I want to see all of the things that we’ve already seen,
I wanna see you take the jackpot out the fruit machine,
And put it all back in,
You’ve got to understand that you can never beat the bandit, no.[1]
The Stones and ‘sacred relics’
I saw The Rolling Stones for the fifth time in June 2018.[2] It was two and a half months short of 12 years since I had last seen the band, also in Cardiff, in the then Millennium Stadium at the end of August 2006.[3] The earlier show was four weeks ahead of Facebook’s extension of its service to everyone over the age of 13[4] (I was unaware of the social network at the time) and five months in advance of Apple’s announcement of the iPhone.[5] On arriving on the pitch in the remonickered Principality Stadium in June 2018, a priority was to snap the lapping tongue logo-laden stage on my iPhone X and share the shots on Facebook.
I often enjoyed taking my camera to local gigs in the past, but, as David Byrne[6] relates, established ‘performers would at least try to limit amateur photographers and especially video cameras, but now that idea [seems] simply ridiculous — hopeless.’ The futility of any effort on the part of concert promoters to prevent audience members using smartphone cameras during shows makes for the novel position of my having a camera where one would not previously have been tolerated. While smartphones are now capable of excellent image quality, the view from the crowd is not a vantage point from which it is possible to take dramatic performance shots. Official photographers still have the advantage of direct access to the stage and are permitted to use dedicated equipment that is more than capable of outperforming a smartphone, so the competition from mobile-wielding punters is minimal. Despite the unlikelihood of my snapping anything significant from my spot next to the mixing desk, I was not about to pass up the chance to shoot something of the Stones!
The impulse to capture and keep something of life’s significant moments is one that predates not only digital technology but also the invention of photography. Steven Johnson[7] describes how following the introduction of early mirrors in the 15th Century:
During holy pilgrimages, it became common practice for well-off pilgrims to take a mirror with them. When visiting sacred relics, they would position themselves so that they could catch sight of the bones in the mirror’s reflection. Back home, they would then show off these mirrors to friends and relatives, boasting that they had brought back physical evidence of the relic by capturing the reflection of the sacred scene. Before turning to the printing press, Gutenberg had the start-up idea of manufacturing and selling small mirrors for departing pilgrims.[8]
Attending a Rolling Stones concert is a pilgrimage insofar as its end is witnessing a performance by some of the most iconic musicians of the last century. Elevating the band to the status of ‘sacred relics’ is, though, as spurious as the artefacts that were the objects of the early pilgrims’ devotions. Stevenson states that it was ‘well-off pilgrims’ who attempted to capture something of the moment of their benedictions in mirrors, which suggests that what they hoped to reflect was no divine light but evidence of their wealth. Attending a Stones concert is not expressive of exceptional affluence but a show of doing so does speak of consumer choice. Conspicuous consumption is a staple of social media posts with platform users uploading evidence of their buying behaviour in everything from holiday destinations to soft furnishings. It has become a comedic cliché that people post pictures of their meals on social media, in so doing being conspicuous about that which they have literally consumed. I explored Dic Hebdige’s[9] observation that subcultures are cultures of conspicuous consumption in an earlier post, concluding that culture as a whole finds expression in consumption. It is unsurprising, then, that individuals articulate their tastes in the same way on social media.
The sops of social media
Presuming that people now express their identities in equivalent ways online as they did previously in daily life is what Marshall McLuhan[10] might call ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot.’ It is important to keep in mind that, in McLuhan’s words again, ‘the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind,’ and it is necessary to keep all the heads of a cerebral Cerberus on red alert when it comes to avoiding distraction by the sops of social media.
In the first part of this series, I outlined how carrying records signalled more than musical taste. As in David Hepworth’s[11] account of the October 1961 meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it also expressed the likely interests and inclinations of the people engaging in this kind of conspicuous consumption. Although Hepworth characterises the carrying of LPs and a guitar in the Jagger-Richards encounter as ‘a cry for help’, as social gambits these were low-risk strategies. Going about with records was unremarkable for those uninterested in your musical tastes, although it might have provoked derision from your peers. As with Jagger and Richards, though, the strategy could spark an enduring mutual connection.
