Analesa’s Task 10 – Attention Economy
https://blogs.ubc.ca/54064c/2021/11/11/task-10-attention-economy/
I was immediately drawn to Analesa’s post on Attention Economy because it looked like we both struggled with completing the activity. The thought of emailing the professor to say I really didn’t understand the assignment also crossed my mind. I did not understand what needed to be done in order to complete the activity. Both Analesa and I quoted from the TED Talks that was a part of the module, which was Tristan Harris’s TED Talk about Persuasive technologies that teach people the covert way of getting people’s attention or orchestrating people’s lives, and Dr. Tufekci’s TED Talk about how we are building a dystopia to make people click on ads. In addition to the TED Talks, Analesa also quoted from a source that was lacking in my post, which was Brignull’s Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. This was a good reminder to me of what dark patterns were, and how they worked to trick users into doing an action.
Even though I was very frustrated with completing the activity, I really enjoyed the TED Talks because they sparked insight into something that I have chosen to ignore before, which is the amount of data social media companies are gathering about us, and the lack of transparency on how these data are being used. I have since then reached out to communicate with a couple of people that I am Facebook friends with but have lost touch with. Instead of using Facebook to browse through their page, I used Messenger to just send a message to see how they are doing. I think it is very meaningful to apply what we learn in our course content to our daily lives. Unfortunately, it is always harder than it sounds! Our habits are very difficult to break because, during the habit formation period, patterns form both in behaviour and in the brain. Investigator and Professor at MIT, Ann Graybiel believes that to free up space in our brain for important memory, our brain develops habits so these actions become automatic (Adi, 2019). This can make it extremely difficult to break a habit. So next time you think you’re about to begin a behaviour which could lead to the formation of a bad habit, think twice!
Jaffe, Adi. (2019). Why Is It So Hard to Change Bad Habits? Psychology Today.
