Digital Platforms: The new Arsène Lupin of your attention
Beware of the thieves!
What is the common point between the smart and charismatic thief of the twentieth century and the new Digital Platforms emerged during the past few years? They are both a clever and crafty “gentleman burglar”. One will carry out his misdeeds at night with elegance and attitude, the other one will steal your attention and use your cognitive weaknesses also with elegance and attitude.
Digital Platforms, the new big players
Digital Platforms like the GAFA and NATU groupings have been on everyone’s lips and in every newspaper for a few years now. They have made themselves vital by disrupting traditional industries and they seem to want the best experience for each user, whether it be a simple visitor, a “friend” or a paying customer. But what is a Digital Platform?
Either the definition of a digital platform on Internet is way too complex or too simplistic, we are dealing with a new business model that allows multiple kind of participants (producers and consumers) to connect to it, interact with each other and exchange value. A so called “network effect” has all the hallmarks of a game. Whether you are a Social Platform (Facebook, Instagram…) or a Media Platform (Netflix, Spotify…) or an Application Store (Android/Apple), you create a community that can be in touch with each other or at least share their common interests. No one can resist the urge to be part of it, as the user experience is so good (in real-time, no training needs and self- service)
Sounds good, right? No, it’s not. These Digital Platforms have become well accepted as the new big players of our societies a new reign has come where getting your attention and getting you hooked is the key. You became a victim of a gently and crafty burglar, that is everyday powering its algorithm to steal your time and get you locked in its platform by using cognitive weaknesses.
Stealing your attention
Your attention makes you a customer. In a recent interview, Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook and once co-founder of Napster had shocking news to reveal. He considers himself a “conscientious objector” of social media. According to Parker, “the though process was how to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible and that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone like one of your photo or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content aterthat. It’s a social validation feedback loop” Which he admits it is exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. On Youtube, there are more videos made in one minute that a human can see in one day and the platform by a complex customer data-driven algorithm keeps improving itself (by tryings and errors) in order to get every day a little more minute of your attention. Same with Netflix with default auto-play that which makes it easier for users to stay on the platform. The list could go on and on as the big players are so clever and crafty to steal your attention in an elegant way. Likes, shares, comments, uploads, notifications on applications, aggressive contents…coming from theses Digital Platforms have created a brand-new world of mutli-tasking and continuous stimulations that are taking away our attention.
Meanwhile, although our brains have stayed fundamentally the same since the stone age, 20000 years of low level of stimuli (hunting and harvesting stimuli) have profoundly changed over the past few years into an explosion of stimuli to the point where we have lost control. People are bombarded by the food they crave, tempted by seductive images, and urged to buy products designed to appeal to specific wants, regardless of need. And there are threats to our health and productivity that we are just beginning to distinguish…
All reptiles responding to stimulations?
By running after all these stimulations and distractions made by Digital Platforms, we are gradually losing a part of our attention, our memory and perceptions of the world. In the book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose by the Harvard’s psychologist Deirdre Barret, she argued that human instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life and she extends the concept of supernormal stimulus developped by Nikolaas Tinbergen to humans.
Researchers like Nikolas Tinbergen have long known that lab animals’ behavior can be manipulated by artificially stimulating their natural instincts. A bigger artificial egg would more likely to be chosen by chickens for brooding etc…these animals end up preferring artificial objects to the natural ones.
And we, humans living in modern society, are something like those lab animals : Our innate instincts are overstimulated by unnatural products, as well as by advertising and images. And, like them, we respond almost unconsciously: reaching for more food, Web-surfing for porn, dumping time and money on “cute” stuff etc…So, our attention and our humanity seem to be taken away by these big players. But how to blame them ?
We chose this artificial world of our own making where escaping those stimuli is so not easy and we value theses stimulations. The only thing left is to be aware of it and change our natural habits and instincts.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
