Facebook exploits our weakness – but we have the power to switch off
Poor, poor us. Exploited by tax-avoiding rich people, manipulated by venal politicians and corrupted by global industry. Or at least, so goes the incessant whingy line of current opinion everywhere you look. Well, I have no time for it; I don’t buy that we’re all poor victims being taken advantage of left and right.
Last week, speaking to tech site Axios, Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, admitted that when the company was started, Facebook’s creators – shock horror – wanted to make us spend as much time and attention as possible on the application. “That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you... more likes and comments.”
Hardly surprising. But Parker went further, really getting the violins out on our behalf (though too late, clearly). “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways,” he went on dramatically. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
I found these comments both
deeply superior and deviously, disingenuously self-pitying. Plus, the idea that a company should want to make money off our predilection for pleasure should not come as a scandal. It’s time for us to buck up and take responsibility for the fact that we do have a choice, and that the biggest bar to our exerting it is often simple laziness.
According to Mr Parker, we may all be dupes, our brains shot to God-knows-where, but he himself shows that you can resist if you want to. He admits that he desists from social media because it is “too much of a time sink”, but then concludes his remarks with an immensely holier-than-thou statement. “I use these platforms,” he pronounced. “I just don’t let these platforms use me.”
All that is well and good, and of course Mr Parker’s resolution is to be admired. It’s also true that Facebook, along with all social media, trades on our need for validating, dopaminesquirting little red dots, and takes up far more of our time than it should.
But at the end of the day, we all have a choice. Cigarettes are lovely – I’d chain smoke if it wasn’t deadly – but it is, so I don’t. Likewise, clever techies have made social media almost irresistibly tempting. But we can always control our intake – it’s just a matter of willpower.