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I agree with your ultimate conclusion ("Using a computer is not a drug"), and that this is an important consideration, but to play with the forest-trees thing here, the stimulus I think most people perceive and/or conditioned to is the alert tone and/or vibration, which I believe has been argued to (not in their words) have some inherent salience, once the user is conditioned by carrying a phone around for a while, at least. I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of bzzzzzt could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say, nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected, however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or something. There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted. Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things, and however little dopamine "all the little red little circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to see:
- 32 New Facebook notifications!
- Your dispensary order is ready for pickup!
- sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile!
- Your bank account is overdrawn!
- 18 new Twitter notifications!
- ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES!
- You're never gonna learn Spanish if you keep doing drugs, Carl!
- DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND!
- Your order has shipped!
- YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE AND GAMBLE
- Re: Hey
- THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SALE! I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing lots of business types who have written lots about how optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company broke and homeless too. So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug", particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb), and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and <sleep stuff> compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for exactly the reasons you listed, like: "We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z% more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the bed." |