Are Media companies deliberately increasing screen addiction?
Screen addictions is a term that can be defined as an individual being heavily dependent on screens to function. With that we ask ourselves are media companies deliberately increasing screen addiction? The short answer is yes, even though it varies from person to person, everyone in this day and age is affected by this disease. The growing youth most commonly depict the symptoms of screen addiction, such as decreases social skills, inability to function in society, and sometimes physical health issues. The underlying cause everyone would commonly assume is the increase of technology in our homes leading to the younger generations are growing up with more and more technology around them causing issues during growth at early ages. But the truth is that big tech companies are deliberately designing their products to be more addictive, which entices their users.
A common question that arises with these topics is why are companies doing this? Well it has a common but simple answer, money. Media companies have advertisers who pay them to show advertisements on their websites or property, the more an individual watches an ad the more revenue goes to the establishment. During an interview with Richard Freed, a behavioral Scientist at Stanford University, mentions the overarching design of big tech companies, the “formula is that in order to have behavioral change, you need motivation, ability, and triggers” (Lieber 1). This means to have someone hooked on their screen you need a spark to start the fire, this can take form in many different shapes. For “social media, the motivation is people’s cravings for social connection; it can also be the fear of social rejection. For video games, it’s
the desire to gain skills and accomplishments” (Lieber 1). “Big Tech now employs mental health experts to use persuasive technology”, they purposefully create products that have a “persuasive design” (Lieber 1). A prime example of this is Facebook, a multi-billion dollar corporation, heavily relies on methods of increasing screen addiction to make a profit. One of these methods is “targeted advertisements”, in which Facebook uses the “ massive amount of personal data on its user base” to create ads specifically targeted to an audience and sometimes and individual (O’Connell, 1). These recommended ads use your personal information to create advertisements that are tailored to your preferences causing you to stay on their site longer which leads to more exposure for other ads. On way Facebook increases exposure of the advertisers ads is to “save up notifications and give them to you on a schedule that they believe will most likely stimulate you to get you back” (Lieber 1). Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion as well as WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, on both applications Facebook has implemented advertisements and “advertisers would love to crack” WhatsApp due to how “pervasive [it is] not just in the U.S., but all over the world” (O’Connell 1). Facebook is only one of the companies attempting to increase screen time, another company is Youtube with their Autoplay feature which continues the video unless manually turned off by its user. Overall organizations are deliberately making their products more addicted by hiring mental behavioral scientists and psychologists, which increases their revenue.
These tactics affect both adults and children, adults are being “affected by not working [At their jobs] properly and are getting more distracted. But kids are being robbed” (Leiber). Children are taking the brunt of the tactics of big tech companies and are being heavily affected because they are still developing. Kids social skills are being affected since they are being pulled away “from real-life engagements like family, focusing on school, [and] making friends” which only further increases the issues caused by screen addiction. Boys are more likely to be addicted to video games leading to “bad habits and statistically poor academic performance” while girls are more attracted to social media which “can be hurtful for young girls and there’s been an increase in suicide” (Lieber 1). Rewards systems in games entice manly males since it gives them a feeling of accomplishment, such as “coins or cash boxes” (Lieber 1). Teenagers are one of the most commonly targets audience since they are “sensitive to social situations, like being accepted or rejected” social media uses these insecurities to create a facade (Lieber 1). But not all issues are psychological or social; some can be physical if left uncontrolled. If children are introduced to screens at an earlier age and develop an addiction it can lead to physical brain issues as stated by Dr. Dunckley, “excessive screen time appears to impair brain structure and function” (Dunckley 1). There also has been a correlation with screen time and brain atrophy, “shrinkage or loss of tissue volume of the brain”, this portion of the brain process organization and a higher level of thinking.
In conclusion, screen addiction has been increasing along with technology and we should start to limit it for our youth. Companies that make money off these users do not care for their well being as long as they are making money. All rewards systems in games and social media apps for logging on every day release dopamine which is very similar to a drug craving, every now and they the user would depict withdraw. So the youth in particular are vulnerable to health issues caused by screen addiction because their brains are still developing and can lead to permanent damage to the frontal lobe which “determines success in every area of life” including “academic or career success”. People always have been attempting to reduce their screen addiction, so now I challenge you as the reader to determine where you stand, what will you do?
