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Tech companies use “persuasive design” to get us hooked. Some psychologists say it’s unethical. Children are particularly susceptible to "hidden manipulation techniques," but lots of adults are also taken in by its use, especially in social media and advertising on the Internet. by companies like Facebook and Twitter. 

It is in front of our faces when we are getting notifications on our phone and even when that next episode or video on Netflix or YouTube loads itself as soon as we finish one.

Back in the 1970s, there were plenty of articles and theses written about the dangers of too much television affecting children. Kids have 10 times the amount of screen time now compared to just 2011. Of course, now we are talking about more screens than just the family TV set. They spend an average of 400 minutes using technology, according to Common Sense Media.

Media companies have been using behavioral science for decades to create products that we want to use more and more. Remember how the tobacco companies were sued for the ways they hooked people on cigarettes? Big tech uses persuasive technology which is a fairly new field of research based on studying how technology changes the way humans think and act.

Using persuasive design techniques, companies incorporate this research into games and apps. As soon as a child begins to move on to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft apps, they have been pre-conditioned for specific behaviors. 

Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has warned that algorithms pushing us to catastrophic results, though critics will say that Apple itself is not free from using persuasive design.

Social media companies are being targeted for deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain. Some design features, such as infinite scroll, are features that are seen as highly habit-forming. Along with features that may appear as a "plus", like notifications, they keep us on our devices and looking at advertising and clicking longer. They encourage the "fear of missing out" (FOMO).

The infinite scroll was a feature designed by Aza Raskin when he was working for Humanized - a computer user-interface consultancy. He now questions its use.

He is not alone. Leah Pearlman, co-inventor of Facebook's Like button, said she had become hooked on Facebook because she had begun basing her sense of self-worth on the number of "likes" she had. But Ms Pearlman said she had not intended the Like button to be addictive, and she also believes that social media use has many benefits for lots of people.

Defenders of persuasive tech say it can have positive effects. There are apps that remind/train people to take medicine on time or develop weight loss habits. But critics are concerned with persuasive design that is not intended to improve lifestyles but to keep people on their devices in order to sell.

A letter signed by 50 psychologists was sent to the American Psychological Association accusing psychologists working at tech companies of using “hidden manipulation techniques” and asks the APA to take an ethical stand on behalf of kids.

I don't think it would be considered "cancel culture," but year-to-year we see technologies get canceled. This past week, my wife asked me to take the DVDs I have on three shelves and "either put them somewhere else - or get rid of them."

Get rid of them? But these are a lot of my favorite films and TV shows. And surely, some must be "collectible" and worth something. "Then sell them," says my practical wife, who says the same about my vinyl record albums and books. My sons, now in their 30s, agree. Their videos, music and books are all digital and take up no shelf space. That's part of what I once termed as a "disconnected" culture and generation.

Remember DVDs? They might have been a gift you gave for a birthday, Hanukkah, Christmas or bought for your own pleasure. Do they still exist? Yes. Are people still buying them? Not really, but they did get a pandemic bump in sales this year.

"The top title for the weeks ended April 25 and May 2 [2020] was Bad Boys for Life, and for May 9 it was Bloodshot and earlier hit releases such as Disney’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Sony’s Jumanji: The Next Level  hung on so that this was the first time DVDs saw yearly gains two weeks in a row since April 2014, when Frozen was driving industry sales. It’s the first three-week gain since late-August 2012, when The Hunger Games and Battleship were the top titles."

I was buying discs for films that I would actually rewatch and that rarely appeared on TV (pre-streaming). Some of them were films I had previously bought on VHS (a practice my wife could not understand). I did watch them. Not a lot, but I did. And I loaned them to friends. "You've never seen The Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Citizen Kane... ?"

The last DVD player I bought had "smart" features that my dumb TV at that time didn't have so that I could watch Netflix. But streaming video services became the thing and when I dropped by the original Netflix DVD mail service for streaming the player got dusty with lack of use. My sons had given me some TV series I love on discs as gifts (Seinfeld, 30 Rock, Taxi) because if they were available on broadcast TV they had commercials and you had no control over which episode to watch. Plus most DVDs had additional features that were interesting and not available elsewhere.

Now, those box sets are also gathering dust as entire runs of series like Seinfeld are available streaming and you can pick whatever episode you want to watch.

I subscribed to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service early-on and it was pretty great. Of course, waiting for that next movie or episodes of a series was tough. Those red envelopes still exist but Netflix doesn't want you waiting for the mailperson. They want you to binge that whole season of Schitt's Creek today and just go from one video to the next.

