A child who loves books, art, craft – and Netflix.
My friend’s almost five-year-old, the brightest, most articulate child I have ever known, doesn’t know what a TV is. Her mother’s hand-me-down laptop is her TV – the one she uses for her online school as well as entertainment. My friend, the most evolved, 2021-compliant parent I know, makes sure that she vetts and curates everything the child watches on her “TV”, to be 100% sure that no ambiguous or inappropriate content slips through between episodes of Peppa Pig and Octonauts.
The child’s screen time is monitored and my friend ensures the child knows this – she’s not allowed “TV’ outside of her allotted hours; never on demand, never because of a tantrum, never unsupervised. She suspends TV privileges when the child misbehaves and makes sure she earns it back with good behaviour. The child is a voracious reader, gets plenty of physical activity, spends quality time with the adults in her life making art and craft, is sociable, and goes to a wonderful school that imparts holistic education.
And yet. The thing she craves above all other activities is “TV” – the one hour every evening when she can watch her favourite shows, lost to the world and eyes glued to the screen. On the days she loses TV privileges, she’s irritable and distraught, pleading with her mother to let her watch her favourite shows. Though she loves books and art and puzzles, most of her references are from the shows she watches on Netflix and YouTube. A child who has spent one third of her life in the pandemic, even online classes and daily video calls with extended family haven’t dimmed her enthusiasm for more screen time.
What is persuasive technology and why should it worry us?
This allure of screens is the intended effect of ‘persuasive technology’, the favourite child of the attention economy. Persuasive technology is defined as technology that is designed to change behaviours through “persuasion” – subtle psychological cues that keep us coming back for more. Computers, phones, social media, OTT platforms, instant messengers, video games, and everyday apps that we use for shopping, dating, food delivery, infotainment – these are all examples of technology designed to ‘persuade’ us to keep us constantly engaged. The power of persuasive technology is such that neither toddlers under the age of five nor seniors over the age of 65 are exempt from its effects.
The Center for Humane Tech defines persuasive technology as “notifications, social cues, personalized feeds, and more – to keep you coming back and monitor your behavior to analyze you as well as they can.” A youth toolkit on the site sums it up further: “Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are built on persuasive technology, technology created specifically to change its users’ opinions, attitudes, or behaviors to meet its goals.”
By now, we know that screen addiction is rampant, something every one of us battles on a daily basis. Though there might be differences in our individual habits, we are all “guilty” of it, often berating ourselves for not being able to put our phones and laptops away, jumping up to check every time a notification arrives. Healthy mobile use remains a lofty, yet unachievable goal for most of us. Often, we put this down to lack of discipline or self-regulation, blaming ourselves for the amount of time we spend on our screens, or allowing our children to do the same.
What we don’t realise is that discipline and self-restraint are no match for some of the sharpest minds that help conceptualise, design, and engineer these technologies. In short, we are behaving exactly as the companies behind these technologies intended. We are not addicted because we are weak-willed; we are addicted by design.
Screens helped us survive the pandemic – but they also made us sad and lonely.
While there is little doubt that technology addiction is both real and growing at an alarming rate, is shunning our screens the only answer? Are the hours we spend bathed in the glow of our screens as terrible for our physical and mental well-being as technology-sceptics make it out to be? Are the companies that keep us glued to our screens evil corporations that exist to profile us, target us, profit off our time and attention, and harvest our data so that they can sell it to advertisers?
The answer is complicated – and needs nuanced consideration.
Digital technology giants like Meta (Formerly, Facebok Inc.) and Google are well aware of the impact their products have on individuals and communities. They know that persuasive technology can be harmful, even dangerous, if left unregulated. And yet, they choose not to fix the root of the problem. In this scenario, how do we change our dysfunctional relationship with technology, while holding on to the good, important, relevant bits? Is self-regulation the only answer or do we need more comprehensive, long-term solutions? Read on, in Part 2 of this blog.