O’Connell, Brian. “How Does Facebook Make Money? Six Primary Revenue Streams.” TheStreet, TheStreet, 23 Oct. 2018, https://www.thestreet.com/technology/how-does-facebook-make-money-14754098#:~:targetText=How Does Facebook Make Money?,directly through its user base.&targetText=All in all, the company,of its money from advertising.
Are you being targeted by Big Tech Companies to stay on your phone more?
Almost everyone, including yours truly, has access to a touch screen phone nowadays and uses it daily, whether it be to wake up in the morning, to talk to people, or to kill time, but in recent years there has been a significant increase in the amount of time spent on screens. With our rapidly developing technology this is only going to speed up. This epidemic is leading to a raised risk of mental diseases, physical changes to your brain, and less logical thinking. You might ask what is causing this eruption? Well a major part of it is companies purposefully attempting to increase screen time through the use of techniques hidden in plain sight and shady or subconscious tactics. To elaborate, these big tech companies are deliberately designing their software to encourage people to stay locked to their screens, they do this to increase the number of views each advertisement gets to increase their revenue. As the New York Post stated, “Advertisers are the consumer; users are merely the product”, in layman terms it means advertisers are profiting through the screen time of the unknowing users (Schweppe 1).The reason I chose this topic was to bring awareness to the screen addiction we all face, not just children, but adults as well. The raised times that we are spending on screens is detrimental to our wellbeing, thus we should be well informed and attempt to limit or reduce screen time.
According to Yatan Pal Singh Balhara, the term screen addiction“is used to describe the engagement with a variety of screen activities in a dependent, problematic manner”, which in a nutshell means the average person is negatively affected by their daily reliance on screens (Balhara, 1). In addition to this, screen addiction can be defined as repetitively choosing to spend time on a screen even though it’s unnecessary, we all have fallen victim to screen addiction without knowing it. Victoria L. Dunckley, a child psychiatrist, explained some of the disturbing effects of excessive screen time and what it can do to the brain. Children especially are victims to the harsh tendencies of spending too much time on screens, because their brains are still developing. Through mental observation of her patients she recorded that many of her patients “suffer from sensory overload, lack of restorative sleep, and a hyper aroused nervous system” leading to the children being moody and show signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Dunckley 1). Though it may not seem like much but each subsequent “hour of viewing increases the likelihood of experiencing socio-emotional problems”, overtime the time spent rises creating the addiction. In an interview by CBS with a former google design employee, Triston Harris, and James Styer, the founder of common sense media, both advocates that parents and children get educated about the addictive qualities of cell phones and other media. As said by James Styer that device addiction is “changing the nature of interpersonal relationships”, leading me to agree with his statement since it can be backed up by Dunckley’s work. Through physical scans of the brains of addicted kids, it portrays “gray matter atrophy” or the loss of tissue volume which controls higher thinking processes such as planning and organizing, so it physically makes you dumber (Dunckley 1). As a person who had spent most of my time on a screen, either gaming or watching television, this information caused me to change my own lifestyle and spend more time outside sports and I hope it does the same for others. But nonetheless, we as a society spend countless hours on our phones, without noticing that we fell into the traps set by companies to retain our attention.
