Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
A while ago, I was in a bar.
There, was a woman at another table with her five-year-old son.
She was completely captured by her cell phone.
Meanwhile, the kid stared at her.
Maybe another kid would have messed up to try to get her attention.
But not this kid.
He waited for a while, he finally stood up,
went behind his mother and began to stroke her hair.
He tried to summon her with caresses for several minutes.
And she never realized what was happening.
A question haunted me:
How many times I might have been
in the same situation without even realizing it?
What is happening to us?
Why do we live obsessed with our screens?
Today we unlock our cell phones 150 times a day.
This is once every 6 minutes during the time we are awake.
I decided to do some research on this and came to a conclusion that struck me.
What is happening to us with technology is not an accident.
Stanford University is located at the heart of Silicon Valley,
the cradle of the world's biggest technology companies.
The Persuasive Technology Lab is based there,
where brilliant researchers work --
in their own words --
to see how to use the websites
and mobile apps we use
to manipulate what we think and what we do.
Trying to persuade others is as old as the world.
But digital devices and the huge volume of personal information
accumulated from our online activity
are creating a new way to manipulate our thoughts and actions
taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the mind
detected by behavioral economics,
psychology and neuroscience.
Examples abound.
On the social scale, attempts to manipulate elections,
the proliferation of fake news,
the widening of all social gaps.
In the personal orbit, parents who don't see their children,
and conversely,
meetings where everyone
is more concerned about what happens on their screen
than with what happens around them.
A growing difficulty to focus.
This phenomenon began with the initial expectation
that everything on the Internet had to be for free.
A group of companies had to find a way
to earn money without charging users.
First thing they did was to place ads
and start charging advertisers.
Then they started collecting this heap of personal data
to ultra-segment the message they deliver to each of us.
Finally, to increase their profits,
each company needed us to spend more and more time on their platform.
And that was how the attention hack was born.
When the product that companies sell is your attention,
it's a dog-eat-dog race.
Facebook competes against other social media like Twitter,
but also with very different products
like YouTube, Netflix or Fortnite.
Every second you're not there hypnotized
it's time they cannot sell to their advertisers.
That's why they use visual and sound notifications
and all kinds of tricks to distract you from anything you are doing,
even when you are using other platforms.
Not long ago, the former president of Facebook
made public his regrets.
In a presentation he said that he and Mark Zuckerberg
were absolutely aware of being developing a platform
which would exploit vulnerabilities in our minds
to maximize the addictive effect.
But he was not the only one to admit the use of these abusive mechanisms.
Recently, the founder of Netflix
declared that their greatest enemy
is sleep.
His goal is that we sleep less so we spend more time watching series.
Selling products that are not good for us is also not new.
But at least the executives of companies like big tobacco
were on the defensive.
The founder of Netflix overtly tells us
that his company is willing to induce habits
which are totally detrimental to our health
in order to make more money.
To achieve these goals they feed on our naivety.
When we are going to buy a product,
say a pair of shoes, we have some distrust.
We wonder things like, "are they comfortable?"
"Are they good quality shoes?"
"Is this a reasonable price to pay?"
But when the product is free, we lower our guard.
If the product is free we should be much more wary.
Why a large multinational company
would want to incur the huge costs of developing a social network,
a video platform, an email system,
for us to use for free?
Nothing is free in the business world.
If we are not paying with money, what else are we paying with?
An especially sensitive ground for manipulation is self-esteem.
The increasing use of photos and videos as the main language in the networks,
gives an absurd, overblown importance
to aesthetics and physique
over all other dimensions of our being
to the eyes of others and, therefore, to ourselves.
And networks take advantage of that.
Social media takes advantage of the fascination that causes in us
to spy on the lives of others
and make an impact on others with our own image
to keep us endlessly mesmerized.
Moreover, since each of us
shares very little spontaneous content
about the highlights of our day,
conveniently edited to look much better than it was,
when we later ride a bus, cramped and bored
surfing on a social network,
it's inevitable to have the wrong feeling
that we are the only ones who have an ordinary life
more full of obligations and mishaps than laughter and sunsets.