The stakes on social media are higher with smaller potential rewards. Depending on your privacy settings, the likely audience for a Facebook post is a group of others with whom you have existing connections. The point of posting is not usually to initiate new connections but to commune with existing ones. Adding a status update is an empty gesture if it goes unacknowledged and to post is to risk this outcome. Adam Alter[12] notes that following the introduction of its ‘Like’ button on 9 February 2009:[13]
[Facebook users] were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed.[14]
Given the risk of a virtual pillorying for an unpopular post, it is surprising that Facebook subscribers remain so ready to offer these online gambits. Pointing to studies conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Michael D. Zeiler,[15][16] a behavioural psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Alter finds that the possible lack of response to posting is part of the compulsion to do so.
Zeiler’s pigeons
Zeiler’s experiments centred on three ‘White Carnaeux pigeons [that] were maintained at 80% of their free-feeding weights.’[17] The avian test subjects were underfed to ensure their participation in the experiment, which involved their releasing ‘Purina Pigeon Checkers, the birds’ standard diet,’ by activating a key in their enclosure. The birds received a variety of feedback including ‘darkening of the chamber after food presentation’ and illumination of the key with a green light when it was active and when it released food pellets, and with a red light when it did not dispense. Zeiler varied the rate at which the key presented food pellets to find how far this influenced the pigeons’ actions. Notably, the birds did not stop activating the switch when it did not always feed them and Zieler’s report confirms earlier findings that ’terminating 75% or 83% of the intervals with food presentation produced higher [response] rates than did a 100% condition’ and while the ‘overall rate of responding was related to food presentation; […] rates did not decrease markedly until food presentation terminated 30% or fewer of the intervals.’ The pigeons, therefore, appeared to be incentivised to peck at the key by its delivering food inconsistently and began to lose interest in doing so only when they were rewarded with pellets on fewer than 30% of attempts.
Alter[18] concludes that the birds’ brains were releasing more dopamine in response to an unexpected reward than when the food delivery was more predictable. He explains that dopamine is a chemical, which:
[…] attaches itself to receptors throughout the brain that in turn produce an intense flush of pleasure. Most of the time the brain releases only a small dose of dopamine, but certain substances and addictive experiences send dopamine production into overdrive. Warming your hands by a log fire on a cold night or taking a sip of water feels good, but that sensation is dramatically more intense for an addict when he injects heroin or, to a lesser extent, begins a new World of Warcraft quest.[19]
Roger McNamee[20] — a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook and business mentor to its CEO Mark Zuckerberg[21] — outlines evolved biological responses’ vulnerability to technology as follows:
Humans have evolved a common set of responses to certain stimuli — “flight or fight” would be an example — that can be exploited by technology. When confronted with visual stimuli, such as vivid colors — red is a trigger color — or a vibration against the skin near our pocket that signals a possible enticing reward, the body responds in predictable ways: a faster heartbeat and the release of a neurotransmitter, dopamine. In human biology, a faster heartbeat and the release of dopamine are meant to be momentary responses that increase the odds of survival in a life-or-death situation.[22]
Social media companies have developed their platforms to elicit repeated ‘life-or-death‘ responses from their users to ensure that they retain their attention. The now ubiquitous ‘Like’ buttons produce a variable response — as I have described above — because feedback from them depends on others choosing to ‘like’ posts, pictures, links or videos. Like Zeiler’s pigeons, social media platform users seek the dopamine rush of an irregular response.
