The influence of social media on society is much stronger than one can imagine. The goal of their business is to keep your attention because it is limited. Businesses need to be more aggressive. What practices do social media use?
Supercomputer Holds Your Attention
You turn on YouTube and, in two hours, realize that you are still watching videos. How is it possible? A supercomputer has focused on your brain. The moment you start the video, your avatar wakes up on the server. And this avatar is modeled from your handles, likes, and everything else. It behaves like you.
Google’s computer can better estimate how long you can watch when it selects different videos. Recommendations are responsible for 70% of YouTube views. It is not the choice of users, but machines. It’s a race between an FB avatar and Google. The business model is simply to keep you watching for as long as possible.
What Does the Media Know About You?
They know about us that we don’t know ourselves. For example, you want to change the brand of diapers or skincare products. It can predict with 95% accuracy that you will leave work, according to an IBM study. According to your 150 FB likes, it is possible to predict your political beliefs.
Thanks to AI, it is possible to predict more and more of your properties without your data. Just see the patterns of mouse movements and clicks. It estimates your political affiliation to be 80% from one tweet. Computers can predict that you are gay before you know it. Or that a woman is pregnant.
Addiction and Mental Disorders
It starts with “update by dragging” techniques. Drag to update the feed, which acts like a slot machine. It causes the same addiction as the one that keeps people at vending machines in Las Vegas. The competition for human attention is intensifying – likes and followers came.
Instead of keeping your attention, it’s much cheaper to become addicted to getting attention from other people. This has caused narcissism and other cultural problems that affect young people in particular today. The rate of mental health problems among girls between the ages of 10 and 14 has increased by 170% in the last 8 years. Social media was identified as the primary reason.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2547970048757448
Photo credit: Pixabay