Big tech companies deliberately design their products and software to contain traps “that will keep users on the hamster wheel as long as possible”, going as far as even hiring “psychologists and neurologists do develop addictive techniques (Schweppe 1). Are you ever just sitting waiting for a bus or train and decide to use your phone and get stuck in an infinite scroll? Or are you ever watching a youtube video and auto play plays the next video? Steaks in a videogame or social media app? These are just some of the tactics that seem harmless but are techniques hidden in plain sight that attempt to keep the audience glued to their screens. Corporations mainly target teenagers and adults who are tech savvy; this is done through many different ways from simple design choices all the way to creating a personalized profile per individual. As a tech savvy person I experience this first hand, but even though the intentions of these are debatable, they still have a tendency to collect private information through cookies and algorithms. When a website says they use cookies, they are referring to the virtual ones, which are bytes of information that store some of your information and have many uses from remember login details to remember your history. This acquisition of information recently has been in the news due to Facebook’s scandals of selling user information, leading many corporations to send out updated terms of service agreements. There are many types of algorithms others than one that recommend products and interests, such as simple learning algorithms for games. Most are beneficial to society from Google Maps giving you routes all the way to creative AI in your camera to help picture look better. But in the end algorithms are another way an establishment can increase your screen time, for example some algorithms can take previous searches and wish lists into account. Paul Hood, the head of Trinity mirror (A newspaper and magazine company), stated “The implementation of the recommendations software lets us automatically present related products from the ecommerce range at the right time, and the initial results are positive,” depicting how companies are actually benefiting (Lovett 1). For instance, let us say that you are planning on buying a gym membership and you search up the cost, later while on a separate page about cats you are recommended that search, that is algorithm in play. A well known company that uses algorithms to psychologically target an audience is Facebook, since the AI “constantly shows an effect of Psychological matching”(Matz 1). During my research I also discovered that Facebook’s algorithm targets people based on “geo-demographic” and “personality,” so a person is more likely to find a reason to spend more time on the site (Matz 1). Hood also reveals that his company has “profiled more than 200,000 people using VisualDNA in the last three months, and it means we can personalize both content and ads and trace the users as they come back to the site” (Lovett 1). In my research websites are not the only companies who are collecting user information, but the internet and television service providers as well. When you subscribe to a service such as Netflix, your information is collected, so they can send you targeted ads “according to demographics, income, marital status, etc making adverts even more relevant” (Campaign Middle East ).
Even though we are in a technological era we still need human interaction to maintain a society that has good mental health. Some may argue that without social media kids find it harder to communicate with each other and argue parents should stop worrying so much since pediatricians say it does no harm to you children. But as stated before there are countless studies that “Excessive screen time is as an important and independent risk factor for health” (Balhara 1). A very particular case though not average, portrays the extent of what excessive screen time can do to you, a young man in India started watching tv-shows on his free time. Over time his grades began to slip and within the end of his first year of college he was only watching tv-shows full time and avoiding society and his family. Yes social media does bring us closer to everyone, but on the other side of the coin it distances us from real human interaction leading to more depressed and moody people (Balhara 1).
Before you grab your pitchforks and torches, I am not saying all companies are inherently immoral or that screens will be the end of the human race, but we still can not deny the impact of screens on society. Some big companies that do not profit from these advertisements are attempting to help decrease the time spent on screens, such as Apple, who is allowing their users to limit their screen time and decrease the amount of notifications. During CBS’s interview with James Styer and Triston harris, Triston mention some ways to repair some of the damage done from screen addiction, such as how you can “set your phone to grayscale”, which eliminates the colors that grab you attention without missing anything that’s important, less stimulation leads to a less enticing phone. Another way we can limit our interactions with advertisements to decrease screen time is be cautious of your location, in my research it was apparent to me how bigger companies use expensive hardware to send targeted ads using location. In the video How Internet Advertisers Read Your Mind by the Bright side (A Youtube Channel that has over 30 million subscribers), elaborates that you phone has a unique identification that can be used by such hardware, this is known as “geo-tags” (Bright Side 1). Anyone that has used a public wifi, such as the free transit wifi, has already been a victim to these tags. Even though they do not collect private information, they will send you offers related to the area the wireless network is located in. Now, I am pretty sure everyone is slightly suspicious of their phones and question if it is listening to us all the time. Not surprisingly, the answer is yes, many apps that have access to the microphone are constantly listening to our conversations, this is more relevant now more than ever since Amazon and Google are launching their home assistants. These devices without using their microphone without permission of the owners, this could be because of they listen for voice commands that they need to activate them selves. If you are using any “social media at all, you are already being tracked”, since they use your camera and microphone for recording videos and taking pictures (Bright Side). Certain voice commands such as “Hey Siri” and “Okay google” are triggers for phone to start listening, but for other apps such as “Facebook, no one knows what the triggers are” (Nichols 1). This can explain many phenomena which occur without the interaction of a phone, such as verbally saying you are searching for a new house and later getting ads on greats websites for finding a new apartment. On the topic of social media, parents assume that its “part of our kids’ culture,” that it is what all the kids are doing but fail to realize that they too are addicted (Dunckley 1). During the interview with James Styer and Triston Harris, a simple survey study was conducted to find out whether teenagers and parents find it urgent to respond to a notification, roughly 78% of teenagers and 69% of adults felt like it was necessary to respond instantly and check their phones hourly. To resolve this what I personally do is avoid social media and deny apps access to my camera microphone, if you want to continue using social media you can make it so apps, on launch, must always ask to use your phones accessories. In an attempt to reduce the insane screen times Senator Josh Hawley passed “the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology, or SMART Act” which would stop companies from using manipulative techniques to retain an audience (Schweppe 1). This act also allows users an “equal opportunity to either give or decline consent to particular user experience”, but Big Tech companies still look for ways around this such as hiding privacy options that the user can still find through a decent search.
