Advertising is Destroying Everything | Max Stossel | TEDxUNC

I've ever looked down at your phone or computer and then immediately gotten distracted and forgot why you did so quick show of hands be honest yes okay everybody that used to be my job it was my job to take you out of your world and bring you into mine because once we have your attention we're very good at keeping it and the longer we can keep it the longer we can sell advertising against it and it was around doing this that I realized the entire industry of the technique of the attention economy was working exactly this way but there was this boundless competition to steal your time and as much of it as possible and I realize that as architects of our digital world we need to be better because we can be and we can see that these systems have been designed with intricacy so that companies can keep our attention indefinitely I don't want to keep crushing these freaking candies I don't want these alerts to completely command me I don't care if that panda bear is dancing well maybe with a hula hoop okay this is fantastic I have to share this with my 10 friends and ten thousand strangers caption who wants to throw a panda rager great let me go back about my life for God's sakes I'm trying to right swipe my wife ha it's been 30 seconds in just 2 Facebook Likes or is that just to for which I've been notified let me go back and check inside and see whose likes it tried to hide they don't show them all I wonder why this pandas dancing and another video plays after automatically this one of a gopher that stage turns dramatically it's like my attention is kept systematically raptured by algorithms that know exactly what I want or not what I want just what I'll watch and the people behind this intelligent design genuinely want to better our lives but their bonuses just so happen to be tied to keeping time on site exceptionally high and now even my news apps have been gamified and what am I not gonna click that one simple sex tip guaranteed to blow her mind when we talk about the dangers of advertising we're often talking about body image in the messaging itself and I think it's the wrong problem I want to talk about this about the primary business model of the attention economy in which the more of your time we can steal the more money we make with absolutely no limit and you might be thinking you know who cares so what if all of these companies if I'm sorry so what if all of these companies of Facebook Twitter Instagram snapchat the entire news industry every gaming company even meditation apps have to compete for our attention who cares people have been doing that forever right and I have to compete to give us the best stuff and in practice yes but in reality unfortunately no this isn't a new problem the problem is that we've gotten so good at it as we've carried around these devices in our pockets and we've gotten so good at perfecting the tactics to steal and hold as much of your time as possible that is starting to be a threat to our new system it's starting to be a threat to our way of life and so that begs the question of how well really do these companies know us and so there was a study recently by Michael Kaczynski at a Stanford out of Stanford University and he found that a with just 10 Facebook Likes if we just knew 10 pages you've liked he could tell aspects of your personality better than the average co-worker with 150 he knew you better than your mom with 300 better than your average spouse and these are just pages you've liked this is not everything you've ever clicked on hovered over and how long you've clicked on it and how long you've hovered over it everything you've shared how long you've spent stalking your ex girlfriends and boyfriends on Facebook and Instagram all of that data is what Facebook has but wasn't available to him and yet he was still able to know us better than our spouses he essentially concluded that our smartphone is a vast psychological question that we are constantly filling out both consciously and unconsciously when we hear the sort of stuff we think okay like whatever they know us really well like that's fine they're not making me do anything I don't want to do but I'd like to argue today that as humans we are persuadable there are some things that just work at getting and keeping our attention that we wouldn't have done otherwise and you know we think we can't be fooled but there are some things that just work there are some ways in which we are just de siiva Belov the attention economy companies that are stealing that are fighting for our time when I know us so well when they live in our pockets when they profit off of our time and they're willing to do whatever it whatever works to get it what world does that create and we'll start to see that what like what works isn't necessarily what's good or what we actually want there's a difference between what I want and what I'll watch so what works to keep you engaged in scrolling if you spend the most time on Facebook when you're angry and lonely then that algorithm as its optimizing to keep you there for as long as possible is optimizing to keep you angry and lonely and it's not because there's someone evil at Facebook sitting behind a screen saying AHA I want to ruin your emotions no these people are doing their jobs and they're doing it really well at keeping you on their site but the consequence is our emotional state and I want to show you a quick video that just sort of gives you a sense that we're not really the customer in these ecosystems or the product and I think this shows that quite well [Music] make them laugh cry Wow and by that's what the algorithms are optimized for they don't inherently care about us of course the people at Facebook want to make us happy in some regard but we're not the primary shareholder the advertisers are and what works starts - then you're very fundamentally change the stories that we tell so we know as we're posting on Facebook we're all as advertisers we're measuring as news organizations we're measuring what's effective what is working in this system right now and we start to see ah that anger is really doing quite well and then you know pretty much every article we see on Facebook as some version of this headline right this is why you should be angry click here to feel right about why you're angry that's pretty much where it's become because that works and we start to do what works but is that news similarly what works has absolutely nothing to do with truth people are making ten thousand dollars a month just straight up making things up and putting them in front of people who are willing to believe them who would like that confirms their suspicions it confirms their bias it's a very profitable industry I don't know if you've seen one of these articles of the Pope endorses Bernie Sanders or the Pope endorses Donald Trump the Pope does not endorse presidential candidates but you know they're they're convincing they're convincing because they're in front of people who are very willing to believe them and when it happens when it works it happens a lot over the months leading up to the election there was more fake news from fake news sites than mainstream news sites and - granted what counts as mainstream news is up for debate I'm willing to concede that for sure but the amount of information being created and shared from a straight up did this happen or did this not happen standpoint is staggering and once this happens it's very hard to undo there's a very real cost because the lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes by the time any sort of correction is issued by the time people get any sort of right information it's too late if it even does reach them in the first place and just a quick side one another persuasive tactics for making people believe something is to put it on a black background with someone's face in front of it there's absolutely no evidence that Mark Twain said this quote but I found that online I didn't make that just people put things in front of things that make it work on to a separate Mark Twain quote it's