Our online experience doesn’t push us towards a change in our lives
Technology provides us with more powerful means to accomplish what we already were doing before or brand new means to do things we never imagined before. But it doesn’t go further. Then it’s up to each one of us to choose how to leverage those means, working on ourselves in order to evolve and exploit them at their full potential. Technology isn’t a magic wand that transforms us, technology alone it’s not enough. We can use a drone to spy on people, if that’s what we wanted to do anyway also before drones came. Or we can use it to film the landscape around us. It depends on what we would do firsthand if we could fly. Otherwise we could use a drone for something we never thought of before, an idea picked up among the infinite new possibilities given by the use of drones, in a creative way: to create something that wasn’t there before, not even in our thoughts. As long as technology widens the horizons of our potential, we can try and evolve at the same pace with our minds, in order to make our lives better, richer and more vibrant thanks to technology.
Unfortunately there aren’t many people taking up this challenge, questioning themselves, knocking down internal walls and taboos, shaking off their laziness and shyness. Most of us use technology just to enhance, speed up and simplify what they already did or thought even before technology. It is no small thing, but it’s very limiting and it leaves people unchanged, in fact caught up in their drives, passions and habits, since they can fulfil them more and better using technology.
The Internet makes no difference. It’s one of the technologies that most disrupted our lives, probably the one that had the biggest impact in the last fifty years. But still we didn’t change accordingly. Actually in many cases we took cover even more in our predetermined positions, squeezing in our comfort zones. If we analyze the services provided by the web, we get among others: search for information about any topic editable by any person in the world, communication with any person in the world, publication of content accessible by any person in the world. It’s huge, and despite the years that have passed there’s still a lot to process.
Over time, many mediators — sites and applications looking simple to our eyes but more and more internally sophisticated — placed themselves above the hard, simple network made of computers, routers and other digital machinery that together with protocols and dedicated software architectures materialize what we know as the internet. Those mediators represent the interfaces between us and the web. They make our online experience more comfortable, effective, immersive, but they influence and affect it just as heavily. Which are those mediators? It ranges from the (relatively) less intrusive ones such as web browsers that allow us to navigate through web pages, to search engines, social media and content sharing platforms. The web is neutral, in the sense that it doesn’t tell us how we have to use it, whereas mediators push us towards a specific direction and not other ones, because they have been designed like that by someone who made some choices, considering the possible options, weighing up their pros and cons. Each mediator is the always evolving result of this hard work done behind the scenes by who provides it and places it on the web. Which search results should be the most relevant? Which friends or posts should be shown first to the user? Which videos in a content sharing platform should be recommended? It depends on the choices made by who designed them. Unlike the mediators, the web doesn’t show those freedom degrees: I do have infinite solutions I can design to make it work, but at the end two nodes of the network — i.e. two remote computers — are connected or not, there isn’t space for much more than this. We can think of the web as the lego bricks, while mediators are the lego constructions. The freedom degrees of mediator designers give them a huge power over our online experience, what we can get out of it and how it will impact our lives.
Let’s start with browsers, which can reveal more design choices than it may seem at a first look. Any browser has its own little local memory, where it can save files coming from sites it shows to the user. Among these are the cookies, little text files which identify the user on a specific site. The browser sends them back to the server of the site each time the user comes back to the same web pages. In this way the site recognises the user and sets up a personalized environment, very much like that one they left the previous time, as if they never left. But a site can also send someone else’s cookies, called third-party cookies, which it accepted to send on behalf of other companies. So the third party can now know when a specific user visits a specific site and all the other ones it made a deal with. This knowledge will let it embed some ad-hoc banners in sites accepting them, which will seem to magically match the current user’s interests and will provide the nudge needed to click and buy.
