How can we be humble and authentic in a fast-paced online world of deception? What is time well spent?
In this blog entry, I look at the reactions of my peers to playing the game User Inyerface. It is common people will respond emotionally when playing games. There was a variety of reactions, ranging from anxiety provoking in Tyler, to determination through speed in Katelyn. However, in Brian’s post, he deviates from the norm among our peers and focuses on how much people fail to read the universal symbols and uses specific examples to illustrate how the attention economy is impacting our social, emotional, and psychological health. He looks at the practices of autofilling information and how it facilitates fast tracked action, which can contribute more generally to having less patience and compassion. From a business perspective, Brian reasons that “Companies are motivated to do this [enable cookies to autofill forms], because every little thing that increases frustration or causes us to lose interest is one less potential sale or data input for advertising.” This leads to the speculation of the attention economy’s effect on our humanity…
Does participation lead to a lack of patience and understanding? How does being wired by the practices of social media and psychological manipulation in online games change our social interactions, emotional responses, and disconnect us from our physical and spiritual selves? How can we remain connected with ourselves, our own passions and desires, without interference by AI?
As mentioned by Tristan Harris in his Ted Talk, social media algorithms are taking away our agency by changing the ways we want to converse and changing democracy. Brian’s thoughts from his blog are applicable not only to the game, but to the ways in which social media sites can influence choice by design. “By utilizing our common design language, you can both trick people into clicking things they didn’t intend to, and you can convince them that one option is preferable to others by designing it in a way that users associate with the right choice.”
Finally, Kristin mentions that “every single step is created to slow you down,” which makes me question our collective approach as teachers within our fast-paced evolving world. Carla included the youtube video “Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?” where they presented the information, “study’s show that the average attention span of adults today is one second slower…than a goldfish.” Along every single step of progress, we need to think critically as teachers to inform ourselves and question the messages we are promoting.