I choose to link to Sophy’s Attention Economy task
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540thc/2022/07/23/task-10-attention-economy/
Yes, such a frustrating task! Everything about the task had me irritatingly repeating the same mistakes over and over. I was on alert as I knew the design of the game was to “trick” me into doing things incorrectly. But as you pointed out, we are often on auto pilot when working our way through webpages. Brignull (2011) says that many websites use this auto pilot for their own gain. In fact this game employed many of the dark patterns Brignull (2011) talks about: leaving the defaults selected, continuous scrolling, and confusing ways to word requests.
Do you think most people have gone complacent and are happy to have choices made for them? I have a new habit of always turning off cookies when visiting a new site. I don’t want to have the feeling of being tracked when I visit other pages just because that one time I was looking at an entry way bench and then for weeks those ads were all I saw. But there must be benefits. We do have habits on the internet and if we can have our experiences customized is there a problem with that?
History pages for example are a resource I fall back on when in study mode. I look for information in past pages and if I can remember what day I found the information then it’s helpful to have that recorded. I feel there is a distinct difference between webpages and social media. Social Media has a dark side that goes beyond selling.
Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017) discuss the variety of ways that we are being lured into staying on a site for as long as possible. I am reminded of the design of casinos when I think of social media apps. Casinos want to immerse you into forgetting you have outside responsibilities. No windows to see the outside world, phones are discouraged, drinks at the ready, and easy access to money, all make staying and playing an easy choice. Social Media is no different and it plays into the voyageristic tendencies many people have, and now they just auto play so that you never have to make a choice for your self.
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
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en
tzu hsu chu
August 1, 2022 — 2:54 pm
hello Marie!
In this post there were many thoughtful questions!
I wanted to respond to your post directly here so you will be able to see it.
I find it interesting how you connect the “lack of attention” when it comes to being on autopilot to the other things we let slip by our awareness, like tracking cookies performing their task in the background. Similar to you, I also try and disable the tracking cookies on new sites, as I am very much aware of the possibility that my one time visit to that website will gain more information than necessary from me. The ads and suggestions I find in other places of the internet creates a lot of inconvenience and annoyance for me later on, such that I just get to the root of it and stop it while I can.
I don’t necessarily think people are complacent, perhaps it is about their threshold for “annoyance” in the way I pointed out above, some people are unbothered by that. It is also possible that some people are just not aware of the potential dangers of such software either.
I think that definitely there are cases where I do have to fall back on certain “record keeping functions”, in your case, the history pages; in my case, my password manager.
Your point of social media having a dark side that feels different from dark patterns is also something I really resonate with. Certain features such as autoplay creates a context where it is easy to doomscroll in rabbit holes of content mindlessly. In some ways, it does feel very dystopian when you are “fed” content aimlessly, dependent on what the algorithm thinks you like based on how much time you spend looking at certain reels before moving on to the next one.
This is why it is important to “curate” your algorithm, such that it shows what you enjoy and cull the content that you don’t. This may seem a bit counterintuitive (and of course, there are dangers of creating an insulated echo-chamber bubble for yourself) but I think it feels different knowing that you have some agency in controlling what is being fed to you (or perhaps it is an illusion that you even have a choice and say in this at all!)
I think another way social media has really messed with our attention is setting the expectation for instant gratification and validation, which also shortens our attention span to concentrate or have patience for things that take longer time!
Attention is such a finicky thing and in the end, I think it is about being reflective and aware of our own online habits, and being able to balance that awareness!