Thought-Process for brainstorming ethics

Social media ethics is not the easiest thing to talk about. Not only do we have to try and think of certain ethics that should be in place, but we now must try and make ethics that are fined tuned to everyone. If not everyone, then at least most social media users. We have spent a couple days in class talking about ethics, and it is all very confusing to me. Confusing how something like social media has gone unchecked for so long? Everyone seems to have something to say about it (Even more so now) and still nothing is coming out of it. We can all argue and write all the books we want, but social media platforms are just becoming more infringing on our daily lives. Certain rules if you will, need to be put in place to limit these kinds of infringements on our attention.

Just recently, I noticed an influx of notifications from Instagram and Facebook. Telling me things like ‘Your friend who hasn’t posted in awhile, just posted.’ I don’t care enough about things like that to have my phone grab my attention from something else, to know this is happening. Same thing goes with Facebook, except I am starting to get notifications when my friends post which helps the line of thinking that each time we post, we are robbing our loved ones of their attention and time. Our phones are increasingly robbing us of our lives and everyone seems to be powerless against it. Sometimes I want to just break my phone and not have to worry about it, but the entire world runs on technology, so that’s unlikely. Ultimately, it comes down to what Williams mentions in Chapter 10 of his book Stand Out Of Our Light.

Yet for all its information benefits, the rapid proliferation of digital technologies has compromised attention, in this wide sense, and produced a suite of cognitive-behavioral externalities that we are still only beginning to understand and mitigate. The enveloping of human life by information technologies has resulted in an informational environment whose dynamics the global persuasion industry has quickly come to dominate, and, in a virtually unbounded manner, has harnessed to engineer unprecedented advances in techniques of measurement, testing, automation, and persuasive design. The process continues apace, yet already we find ourselves entrusting enormous portions of our waking lives to technologies that compete with one another to maximize their share of our lives, and, indeed, to grow the stock of life that's available for them to capture.

So with that in mind, what are we supposed to do about technology not having our best interests at heart? With that, we can try and brainstorm a few ethics that could start on the road to keeping these large platforms in check. When it comes to stealing our attention and time, their should be rules in place that limit the notification usage by social media platforms. Multiple notifications are just being used to keep you glued to their specific platform for longer. These companies don't care about your life outside of their platform, but encourage you to share that very life they don't care about. What does that say about these companies? I think it says that they could care less about your life unless it is broad casted through their platform, that way they can continue to stack up eyes on their product. A secondary part of attention stealing is Ads. On par with the notifications, I noticed that ads are becoming more frequent as time goes on. At times, YouTube even makes you watch a 30 second ad before your video. This serves two purposes, it helps the creator, but it also helps YouTube. YouTube is notorious for demonetizing content creators, and not really explaining why they are doing so. If the creators videos are demonetized, who is making the money off of all of the eyes on the site? YOUTUBE. These things are purposefully set-up for the company to always succeed in the end.

This class has honestly changed my perspective on social-media as a whole. I can easily see how it would be very easy for people not to notice what is going on. Their ways of marketing things are specifically meant to trigger something in our brains, and that is what most of their marketing is. I think if a company is purposefully going and manipulating our brains to react to their product, that should definitely be checked in some way. To keep going with that line of thinking, I think their should be rules in place that does not allow companies to take the easy way out and just make things that trigger our brains by default. I think the market would profit from having a healthier relationship with technology, because at the rate we are going, we might end up merging with it. The question is, is that a future you look forward to?

Citation: Williams, James. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.