[thecatspaw]

A new-to-me term I learned recently which I feel quite nicely relates to this post is Consumer neuroscience.

Wikipedia clinically describes the field as "The goal of the field is to find neural explanations for consumer behaviors in individuals both with or without disease." Personally I have a less favourable description of it. How to make people addicted to your product, and spend more money than they should.

[nonrandomstring]

BJ Fogg [1] is someone who could have contributed to our recent "Things you built and regret" thread. His "Persuasive Computers" paper gets blamed (for example by Tristan Harris) for the explosion of attention economics. That's perhaps unfair as his Tiny Habits work seemed geared toward wellbeing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Fogg

[cratermoon]

Fogg was pretty early in identifying some of the risks, although at the time (late 90s) I don't believe he took them seriously. One of the earliest critics from inside the industry, that I can find, was Joe Kraus, a partner at Google Ventures. You can watch his 2012 (I think) talk at https://vimeo.com/240721308

ETA Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr, 2008

[leetbulb]

Having worked in related industries, I've always referred to this as the "dopamine / reward loop" (I think this is fairly well accepted?). Some people are predisposed to hardcore exploitation (e.g. gambling addicts), but from what I understand, and generally speaking, we're all capable of falling victim to some degree (we're all susceptible to some level of superfluous dopamine response). Not helping, industry shaping our society to modulate where the average falls on this spectrum. A normal child having a cellphone is very similar to a normal child taking amphetamines, both yielding unnatural amounts of dopamine. Both can very well cause ADD-like symptoms after being taken away. There's also a parallel here to sugar and Type 2 diabetes, and other disorders.

I think there may be a balance, but whatever is happening today is totally exploitative and should be regulated in some way, at least up until a certain age.

[saiya-jin]

> should be regulated in some way, at least up until a certain age.

Its called proper parenting. As a father of little 2 miracles, I can clearly see how easily they get addicted to basically everything-screen, and many more things like junk food. And its 1-way road.

The hard part is going into full relentless battle with your own children who will use various psychological tricks, just like adult addicts, to get their kicks. Almost nothing is off the table. So you often end up with verbal contracts like you are buying next twitter to have some rule of sanity, but kids tend to ignore it anyway.

We personally are +- not there yet, so its relatively easy to manage 1 and 3 year olds for screens. But we see lost battles all around us, kids small and big glued to phones, tablets, tvs, just that parents can have some time off. Not everybody fails, but we see success mostly with parents that simply dont have tv at home and use (rarely) phones more like old nokias (with attached camera) rather than smart phones. You can't expect kids to respect prohobition when parents are clearly ignoring it.

Proper parenting these days is hard, I guess also due to higher bar for parenting success than just 'kids are alive when entering adulthood'.

[leetbulb]

Totally agree. I cannot imagine how difficult it is for modern parents to manage this issue. By "regulated" I did mean 90% parenting, but it's also a larger, systemic societal issue that needs to be at least considered, quickly, before the current generation(s) who realize it no longer have influence and the issue solidifies as normal in our culture.

On the other hand, it's probably just the, albeit sad, natural order.

[saiya-jin]

Maybe the trick is to clearly label these addictions across whole society as harmful, the lower the age the more intense/deep/long lasting harm and act accordingly. When we managed it rather quickly globally on proper narcotics this should be achievable.

I've met parents who were saying 'we have digital kids' when their kids were acting like heroin addicts on withdrawal just to play on phone another 30 mins, and they were saying this as something normal. I get it why, admitting you are raising hard addicts and it was you who failed to prevent that must be outright unacceptable for many. People have this innermost desire to feel good about their actions and decisions and this would be properly undefendable if hard truths were told.

But it comes back to parents too - spending more time with kids instead of chasing career and money kids have 0 interest in (which is smart!), more meaningfully, be an example in ie activities, sports and hobbies. In an age when obesity jumps through the roof, people are seriously messed up after 2 years of covid lockdowns and all news are about doom and gloom. Tough.

[leetbulb]

> I've met parents who were saying 'we have digital kids'

Never heard this. Very interesting.

To your point, I agree. I am curious if there's been an official term coined for this... is it actually "digital kid?" I am curious if there will end up being a stigma applied to whatever it is as a sort of natural course-correction, or if it becomes the "norm." Humans love labels and their connotation.

PS: Hats off to you and the other parents in this thread with similar understanding.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

If there is one thing that I took from my marketing classes, it is that marketing basically starts with trying to understand people as they actually are. You cannot sell stuff well if you do not understand how people work. For example, as annoyed as I was to discover it, it is genuinely hard to argue with Patzer's looks[1] and how perception can alter my disposition towards buying something.

I genuinely hate the ads-tech, ad-ridden web, and ads in general, but I cannot help but to admire it for starting from a very simple 'this is how things really are'.

[1]https://gordonpatzer.com/

[cratermoon]

You may also find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captology