Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online | Technology | The Guardian

Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online | Technology | The Guardian

• it's not that we've started depending on technology, but that the technology we're depending on is poorly designed, too often focused on making money for its creators at its users' expense. Undoubtedly, we'll one day figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates without the accompanying distraction and compulsion. But that doesn't mean the distraction and compulsion aren't a problem right now ? or that it might not be wise to find ways of adapting more rapidly.
• BF Skinner..conducted famous experiments on pigeons and rats ....discovered that the most powerful way to reinforce the push-or-peck habit was to use "variable schedules of reward": to deliver a pellet not every time the lever was pushed, but only sometimes, and unpredictably.
• There's a slightly depressing view of the web according to which we're essentially just Skinner pigeons, compulsively clicking in hopes of a squirt of dopamine, the so-called "feelgood" hormone in the brain. Once you've learned about Skinner, it's impossible not to see variable schedules of reward everywhere you look online. When you click refresh on your email, or when you check your phone, you're not guaranteed a new message;
• By far the funniest, or maybe the most horrifying, illustration of this situation is Cow Clicker, a Facebook game created in 2011 by the game designer Ian Bogost as a satire of undemanding "social games" such as FarmVille ? in which, as Bogost put it, "you click on a cow, and that's it". In Cow Clicker, you clicked on your cow and it mooed, and that was it: you then had to wait another six hours to click again, unless you were willing to part with real money (or virtual money, accumulated through clicking) for the right to click again immediately. Bogost's joke became a surprise hit: at its height, Cow Clicker had more than 50,000 users, some paying $20 or more for pointless "improvements" to their cow, such as making it face the opposite direction. "After a while," Bogost told a US radio interviewer, "I realised they're doing exactly what concerned me about these games" ? becoming "compulsively attached". "I began to feel very disturbed about the product." Eventually, a few months after the launch, Bogost eliminated all the cows in a Rapture-like event he called the Cowpocalypse. After it, users could keep playing only by clicking on a bare patch of grass ? and some actually did. Responding to a player who complained that Cow Clicker was no longer "a very fun game", Bogost replied, "It wasn't very fun before."
• After all, distraction ? as the Australian philosopher Damon Young points out in his book of that name ? isn't just a minor irritant. It's a serious philosophical problem: what you focus on, hour by hour, day after day, ends up comprising your whole life. "To be diverted isn't simply to have too many stimuli but to be confused about what to attend to and why," Young writes. "Distraction is the very opposite of emancipation: failing to see what is worthwhile in life, and lacking the wherewithal to seek it."