This week I found myself connecting to Trista’s post.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540trista/2022/07/21/task-10-attention-economy/

We both noticed the way in which we had to read every word and every line on each page in order to complete the game. She highlights Bringnull (2011) statement that designers, based on psychological insights, can easily use dark patterns to deceptively manipulate users in business owners’ interests. I found this also connected with Harris’s (2017) TED talk that identified how peoples’ thoughts are being steered in such a way that we end up thinking about things we hadn’t planned on effectively losing agency over controlling our lives the way we want to. As a human race we need to begin acknowledging this fact and intentionally focusing our attention on things that drive our value systems and supports our goals. I appreciated how Trista highlighted the subtleties of how our attention is being focused elsewhere in small enough ways that we allow it or don’t deal with it, such as an inbox full of junk mail that we don’t unsubscribe to. She points out that it is easy to attend to the game but much more difficult to attend to these same issues in our everyday life. I am in absolute agreement with this. We often give our attention to things that are easy instead of saving it for what we truly care about!

Reference

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en