It's inevitable that the comparison against these false ideals
leaves us disappointed with our own lives.
The decision of who we follow and what we show
is key to breaking the effects of this distorted mirror.
While it was always true
that there were some popular people and some others more withdrawn,
somehow this is implied.
Today it's measurable and visible to everyone.
The likes and the number of followers
is the currency in which social acceptance is traded today.
And each action is subject to public quantification,
for the amount of likes it gets.
As a result, we begin to live life
to show it, not to enjoy it.
That is the narcissistic swamp in which social media put us
and which, curiously, we don't want to leave.
The desire to find someone to love and be loved
leaves us in a particularly vulnerable position.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Consumer Defense
sued the world's largest dating company.
Charges are for taking advantage of the despair
of those who are not being able to find a partner,
allowing them to be contacted from false profiles,
then inviting them to pay to get in touch with these non-existent people,
who will never reply their messages back.
Is that really anything goes to retain us as users
and take our money?
Another particularly attractive group
which is an easy target is our teenagers.
Adolescence is the time when manipulations of our self-esteem
find the most fertile ground.
But the problem starts long before that.
Babies have also been discovered as a new consumer target.
YouTube is full of videos
specifically designed to hook them.
Although the recommendation of the World Health Organization
says that babies under two shouldn't spend a second in front of screens,
the reality is quite different.
The average time for two-year-olds today
is 2.5 hours a day.
And a third of babies uses screens from before walking.
At this crucial stage of development of the nervous system and the psyche,
the electronic pacifier is becoming a tempting escape
for parents and it's replacing physical contact,
the use of speech and upbringing games.
Many parents even take pride in their kids' ability
to handle these devices.
They see what their children learn with these videos:
the animals, the colors,
but they don't see the lessons and experiences lost.
Several scientific studies are already beginning to show
the negative consequences of this change
in areas such as language acquisition,
attention span and socio-emotional development.
The biggest risk for our children
is not the early use of screens,
but adults exceedingly slipping away.
(Applause)
In the face of this, some people say:
"After all, it's always the same.
In the 40's the villain was the radio, in the 60's, television,
in the 80's, video games, and now is this."
For Socrates, the villain was writing.
There is always something the elders demonize simply because it's new.
But this time is different.
Because, while we keep calling
this ultra-light supercomputer that each of us carries a "cell phone",
this device is everything.
It's indeed a cell phone, but it's also a camera,
a TV, a GPS, a game console, a camcorder,
an Internet browser, a flashlight, an alarm clock,
a calculator, a stereo...
and many more things.
Not only it is everything.
It's with us everywhere and at all times
offering the promise of an unlimited flow of content
capable of filling the void at every moment of our life.
Yet, in this era of hyper communication,
studies show that the number of people who feel lonely
was never as high as it is today.
There is no worse loneliness than loneliness surrounded by people.
And all this is going to get worse.
So far only a handful of companies put these mechanisms into practice.
But new ventures are developing software
to bring these manipulative methods to all digital products.
The use of manipulation and the hacking of our attention
have just began.
What do we do?
Do we throw away our cell phones and delete our social media profiles?
No, it's not necessary to go that far.
The advantages of connected life
are too great to give up.
But we are in an unequal battle between very sophisticated companies
and users that act with naivety.
We signed a contract written by the other party
without even being able to read or know
what the hell we are signing.
To even things out,
we need to understand how these mechanisms work
in order to defend ourselves from manipulation.
If we asked ourselves how each of these companies makes money,
it'd be easier to imagine what kind of behavior
they want to induce in us
and what kind of information they may be looking for.
For example, the next time you use a dating app,
keep in mind that the business of these companies
is that you search, not find.
Devices and networks keep us absorbed,
distracted, impatient and focused on passive consumption.
But it doesn't have to be like that.
It's time to leave naivety behind and fight back.
We can reclaim the control of our lives
to take advantage of the benefits of technology
without being eaten up by it.
To take advantage of the supercomputer we carry with us
to create,
not just to consume.
To use it to live shared experiences
instead of being locked upon our own screen.
In short, the challenge is to put platforms and devices
at the service of the life we want to live,
not at the life that others need us to live.
(Applause)