Whoops, I changed the world.

This is the basis of a talk delivered at TEDxBradford - you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5ckRXf7aRw

Who am I? No one of note. That’s one of the key things I’m going to explain.

We live in a world where a vast number of people are glued to their phones, using websites and apps for myriad reasons. 

And it’s not just a Western trend. The photo you see is by Craig Mod. In an essay in the Atlantic, he described being in Myanmar, and he kept seeing farmers sat atop their buffalo, glued to their phones. He asked one what he was doing. “Playing Clash of Clans.” So he asked another. He was playing Clash of Clans too. They were all playing Clash of Clans. They were on the buffalo as the signal was better a little higher up. Craig tried the game and was also hooked, though without a buffalo signal booster.

And it’s not just when we’re alone. It’s when we’re killing time, with friends. Sometimes you see people sharing a screen, but all too often we see groups of people together more engrossed in their virtual worlds than the one they’re participating in right now.

And those virtual worlds have a hashtag for everything - and maybe it won’t be history if it doesn’t get a hashtag, or that’s the danger. Especially when we see, through the work of people like Mark Graham, that there are vast areas of the world who are not contributing to the content online, and their story is being written for them, if at all.

Some people have had their 15 minutes of fame for all the wrong reasons. One woman became famous as the ‘racist PR woman’, who, while in an airport in LA, tweeted a clumsy, sarcastic joke which was meant to be a play on her white privilege, and by the time she landed in South Africa she’d lost her job after a media furore about racism. Or the chap that made a joke on twitter about blowing up an airport, who not only lost his job but was arrested - and all because of the online disinhibition effect - which is a fancy way of saying that, on the web, you say things you wouldn’t say in real life. Which is probably why there are so many bullies, trolls, and generally unpleasant people being as horrible to others as possible. #gamergate

There’s a particularly unachievable beauty standard now, all images being filtered to death; and suddenly life is performative, because we’re all on camera, all of the time. To the point that myths abound that the iPhone XS’s camera has a built in filter. And why wouldn’t we believe the rumour? It’d be entirely in keeping with the fake, inauthentic Instagrammable culture.

Is it coincidence that we’re seeing higher prevalence of impotence in young men, in a generation who’ve had unprecedented access to porn via the internet? And millenials are having less sex generally than previous generations as reported in various studies. Why is that? Raj Persaud talked about the fact that in his view, society is losing the art of seduction with apps and hookup culture. But maybe it’s just as simple as young people not interacting with each other in real life, because they’re too occupied with their virtual one.

But all this screen time is a problem. We are all using our phones all the time, and our children model our behaviour. But when very small children get hooked on tablets and smartphones, they can cause permanent damage to their developing brains. It impedes the ability to focus, to concentrate, to lend attention, to sense other people’s attitudes and communicate with them, and to build a large vocabulary—a not insignificant list.

And ‘always on’ culture. The expectation that because you’re connected, you’re accessible, responsive, available. Always ‘on’. It’s exhausting. People are stressed, anxious. Curren and Hill have found that perfectionism is increasing over time, with perfectionism defined as a combination of excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations. 

Maybe it’s not inherently bad, but it’s different, and concerning; and only hindsight will tell if it was a necessary evolutionary adaption or mis-step.

So how did we get to this point?

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, back in the 90s, marketing departments were starting to become aware of this thing called the World Wide Web, and maybe they could use it to sell stuff.

Lots of people like myself, with no experience of doing anything similar (or anything useful at all) arrived into a fledgling industry called New Media and started taking briefs from clients, and figuring out how to use the tech to try and achieve the aims. Before eCommerce was big, the brief might be ‘put our brochure online and make people want to buy our products.’ And to make you want to buy a jacket for example, you need to ‘experience’ the jacket, but how do we do that? Well, we let you spin it around, zoom in and out, maybe pull all the zips up and down - that’s particularly fun in technical sportswear where you’ve got zips all over the place. Play with the thing, and when you’ve done so, here’s a link to the store finder, so you can go and buy it. But because you couldn’t buy it there and then, it was hard to show the link to a sale, so the metric to ‘prove’ that the website had made a difference, to sceptical Finance Directors, was how long we could keep you on the website; so we made loads of games, and toys. Frivolities. And we’d get you to invite your friends, of course - spread the message. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool, after all.

I fell into the industry in ‘98, lured by an ad that mentioned arranging flowers (true story, for another time) and it was 2001 when I got a role that involved using my own ideas. We were all making a lot of it up as we went along i.e. making ‘cool stuff’ rather than evidenced solutions, but there was an awful lot of educating to be done all round, so we got away with it. I remember presenting the idea for a new website on microfiche on an overhead projector. It sounds incongruous but it was pretty effective, as I could use the physical layers of microfiche to demonstrate that a website is a 3 dimensional space, unlike a brochure.

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”

Very early on we were talking about ‘learned web conventions’ - it’d been observed that people read in an F shape, so we duly put the navigation at the top or the left and the logo top left or right, but knowing what I know now about echo chambers, I wonder if they were really all that ‘learned’ at that point in time, or whether we as hivemind just reinforced the patterns we knew, and different approaches were few and far between. Jakob Nielsen was king of the internet, as far as I was concerned, I think it’s fair to call him the father of usability, and we all took his advice to the letter, based as it was on observing and measuring behaviour. It's just that, there weren't all that many people to measure, back then.