Recalling 1471
This phenomenon is not a new one in communications technology. In Helen Fielding’s comic novel Bridget Jones’s Diary[23] — first published in 1996 — the eponymous heroine opines on the then new 1471 telephone service:
Consider 1471 to be brilliant invention, instantly telling you the number of the last person who called. It was ironic, really, because when the three of us found out about 1471 Sharon said she was totally against it, considering it exploitation by British Telecom of the addictive personalities and relationship-breakdown epidemic among the British populace. Some people are apparently calling it upwards of twenty times a day. Jude, on the other hand, is strongly in favour of 1471, but does concede that if you have just split up with or started sleeping with someone it doubles misery potential when you come home: no-number-stored-on-1471-misery, to add to no-message-on-answerphone-misery, or number-stored-turning-out-to-be-Mother’s-misery.[24]
Fielding identifies the scope for behavioural addiction arising from the variable returns of the 1471 service — later in the novel, Bridget Jones records her daily tally of 1471 calls with her calorie and alcohol intake and cigarette and scratchcard consumption. The extent of this technological compulsion was restricted, though, by its landline-locked nature. The ‘misery potential’ here could be reaped only ‘when you come home‘, not at all times as later when mass-market mobile phones made the torment portable.
The above excerpt also identifies the possibilities for service providers to exploit ‘addictive personalities’. Certainly, it was in British Telecom’s interest to provide the 1471 facility as it helped to generate income for the company by allowing customers to return missed calls. The idea that this was deliberate coercive action targeting human behavioural susceptibilities is (probably) humourous hyperbole in Fielding’s novel, but it shows the endemic addictive qualities of communication technologies.
The slot machine in your pocket
Interviewed for Brain Hacking,[25] a 60 Minutes package on psychological manipulation in mobile technology, the web design ethicist Tristan Harris draws a comparison between smartphones and slot machines: ‘Every time I check my phone,’ he says, ‘I’m playing the slot machine to see “What did I get?”’
The interview explores ideas Harris put forward in his 2016 essay How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist[27] in which he lists checking for notifications, refreshing email, scrolling down on an Instagram feed, swiping faces left and right in dating apps and ‘tapping the # of red notifications’ as ways in which smartphone users are ‘playing a slot machine’ for the respective ‘winnings’ behind each home screen icon. ‘Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business,’ he writes.
Harris agrees that — as with the 1471 telephone service described in Bridget Jones’s Diary — smartphones and their apps were not originally designed to have the addictive allure of slot machines:
[…] there is no malicious corporation behind all of email who consciously chose to make it a slot machine. No one profits when millions check their email and nothing’s there. Neither did Apple and Google’s designers want phones to work like slot machines. It emerged by accident.[28]
Once the human propensity to become hooked by technology’s intrinsic ‘intermittent variable rewards’ was recognised, though, it was likely that this behavioural loophole would be exploited. Roger McNamee[29] identifies Stanford University’s Professor BJ Fogg as a trailblazer for tech-based behavioural hacking, citing Fogg’s 2003 book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do[30] as a seminal text in the development of the practice. In the book, Fogg explains that he evolved his ideas from his doctoral thesis, which:
[…] included experimental studies on how to make computers more likeable and persuasive, as well as outlining a vision for a new domain that I referred to as “captology,” an acrynym based on the phrase computers as persuasive technologies. My vision of captology has inevitably deepened and expanded over the years as technology has evolved and I’ve learned more about the ways in which computers can influence people.[31]
While the goal of ‘making computers more likeable‘ seems benign, it risks increasing their attractiveness to an addictive extent. McNamee[32] finds that when Fogg’s theories were restricted to desktop and laptop computers, their impact was innocuous, but when unleashed on always-accessible mobile devices, their influence is a lot less salutary. He detects no ill intent in Fogg’s work, though, commenting that, having explored the professor’s writings, he ‘developed a sense that [Fogg] is a technology optimist who embraced Silicon Valley’s value system, never imagining that his insights might lead to material harm.’ He adds that Fogg told him subseuently that ‘he made several attempts to call attention to the dangers of persuasive technology,‘ but Silicon Valley remained indifferent to his cautions.
Notes and references