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Course: Social media literacy?>?Unit 3
Lesson 2: What is persuasive technology?What is persuasive technology?
The darker purpose of notifications
What is persuasive technology?
¡°If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it¡¯s demanding things from you. It¡¯s seducing you. It¡¯s manipulating you. It wants things from you. And we¡¯ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment. That¡¯s what¡¯s changed. Social media isn¡¯t a tool that¡¯s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.¡±
¨CTristan Harris, President and Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology in The Social Dilemma
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.
Technology companies consider factors like motivation, ability, and triggers when they are designing their apps, with the goal of persuading you to spend more time clicking and scrolling. A motivation can be our desire for social connection. A user must have the ability to easily do what the app wants you to. Triggers are the prompting features, like notifications, that keep you coming back.
Take a look at the home screen on your phone.
Your home screen is probably filled with apps marked by red dots with numbers in them. We all know that these red dots are notifications. What we may not have considered is that everything on that screen was put there for a reason. A designer intentionally made the decision to put those dots there, put a number in it, and make it red instead of, say, green, because we instinctively respond with urgency to red. Each app¡¯s red dot is a trigger to open that app.
We feel like we need to address notifications as they stack up. They stress us out and eventually we click back into our apps, where persuasive design pulls us where it wants us to go.
Push notifications ¨C the notifications we receive from our apps when they¡¯re not open ¨C operate with similar principles.
When our push notifications tell us that someone has just tagged us in a photo, we are immediately motivated to see what that photo is and how we look in it. If someone commented on a post we made, it is only natural for us to want to read that comment. If someone we¡¯re interested in begins a livestream, we¡¯re going to want to hop in. Because we are social animals motivated to care what others think of us, these notifications are almost impossible to ignore. A simple tap of that notification conveniently brings you right into the app.
Behind these features are designers, psychologists, and other behavioral science experts working to ensure that their product captures your attention. Thousands of decisions go into when to show you these notifications, which friends you¡¯ll be most responsive to, and what videos to automatically play to get you watching. 365体育网投 ping, every flick of the thumb is designed to keep you engaged with the app and keep you coming back.
Want to join the conversation?
Easy solution: Turn off notifications(12 votes)
- Easier solution: get rid of the social media totally and the phone(2 votes)
- Turning off notifications is good way to avoid traps of social media apps.(2 votes)
- Turn on sleep mode and then you can rest without people bothering you.(2 votes)
- turn on do not disturb(1 vote)
You know it will be easy to just not look at notifications that is why i clear them as soon as i get them(1 vote)
just turn off notifs.(1 vote)- One thing that you can do is turn notifincaiton or if that doesn't work you can go to setting and it shoud say app and you can click any mesagge that use too text and i say turn off notifcaiton(1 vote)