English essay - Does your Smartphone have a lot more power over you then you are aware off?

Does your Smartphone have a lot more power over you then you are aware off?
Is the digital world controlling us? 

        More times than none we don't question when we get overly distracted or sucked in by our Smartphone's, we brush it off as accidental or just our hobby. But that is not the case at all, Smartphone's and apps hijack our innate psychological biases and vulnerabilities, they tap into our unconscious minds so they can influence what we do without us even realizing it. App designers play our psychological vulnerabilities in the race to grab our attention. The key to this addiction can be explained in a slot machine format, the average person checks their phone 150 times a day, are they all conscious choices? The main reason behind it is the major psychological ingredient in slot machines 'intermittent variable rewards' which is key to maximizing addictiveness, tech designers use the link of a user's action -pulling a lever- to a variable reward. In terms pulling a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is more variable. According to New York University professor Natasha Dow Schüll, author of "Addiction by Design." this effect works since people get drastically involved with slot machines three to four times faster.

        What makes this addiction more tragic, is that people have slot machines in their pockets. The moment we are online, we're playing a slot machine seeing notifications we have received, scrolling down our Instagram feed, to see what photo comes next, or pull to refresh our email, to see what email we got. Another way technology hijacks our minds is by inducing the 1% chance we could be missing something important. They exploit our need for social approval, when we see a notification of being tagged by friends or a friend request on a social account, this increases our social approval and sense of belonging, all in the hands of tech companies. Although we all have an opportunity to demand a different future from the tech industry.

        Instead of maximizing 'time spent' - in areas of advertising-, what if apps companies offer an alternative, free/paid apps that are ranked maximized 'time well spent'. We need tech companies to design phones to protect our minds from getting manipulated and empower people to make conscious choices. We need a digital "bill of rights" which outline design standards for apps/websites; for example, design standards, forcing apps to give people a direct way to navigate to what they want, separately from what the apps want, minimising the risk of getting sucked into the newsfeed -Facebook-. Companies need to have the responsibility to reduce slot machine effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones. For example, they could empower people to set predictable times during the day or week for when they want to check "slot machine" apps, and correspondingly adjust when new messages are delivered. Tech companies need to help us proactively tune our relationships with friends and businesses in terms of what we define as "time well spent" for our lives, instead of in terms of what we might miss. We need an independent organization that represented the public's interest and help define those standards and monitore when technology companies abused these biases. We need our smartphones to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. Let's protect our minds with the same rigour as privacy and other digital rights.

        In a 2010 TED Talk lecture, “We Are All Cyborgs Now,” talks about how smartphones have become more than just a device in our pockets but something closer to a digital extension of ourselves. “This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we’ve connected in this way,” she says in a transcript from the speech. With that, she doesn't point that machines are taking over, but rather they’re helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other. According to the study in 2012, security company Lookout’s Mobile Mindset Study reflected the ways smartphone users’ obsessive need to remain connected is growing too rapidly; 60% of users don’t go more than an hour without checking their phone. More than half said they check their phones while in bed, before going to sleep, upon waking and even during the night. For those aged 18 to 34, that number jumps to 74%. this has created a huge friction between people and their relationships.

        According to a report released in June by researcher ComScore, the majority of Internet traffic 60% now comes from mobile devices rather than desktops, which long served as the dominant online portal. And with search engines and digitally managed contact lists just a touch away, analysts say smartphones are affecting how the brain processes information. In a sense, the study authors conclude, Internet-connected devices such as smartphones have become a kind of “external memory source.”  “These results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology,” the authors write. “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.” Elon University and the Pew Research Center, technology experts really debates the plus points and the pitfalls of the hyper-connectivity and instantaneous access to information afforded by smartphones. If adoption rates and the always-on lifestyle continue unabated through 2020, scientists suggest future generations will have different priorities about what they choose to remember. The human brain is wired to adapt to what the environment around it requires for survival. “Today and in the future, it will not be as important to internalize information but to elastically be able to take multiple sources of information in, synthesize them and make rapid decisions.” writes Amber Case, a cyber-anthropologist and CEO of mobile platform Geoloqi.

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