It didn’t take long to get obsessed with measuring things, because how else we were going to justify the money the client was spending - we had to prove our work had a positive impact. For my post-grad studies I came up with a model to measure ‘engagement’, which is a hideous buzz word but attempts to describe the fact that we’ve been trying to capture and hold people’s attention to shape their behaviour (to meet our shareholders’ aims).

The model came out of years of armchair psychology and anecdotal learnings based on measurement. That armchair psychology was part personal interest, part naked attempt to apply science to our art to persuade clients to spend more money. Lots of people like me read books, articles and theories, like Nudge Theory, and learnt about ‘gamification’ and the way you create immersive gameplay - months of work in a game is months of work, and difficult to walk way from; we looked at different attention states; and then applied the ideas to filling in forms to get you to give as much data as we could possibly get out of you; or to get you to put more stuff in your shopping basket. We wanted you to spend longer with the brand, use branded tools to make that brand part of your life.

So, we found ways to do things, then did design research in usability labs, combined with the data captured from people using the website / banner ad / thing; and all this meant we could reinforce behaviours, model and predict the behaviours we desired.

Essentially, we learnt how to create behavioural change for cash. I’ve had the privilege to mostly avoid working for companies I find to be morally distasteful - I don’t wish to promote gambling, cosmetic surgery, anyone targeting ‘sub-prime’ audiences, for example, but there are people working in these fields using exactly the same kind of techniques I’ve been describing, and to what end? To make disadvantaged people poorer, to steal the time and attention of those who would be better focussing elsewhere. No, thank you.

But, I’ve still pedalled loads of ‘stuff’ that now chafes with my environmental values. And I could apply the standard disclaimer: I was only doing what I was asked, it wasn’t me, it was my stakeholders - but that’s disingenuous. No one forced me to do anything. I enjoy solving problems, and there’s immense satisfaction in looking at the data and being able to ‘prove’ that your idea has worked.

But there is a real problem here, in that people like me didn’t realise we were part of a revolution whilst we were busying ourselves with the work that underpinned it; so how do you stop a revolution when the revolutionaries don’t know they’re in revolt? I was careful to avoid saying the revolutionaries are revolting, but I couldn’t not mention the gag.

Anyway, while we were busy focussing on what was under our noses, gradually lots of very intelligent people started to research the phenomena they were observing, and told us about what we’d done, what this revolution is doing to society - Sherry Turkle, Leslie Purlow, Naomi Baron and their work around ‘always on’ culture; Danah Boyd and her work around online disinhibition and ‘hacking the attention economy’. If you’ve ever been Rick-rolled, you’ve had your attention ‘hacked’. If you haven’t been Rick-rolled, at some point someone thought it would be funny to trick people into watching Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up by posting a link that looked to be to something else and directing people to that video. It took off, and a fad was born. Online, we have meme-ification as popular culture - odd little curios take off as a ‘moment’ and proliferate more jokes and memes.

Sean Parker, ex-President of Facebook, admitted at the end of 2017 that in creating Facebook their thought process was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And they succeeded, because every ‘like’ or comment or share gives you a little dopamine hit. The dopamine process is the basis of learning: it anticipates a reward to an action and, if the reward is met, enables the behaviour to become a habit. This is why so many people are obsessed with social media - their brain has learnt that they will get a reward if they share content that people interact with.

A gradual accumulation of knowledge brought me to a sudden realisation, that I wasn’t all that comfortable with how the industry was impacting on ‘real life’, and the way we behave and interact with each other.

Who should be 'in charge' of societal change?

There’s something faintly horrifying to me about the idea of societal change driven by marketing budgets. You could argue that it’s no different to the changes driven by the industrial revolution, and in both cases, someone was trying to make other people do things differently for more profit. But I think the difference is that behavioural and then societal change was a side effect in the industrial revolution, but in the digital revolution we were absolutely trying to change your behaviour, to make you do things. Looking at the impact of that, it all feels a bit ‘icky’.

And now personalisation algorithms are well established and creating echo chambers, and suddenly far right political groups are gaining momentum across Europe; and the extremist groups are becoming noisier, braver; shouldn’t that give us pause for thought? The same predictive data modelling that was being used for marketing is now being used by political parties to win elections and other key votes, and evidence suggests rules have been broken all round.

We’ve been doing all this in the absence of a single ‘ruling’ authority, or governing body, who could guide us ethically, morally, anthropologically; and given the state of international politics right now I don’t think that will change any time soon. We’ll get local laws, mandates and regulations, but anything wider is about ‘best endeavours’, ‘goodwill’, and centres on principles, and ethical ideals.

But there’s an issue, in that there’s no real feedback loop. All that great research is out there, but if I choose to ignore it, bury my head in the sand and just sit tweaking a webpage based on what the data tells me we should do to make you buy more stuff - how do we change anything?

So what do we do about it?

There's no easy answer. Firstly, look around. Acknowledge what's going on. Read the studies. Educate ourselves. Become armchair anthropologists rather than armchair psychologists. And let’s hope those working in the fields of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, neural interfaces and bio-hacking take stock and look at what we did just through ‘moving services online’. Look at how fragmented our attention is. Look at how stressed and anxious people are. Look at all those people glued to screens, ignoring the real people around them.

Maybe we can start applying our skills for good, rather than evil (or commercial gain, at least).

But mostly, we need to recognise, that anyone working in an ‘emergent’ industry that involves human-computer interaction, is a social revolutionary with the potential to change the world.

With power, comes great responsibility. Innovate responsibly, folks.