easier to fool people than convince them they've been fooled this is part of why this is such a challenge it's because once people are in these zones once they believe what they believe it's so hard to bring people out of that indoctrination and you may have guessed it this time but also not Mark Twain and unfortunately it's not just fake news real organizations real supposedly prestigious news organizations are subject to all of the same factors and they have to resort to this exaggeration to playing into bias to stirring up fear and outrage because it works and they know if they don't do it their competitors will so they have to they feel like they have to be in this game of stealing our time and starting to really break that system two examples here one from the New York Times apologies one from the New York Times and one from Fox New York Times came out with this article talking about how murder rates are rising sharply in many US cities it was later Nate Silver who's a uh who's a statistician really criticized them sharply for presenting misleading statistics but it creates fear it's a very clickable this article will do what will do better than its tame counterpart and then on the right suspect in Quebec mask terror attack was a moroccan origin there was an attack who was not Moroccan but if he is Moroccan that does better and to that audience that is something that works that is a more profitable headline than its alternative and so finally what works also creates different realities this one is one of the most sort of dear to my heart I think is is a challenge and that I asked two friends Ali and Taylor to Google how many refugees committed crimes in Europe and they pretty much got two different answers to that question they asked the question to Google Ali on the left receiving articles that say uh 56% of Syrian refugees committed severe crimes 200,000 crimes committed in Germany in the last year these are very misleading statistics and then on the right Taylor is getting information about how refugees are not dangerous and how there have been no attacks in the u.s. they put the same question into Google they get a different output these people are essentially living in two different worlds they have different versions of what reality is because personalization is yet another tactic that works it keeps us engaged in spending more time but is this really what we want out of our news out of our information out of our Internet and it's not just Google here it's Facebook it's all the people we've been talking about are dabbling in personalization in one way or another because it works and if they don't their competitors will and that's why this advertising model is so dangerous and so we have this idea that the Internet is free right we have that all these free services and it's so wonderful but what's the real cost of free what is the real cost of getting of all of our information without paying for it because I'd like to argue that it's siloed realities it's not being able to trust news or each other because we're getting our information from news so then how do we know who we can trust there and this war of distraction of having to fight off thousands of people whose job it is to break down our self control because it's their job to get our time and it ultimately creates this angry polarized population this place that we're in now it's created a world where the best engineers and developers they have to use their talents to manipulate our emotions and steal our time it's created a world where news organizations can't afford to value truth to the extent which is necessary for democracy to function it's created a world where we're constantly fighting for control of our own minds against this persuasion and we have different versions of what reality is I'd like to argue that's a very expensive cost for all of these free services and so how do we fix this luckily we have three companies that really have are uniquely positioned with prime opportunity to do so but step one is that we have to separate profits from how we spend our time the game can't be how do we take up as much of your time as possible because this is the cost of doing that but what if we maximize something else what if we maximize things that really mattered to us what if we imagine a world that doesn't compete for your attention but instead competes to help you thrive that's hard to imagine exactly what that would look like so I want to give a couple examples you have you know you have someone making minimum wage trying to provide for their family imagine if all sorts of companies we're competing doing what works to help them accomplish that where the goal weren't about how do we steal as much of your time but how do we help you do something that truly matters to you what if dating apps weren't measuring their success and how many swipes we had what if they were measuring what works to help us find meaningful relationships or whatever you're looking for what if news organizations weren't competing for our time and clicks weird having didn't have to compete to the base instincts to the race to the bottom of our brainstem what if instead they were competing to do what works to inform us about the world around us to tell us what matters not just what's scary starts to get into the questions of ikon what is news why do we have news we've come a long way from that similarly what if this algorithm that knows us so well on Facebook better than we know ourselves in some senses what if it we're doing everything that works to help give us what matters to us doing everything that works to help us spend time spend time with the people we care about Facebook could take us all on like the greatest night out of our lives it knows so much about our surroundings and knows so much about us I could just get it take me on an adventure button it'll be awesome and similarly when you go to Facebook for news as too many of us do it can start to think about that same question what is news for what are we actually optimizing for what works to inform this person not just keep them and the challenge here as many of you are probably thinking is well okay how do these companies make their money but it's not as it's not as bad as you think Facebook makes about what dollar sixty one per person per month that's a dollar two quarters a dime and a penny that's the cost of a lot of this world that we're living in if we start to be willing to pay for services that truly bring us value and I'm not recommending we pay for Facebook now I don't want to do that but if companies do start to offer us real products that are enhancing the world that we live in and measuring their success based on how well it affects our lives we're going to be need to what we're going to need to be willing to pay for that and as customers we're on the hook for that as well but it helps us stop being the product and start being the customer and so we have to fix this quickly because every day that we don't we're being driven further and further apart we're getting more and more polarized this is a critical issue but we can do it we can stop maximizing time spent we can get that off of the table as the metric that matters the most and we can start basing things on human values we can change from time spent to time well-spent architects of our digital world you have more data information and control over our attention the tools to tweak our emotions or return to your experience but is that what we should do or should you build digital tools so advanced they can actually enhance the world outside the device in our hands can we add so much value that it lets us put our phones back in our pants as fast as we possibly can not time sucking time giving innovation that's what it means to be truly technologically advanced the future is not all screens its humanity enhanced thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 42,033

Rating: 4.8970132 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Technology, Internet, Marketing, Media, Social Media

Id: vmDwDHwJTQI

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017