To wrap everything up, screen addiction has been increasing along with technology, and we should start to limit it. All rewards systems in games and social media apps for logging on every day release dopamine which is very similar to a drug craving, every now and they the user would depict withdraw. When I was a kid in highschool I expressed these outbursts with screen addiction, playing video games and was not in the best standing with my family, but through reducing my screen time recovered. So the youth in particular are vulnerable to health issues caused by screen addiction since their brains have not fully developed yet, this can lead to permanent damage to the frontal lobe which “determines success in every area of life” including “academic or career success”. Companies that make money off these users do not care for their well being as long as they are making money. People always have been attempting to reduce their screen addiction, so now I challenge you as the reader to determine where you stand, what will you do?
Source Summary
Bright Side, How internet Advertisers Read your mind, 2019, Video
Summary
Visually depicts how advertisers track your data as well as provide ads, prime example was a Pan that depicts how certain companies attempt to retain your attention by watching your actions.
Dunckley Victoria L. M.D., Gray matters: too much screen time damages the brain, 2014, PsychologyToday
Dunckley explains the negative effects of screen addiction at a young age. Helps explain how urgent this situation is since it physically makes you dumber.
Campaign Middle East, Are targeted ads the future?, 2012, Article
Internet providers are able to create a special set of ads per family based on the history of the user. They take into fact the information of the subscriber from the income to the marital status of the person.
CBS This Morning, “Truth about tech”; Device addiction “happening by design”, 2018, Youtube interview
Summary
Two expertes are attempting to change the way we design advertisements and phone user interfaces to decrease the time people want to feel attracted to our screens. The two experts tackle the big tech companies asking for change, Apple responds with features of decreases notifications.
Koebler Jason, Your phones are listening and it’s not paranoia, 2018, Vice
Sam Nicholas explains why we get coincidental ads when we say we need something such as a pot, house or phone. This helps explains how our phones are constantly listening to our conversation.
Lovett, Gina, Mirror Football trials targeting software to recommend products, 2010, Article
In this article Lovett explains the targeting software created by Mirror Football to recommend products on editorials users are viewing, following users around. The head of Trinity Mirror, Paul Hood, said “produced from the ecommerce range at the right time, and the initial results are positive”, by which he means the software is successful in completing its task of advertising products from the Mirror Football Shop to its consumers. They also profiled more than 200,000 people in hopes to personalize both content and ads while tracing the users as they leave and come back to the website. Companies admit to using this technique and use private information to have a strong base.
Schweppe, John, Big Tech is using psychology to glue us to our screens, 2019, Newspaper
Big tech Companies are using psychologist and neurologist to create addictive strategies that keep users hooked on the sight for longer, increasing their revenue through the advertisements on pages, to the company the user is “merely the product”. Simple things such as the infinite scroll or autoplay are prime examples of how advertisers increase screen time, even the Skip ad button gets you to watch at least 5 seconds of an ad, since they are deliberately seek out addictive features that make it harder to leave the page/app. They all have a common trait they appeal to the user’s desires to demonstrate loyalty.
