Ex-Googler Reveals How Tech Firms Steal Our Attention

Do you need a digital detox? 

If you're like most Americans, you probably find it nearly impossible to put down or turn off your constantly-chirping gadgets. And that's by design, according to former Google employee Tristan Harris in a Ted Talks presentation. Because technology companies are always seeking new ways to capture our attention. 

"What we don't talk about is that a handful of people at a handful of tech companies … will steer what a billion people are thinking today," says Harris who used to work as design ethicist at the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. He quit at Google in 2016. A computer science graduate at Stanford University, Harris is now the founder of Time Well Spent, an organization which advocates that technology align with our humanity, and that people should be mindful of their quality of life. 

Getting Mentally Hijacked 

At large tech companies like Google, YouTube (a Google subsidiary) and Facebook, you can find control rooms filled with dozens of employees who steer the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. According to Harris, here's how our minds get hijacked by phones and other devices. 

1. Notifications schedule little blocks of time for thoughts that you probably didn't intend to have. And once you get sucked in, you'll probably fall down an Alice-In-Wonderland type of rabbit hole full of notifications, messages, emails, comments, photos and auto-play videos. 

2. Technology isn't necessarily a neutral platform that allows you, the user, to go in any direction. Because of advertising dollars and other forms of financial incentives (such as commissions from shopping transactions), technology is often used to steer you in a specific direction. Thus, technology isn't evolving randomly. Large companies have hidden goals (such as the race for our attention) that limit the paths you take. 

3. While there are a plethora of apps, they have a common objective: to gain our attention. Technology companies are motivated to understand how the human mind works. Unfortunately, tech firms have been resorting to sensationalist or shock content to maintain a stranglehold of our minds. That means a growing number of content are designed to appeal to lower areas of our brain stem — i.e., our reptilian brains. These persuasive and/or manipulative techniques can be unethical. 

Discipline Means Freedom 

To find guidance on how we can make technology work for us, we can turn to some of history's greatest thinkers. Benjamin Franklin, one of America's Founding Fathers, said that "Nothing ... brings more bondage than too much liberty." That is, if we're not mindful of how we spend our time, we can fall into the trappings of distraction, which are a form of slavery. And 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant regarded discipline as instrumental to maintaining our personal freedoms. How do Franklin's and Kant's views apply to today's digital reality? 

A March 2017 study by Flurry finds that Americans now spend up to five hours daily on their mobile devices. And the average person now spends five years and four months of their lives on social media — more than the time they spend eating/drinking, grooming and socializing. 

Tricks For Keeping Our Attention 

So what specific methods are companies using to catch our attention? Harris says YouTube and Facebook auto-play videos to keep audiences hooked, and that leads to Netflix auto-playing the next episode of their shows. The key metric is to increase the amount of time spent on a specific platform because there's only so much waking hours in a day. 

Each day, the average person spends 40 minutes on YouTube; 35 minutes on Facebook; and 25 minutes on Snapchat. According to Harris, those minutes will never be enough, resulting in a "race to the bottom" of our lizard brain stems. While mindfulness is often viewed as meditative practice of the past, it may be key to restoring our personal freedoms and mental health in the digital age.