There's a lot of streaming service competition. HBO, the grandpa of cable movie channels, has HBO Max and will be getting in 2021 Warner Brother films the same day that they hit theaters (assuming theaters are open again). Studios, like Disney, are launching streaming channels along with Hulu, Showtime, Amazon, and broadcast dinosaurs like CBS (with its Peacock).

DVDs and services like DVD.com are also a resource for people in areas with poor broadband access. The pandemic and online learning made it clearer than ever that access to fast Internet is NOT ubiquitous in America.

I was surprised to find that DVDs are still profitable. Netflix still has about two million DVD customers and made $37 million in profits in the 4th quarter of 2019, which breaks down to $17.34/user. Netflix’s streaming service sees a return of $13.09/US subscriber. (I'm sure those numbers changed in 2020 but I couldn't find an update.)

When I was involved with creating online learning at NJIT starting in 2000, we were sending out VHS tapes to students, moved to CDs, then to DVDs, and by the time I left more than a decade later, it was streaming.

There is another concern that as DVD catalogs and production disappears, so will some content disappear, perhaps forever. 

The phrase "cancel culture" is showing up in the news more frequently. Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is the term sometimes used when someone is shut out of a social or professional group. This could be either online (particularly on social media), in the real world, or both. Those who are subject to this ostracism are said to be "canceled."

I wrote earlier about moderating content and issues about freedom of speech. One conclusion in that article was that private companies (Twitter, Facebook, et al) have the right to remove accounts that violate their terms of service and that is not a freedom of speech issue.  

Let's look at definitions of a non-legal nature. Merriam-Webster says that "cancel" means "to stop giving support to that person." Dictionary.com has a pop-culture dictionary that defines "cancel culture" as "withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive."

The latest spin on the expression "cancel culture" has given it a more negative connotation. Some politically conservative people and groups view recent examples (like Donald Trump being removed from Twitter) as a free speech and censorship issue. My thoughts on that are clear in that earlier post.

Cancel culture or call-out culture can also be less "official" when large numbers of people boycott an individual or company or group who they feel has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner.

When President Biden was inaugurated, a number of accounts changed hands. As has always been the case, the @whitehouse Twitter account has different administrators with a new President. The @POTUS and @FLOTUS accounts also have new administration.

When those kinds of changes occurred, many followers of those accounts unfollowed them. Is that "cancel culture"? No one would have used that term when Barack Obama became President, but people did follow or unfollow those accounts at the time of Presidential change too. Of course, former President Obama still has a Twitter account as simply @barackobama as do other living ex-Presidents. 

For individuals losing access to social accounts or any form of cancel culture, it can mean losses to reputation, personal branding, and possibly income. For a company or group to lose access, the income portion can be a much greater concern, though all three things are important. 

 

 

The term “Web 2.0” was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004. O'Reilly defined it as not being a change in the technical framework of the Internet but rather a shift in the design and use of websites. The shift was moving away from websites that offered a passive user experience to ones that allowed users a more active experience through the ability to interact and collaborate through social media dialogue and to act as creators of user-generated content.

When I wrote a piece here called "From Web 2.0 to Web 4.0 in December 2019, it was inspired by an article online about "Web 4.0" that made me wonder if we had jumped over Web 3.0.

Web 2.0 websites allowed users to interact and collaborate with each other through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to viewing the content in a passive manner. Web 2.0 examples include social networking sites or social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, et al), blogs, wikis, folksonomies ("tagging" keywords on websites and links), video sharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo), image sharing sites (Pinterest, Flickr), some web apps and any collaborative platforms, and mashups of multiple applications.

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee questioned whether Web 2.0 was substantially different from the earlier Web technologies. He said that his original vision of the Web was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write." Berners-lee coined the term "semantic web" at the start of this century, but that has sometimes come to be called Web 3.0. Berners-Lee meant "semantic" to refer to a web of content where the meaning can be processed by machines. (archived version of his article)

Semantics refers to the philosophical study of meaning, but semantics comes up in discussions about search technology. Google, Siri, and Alexa using semantic search technology. In that application, it is the idea of answering user questions rather than merely searching based on a string of keywords. hunt down words. I can ask those applications a question like "What time is sunset tonight?" or "What is the zip code for Montclair, New Jersey?" but I could earlier have asked a search engine "zipcode Montclair NJ" and gotten an answer. Now, when I ask what time is sunset, the app knows where I am and so the answer is location-based.

In 2013, I wrote about Siri and the semantic web and said "We are not at the point where you can ask 'What would I like for dinner tonight?' and expect an answer." That might change as AI plays a larger role in search and other web operations. Semantic search is a data searching technique in which a search query aims to not only find keywords but to determine the intent and contextual meaning of the words a person is using for search.