S.C., Matz, Facebook’s optimization algorithms are highly unlikely to explain the effects of psychological targeting, 2018, Article
In this article it observes and explains Facebook’s targeting algorithm to recommend ads to a certain targeted audience, also known as Psychological targeting. It is said the the algorithm bases recommendations based on different geo-demographics, so it was concluded that certain audiences are targeted psychologically. This was very relatable to my question since it depicts the algorithm matching people’s information to recommend certain advertisements to increase the length of time they spend on the site.
Yatan Pal Singh Balhara, Kamini Verma and Rachna Bhargava, Screen time and screen addiction: Beyond gaming, social media and pornography– A case report, 2018, Clinical Key
In recent years, people claimed that violent video games (VVGs) increased violence and aggression in children and that they were presumed to be one of the leading causes of violent acts, such as mass shootings and increased crime rates in adolescents. You might have heard something similar along these lines in current news. To put this in perspective, there have been twenty four school shootings in 2018, this is only counting shootings where people have been injured or killed (Education Week 1.) In most of these cases the first blame often is directed toward the culture of violent video games. More specifically, a major school shooting that took place in Parkland, Florida in 2018 had evoked a presidential response in which President Trump said, “The level of violence (in) video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts” (Fishman 1.) We often end up relying on our instincts and common sense to justify the effects of certain actions, but in reality this same common sense and intuition can be misleading and in this case the pseudo-science behind it is even more misleading, dangerous, and ambiguous to protect a hidden agenda.
In the article “Do Violent Games make kids more violent”, by The Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research attempt to inform worried parents in a solely scientific tone that, in fact, video games do not cause violence and any claim that says they do is backed by pseudo evidence. Prior to this article in 2015, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) determined that they had “…enough research leading to this conclusion…that playing violent video games leads to more aggressive moods and behaviors and detracts from the players’ feelings of empathy and sensitivity to aggression.” which lead them to publish a public policy statement (BCTR 1.) This “misleading and alarmist” stance was responded to by a group of two hundred and thirty pediatric and adolescent health researchers, who in 2015 created an open letter addressing the issue. Later the APA created their own response in which they advised government and news organizations not to refer to violent video games as a cause of aggression due to new evidence and relationships that were uncovered. Such as, researchers discovered a negative correlation with violence in youth and video games, meaning as video game sales increases violence in youth decreases (BCTR, 1.) But the false research still does not do the average person any justice, since when searching for information on this topic you are more likely to encounter websites supporting the point of view that video games cause violence. This is because these articles are more likely to be published compared to the opposition due to the blind support of the public. In The New York Times Article “Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings happen. Politicians Still Blame Them” the author, Kevin Draper, maintains a respective manner to the victims of the shootings that took place in August of 2019 while retaining his stance that video games do not cause violence and politicians only say they do to support their own agenda. He does this by exposing the previous studies, providing detailed new studies with evidence, and through quotes. Dr. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University ridiculed that “The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive,” through the use of this analogy it was clear that the intial research on video games was not a reliable conclusion (Draper 1.)
Globally, the United States has some of the highest numbers of gun violence cases compared to other countries with higher video game revenue relative to their population. This is the point of view presented by Philip Bump in his social media post titled “If video games spur gun violence, it’s only in the United States. He retains a confident tone to convince the readers that politicians, such as Trump, are manipulating information to draw attention away from another cause similar to the point of view of Draper. A prime example of this in action is in China, which in 2016 had spent almost 7 billion U.S. dollars more in the video game industry than the United States and have lower gun violence cases, but President Trump still considers VVGs as a major catalyst for gun violence. This can be explained by President Trump political views since, “He sought to explain what link there might be between these shootings incidents besides ready access to firearms” (Bump 1.) Due to President Trump being an obvious Republican intends to cover up a very highly controversial topic discussed in politics about gun control with the VVGs. In Japan and South Korea, where access to firearms is extremely strict and limited, there is lower gun violence and death while receiving almost two-thirds more video game revenue, than the United States. If we look at this picture as a whole we can see that countries with high access to firearms and low video game revenue have a drastically greater number of mass shootings compared to even the United States, thus continuing to support that VVG’s do not have an effect on gun violence, however access to firearms does.