This little example alone can give a glimpse of how these mediators between us and the web can affect us. The more the applications are complex, the more they will imply design choices and the more they will influence our behaviour and our thoughts. The most visited site in the world (as in July 2020) is google.com, the search engine that allows us to find the sites and information we are looking for. This apparently very simple site holds a very complex logic, that binds a user search query — in a certain time and location — to an ordered list of results. What it may look like an objective relation between the string entered by the user in the search field and the most relevant web results, carries actually a big component of arbitrariness and design choices. The search engine objective is obviously to perform well, providing the user with a high quality service. But it could also be not to upset them too much with results they didn’t expect and which are not consistent at all with their biases and interests, or even to strengthen their ideas and beliefs about the world, themselves and the others. Then, just change the logic that computes the web results, or just even their order, and you will get a completely different effect on the user: the same keyword entered by the user can lead to sites encouraging them to do something or its opposite. If a user always gets inputs reinforcing their biases and previous inclinations, they are likely to be happier, more satisfied, less self-questioning, more inclined to atrophy around ideas which will look objective, because never questioned. They will live in what is called a filter bubble, a bubble letting only non disturbing information pass through, which basically will provide the user with the reassuring message: ”You are right to think what you think or to do what you do, keep going”.
Besides reassuring the user, a mediator can also suggest new mental paths to explore. Here the range of design choices is even broader. Youtube, the second most visited site on earth, provides its users with video recommendations they could find interesting, giving what they have already watched. To stretch as much as possible the time they stay on the site, proposed videos will tend to appear even more shocking, sweet, violent, smart than the one they are currently watching, so that the site can ride the wave of users’ enthusiasm about the topic covered by the video, towards a never-ending climax. This design choice has the effect of pushing users towards more and more extreme videos compared to that one they started from, videos which would arouse stronger emotions: they will amaze, scare, delight more, at the end becoming necessary in order to keep feeling those so powerful sensations. Conspiracies, improbable theories, violence are just some of the basic ingredients to sustain and fuel the wave of strong emotions that the site wants to ride in users so that it can keep them glued to the screen. And the more those videos, which otherwise would have remained on the margins of the site content offer, become viral, the more they get recommended to other users, in a snowball effect that brings to the foreground ideas and images that before would hardly have left the mind of the person who thought them or saw them as a direct viewer in real life.
Facebook, the third most visited site (but this applies also to other social media), brings this aspect to the next level. Not only information and videos fall into this logic, but also people we are in contact with, our own friends or following. The site chose to make it easier to communicate with people we have already chatted or shared likes and visualizations in the past. The idea is that it’s more likely that users will keep staying active on the site when there’s often some new content on their home posted by users they know well. Maybe by liking a picture of a friend’s holidays, writing a comment on a video from another friend, and so on, their boost to interact will reignite and they will stay longer online on the site. Their new activity will, in turn, lead to more activity and time online from their nearest friends, because they will see the new likes and comments in the foreground on their homes. The collateral effect of bringing to the foreground who we know better is to leave in the background who we don’t really know yet. With the passing of time our contacts on the site will fall more and more sharply into two groups: who will always make it to the top of our visualizations and who will always stay behind, having hardly the chance to be visualized by us in our daily scrolling routine. It’s the same logic leading the rich to be even richer and the poor poorer, or the experienced workers to gain more and more experience, while the inexperienced remain without experience. So it will be easier and easier for us to keep in touch with people that are already part of our life, but it will be harder and harder for a new contact to find a little slot of our daily attention to build a new relationship with us. And obviously here the filter bubble effect is even more evident, because the site brings to our attention the content and information that is liked or commented on by some of our friends. So I will live and thrive in the cozy environment made by the opinions and content linked by my best friends: what could be better than this?
All these logics have in common the same thing: they lead us to the conservation and even the extremization of the existent, long-established, clear of surprises, to the detriment of the new, unexpected, potentially upsetting. There is no perverse logic behind, it’s just the best way those sites came up with in order to track us and exploit our attention for their own purposes. If I know that a specific user searched racing cars in the past, then I think they like them and thus I try to show racing cars even more so as to keep them ‘alive’ as much as I can on my site, not making them leave. Those sites can (for now) only reason retrospectively, analyzing what a certain user did in the past and trying to foresee what they will do in the future and how to influence them and bring them towards the most profitable direction. But all that leaves out one aspect that should be fundamental in our online experience, just like it should be in our real life: getting in touch with the different, the weird, the atypical, whether it’s an idea or a person. Learning to face realities far away from ours and maybe getting to understand them and love them for what they are. The Internet gave us the potential to do so, but also the illusion to be already doing that. Actually for how the most common mediators we use to go online have been designed, the opposite is happening: we are more and more pushed towards our inner close-minded part of ourselves, and towards people and ideas rewarding it. And much of this is due to how the main tools we use when we are online have been designed, because we observe and know reality through them.
