will of the people. So one way to talk about
the effects of these technologies is that they are a kind of a
denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the
operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking. I
think this wears down certain capacities, like willpower, by having us
make more decisions. A study showed that repeated distractions lower
people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points. It was over twice the IQ drop
that you get from long-term marijuana usage. There are certainly
epistemic issues as well. Fake news is part of this, but it’s more
about people having a totally different sense of reality, even within
the same society or on the same street. It really makes it hard to
achieve that common sense of what’s at stake that is necessary for an
effective democracy.
How have these
technologies transformed news media?
When
information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce...tech steers
the thoughts of 2 billion people with more influence than the world’s
religions or governments. Would you agree?
What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic
shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the
systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even
our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity.
The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t
necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything
obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an
information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring
you information—your problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We
have too much.
How does that change the
role of the newspaper?
The role of the newspaper now is to filter, and help you pay attention
to, the things that matter. But if the business model is like
advertising, and a good article is an article that gets the most
clicks, you get things like click bait because those are the metrics
that are aligned with the business model. When information becomes
abundant, attention becomes scarce. Advertising has dragged everybody
down, even the wealthiest organizations with noble missions, to
competing on the terms of click bait. Every week there are these
outrage cascades online. Outrage is a rewarding thing to us, because it
fulfills a lot of these psychological needs we have. It could be used
to help us move forward, but often, they’re used to keep us clicking
and scrolling and typing. One of the first books about web usability
was actually called Don’t Make Me Think. It’s this idea of appealing to
our impulsive selves, the automatic part of us, and not the
considerate, rational part.
Tristan Harris, with whom you co-founded Time Well Spent, said tech
steers the thoughts of 2 billion people with more influence than the
world’s religions or governments. Would you agree?
I think I would agree with that. I don’t know any comparable
governmental or religious mechanism that’s anything comparable to the
smart phone and social media, in the sense that people give so much
attention to it, and it has such a frequency and duration of operation.
I think it certainly intervenes at a lower level, closer to people’s
attention than governmental or religious systems. I think it’s closer
to being like a chemical, or a drug of some sort, than it is to being
like a societal system. Snapchat has this thing called Snapstreak, for
example, where it says, “Here’s how many days in a row you’ve taken a
snapshot photo with someone.” You can brag to your friends how long
you’ve gone. There’s a ton of these kinds of methods and non-rational
biases—social comparison is a huge one. There’s a guy who wrote a book
called Hooked, Nir Eyal, where he teaches designers how to pull a user
into a system.
[FULL]
It’s not
that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet
Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab (motto: “Every Bit as Good”), had a
“God, what I have I done?” moment during his time at Google. But it did
occur to him that something had gone awry.
Williams joined Google’s Seattle office when it opened in 2006 and went
on to win the company’s highest honor, the Founder’s Award, for his
work developing advertising products and tools. Then, in 2012, he
realized that these tools were actually making things harder for him.
Modern technology platforms, he explained to me, were “reimposing these
pre-Internet notions of advertising, where it’s all about getting as
much of people’s time and attention as you can.”
By 2011, he had followed his literary and politico-philosophical bent
(he is a fan of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World) to Oxford, while still working at Google’s London office. In
2014, he co-founded Time Well Spent, a “movement to stop technology
platforms from hijacking our minds,” according to its website.
Partnering with Moment, an app that tracks how much time you spend in
other apps, Time Well Spent asked 200,000 people to rate the apps they
used the most—after seeing the screen time it demanded of them. They
found that, on average, the more time people spent in an app, the less
happy they were with it. “Distraction wasn’t just this minor annoyance.
There was something deeper going on,” he told me. “That’s why I came
over here to start my Ph.D. on that stuff.”
Williams has most recently been in the media spot light for his essay,
“Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Persuasion in the Attention
Economy,” which won the $100,000 Nine Dots Prize and scored him a book
deal with Cambridge University Press.
|