Nonetheless the misconceptions about video games are heavily derived from authoritative figures, news, and media which is often backed up by pseudo-science. In the article “Blame Game: Violent Video Games Do Not Cause Violence” , Andrew Fishman. The author, argues with the stance that video games cause violence and convinced the audience by presenting newer reliable tests that prove his claim and by refuting pseudo science evidence presented. For instance, on one of Jimmy Kimmel shows Jimmy, “…challenged parents to turn off their children’s TVs while they were playing the popular game Fortnite” (Fishman 1.) Not surprisingly, the youth lashed out, some cursing while others striking their parents. This can be explained by the fact that Fornite is a high skill curve game (high difficulty) and it is not as violent as some of the other more violent games, such as Grand Theft Auto. However, while responding to the two mass shootings during August of 2019, many “powerful republicans, including the president (Donald Trump), blamed an old bogeyman: video games” (Draper 1.) There may be some exceptions in which a shooter specifically mentions games as a catalyst because games “shaped his thoughts” (Bump 1.) For example, on August 3rd, 2019, a 2,300 word manifesto showed up online minutes before the mass shooting in El Paso Texas, it was full of anti-immigrant hate speech and says that the attack is a response to the hipsanic invasion of Texas. Later on in the manifesto it says “Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy”, referencing the popular game, Call of Duty (COD). This can lead to a conclusion that the school shooter played video games since he mentions some knowledge of a video game. But even with that one exception, the “United States is the only place where people play a lot of video games and frequently shoot each other to death” (Bump 1.)
The main game constantly used in all if not most articles was Wolfenstein 3D, since it is one of the goriest games and should cause the most aggression. A study conducted to show aggressive behavior used this game as part of its experiment, since it’s gameplay is fast paced and involves shootings. It was compared to a slow paced methodical game called Myst. The results were fairly conclusive that patients who played Wolfenstein where more prone to getting aggressive, but they also had aggressive thoughts when they lost. When the test was reviewed it was concluded that the violent nature of a game, such as gore and heavy blood effects, does not cause antagonistic behavior, but the difficulty of a game does. After these results, the researchers decided to replicate the test with a custom game to control all the variables, mainly the pace of the game. They created two first person shooters to maintain the same pace, in the first game an opponent’s death would be bloody and gruesome, whereas the other game had opponents that when killed will simply disappear. If we were supporting that video games cause violence then the games with more gory and bloody deaths should provoke the players to be more violent, but when the results were reviewed “they found no differences between the groups” (Fishman 1.) Two similar studies were conducted with different games by the same researchers to test if difficulty really was the cause of the slight violence. They used the famous game we all know by Tetris, to two groups, one version of the game remained the default, while the other one one was heavily modified to be harder, such as harder controls and odder shapes. The group that was playing the complicated version of the game depicted much more frustration compared to the group that was playing the regular version, furthermore concluding that VVGs are not the cause of violence in teens. Overall, the violence in VVGs does not impact how aggressive a player would turn out to be, but it was decided by the difficulty of the content.
To wrap it all up yes, video games may be violent in some cases, but there is little to no correlation between VVGs and the increased rates of mass shootings in the past decades. This statement does not only apply to games, but to most accessible violent media as well. The Entertainment Software Association established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), to put ratings on games preventing the wrong audience from accessing it. Games such as Wolfenstein 3D has a Mature 17+ rating, meaning it should only be accessible to teens above the age of 17, while a game such as Fortnite has a rating of Teen. Often times if children are playing games that are not for their age group its not their fault, its their parents fault for not placing limitations and control. Many gaming communities have also banded together after President Trump’s claims, creating the hashtag, #VideoGamesAreNotToBlame to spread awareness and to mock the claim that video games had anything to do with the two shootings that occurred in August of 2019 (Draper 1.) Accessibility to information is a cause for misinformation and can be manipulated for hidden agendas. People who are ambiguous to the situation are common targets to misleading information. All in all, people need to be cautious of where they get their information from and how it is presented.
Works Cited
BCTR, “Do violent video games make kids more violent?”, Psychology Today, LCC, July 17, 2019
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