Children of the Internet: The Real Reason We’re All Addicted

According to one report, the average American will spend around nine years of their life staring at their phone.¹ Nine years sounds pretty crazy to me. But on the other hand, with all of the other news about shrinking attention spans and lengthening screen times, there’s a part of me that’s not surprised. And maybe you’re not surprised either. I think we’re all aware by now that addictions to the internet and social media are widespread issues in our society. It spans generations, affecting the young and the old. Most of us are hooked, in one way or another. You’ve probably seen a child in a restaurant spellbound by whatever youtube video is blasting from their ipad and thought, something’s wrong here. We have new words now, like “doomscrolling”, “brainrot”, and “binge-watching” to describe the sometimes toxic relationship we have with our devices. Even though I don’t have social media anymore, it’s egregious the amount of hours I sometimes spend wasting away in bed, sucked into the void of Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, and even Pinterest, selling my soul to the algorithms of whatever app I’m on that’s profiting off of my addictions.

Sometimes, because of my intense guilt over wasting my time in this way, I’d make new commitments to stay off of those platforms, and eschew screens altogether. But all in vain. My internet fast would usually break after a couple days to a week and the cycle would continue. So what exactly is going on here? Is this a question of individual willpower and discipline? Have we as a society become lazier? Or are there deeper systemic issues surrounding our relationship with technology that we must confront in order to reclaim control over our time and attention?

The research I’ve done convinces me that it’s more the latter. Behind the apps that we use every day are billion dollar tech corporations with hordes of engineers who understand just how to keep us hooked. These powerful companies are financially incentivized to hold our attention for as long as possible. To do so, they have embedded their platforms with persuasive design techniques and addictive mechanisms which are all informed by behavioral psychology. It’s important I think to underscore this fact. One of the major causes of internet addiction is the design elements which internet companies use to addict their users. The internet is designed in many ways to be a drug. Many of the internet’s addictive mechanisms were in fact designed by engineers who leveraged behavioral psychology research on how to keep gamblers playing on computerized slot machines.² 

How Social Media Companies Design their Platforms to be Addictive

That means whenever we open Instagram or Youtube on our phones with the intention to only browse for a little while, the odds that we will actually do so are against us. Let’s break down the business model of these companies to understand exactly how they manipulate our attention. They first design their platforms in such a way as to engage their users for as long as possible. Slot machines are also designed to measure their success according to “time on device”, or the amount of time that a user spends on the machine because generally, the longer a person plays on a slot machine, the more money they tend to lose.³ Similarly, social media companies often generate profit the more time that users spend on a given platform. This is because the more time that a user spends on a platform, the likelier it is that they will be exposed to ads. The more ads that a user watches, the more that such companies can charge advertisers. Unlike other businesses where customers directly buy products from the company itself, attention economy internet businesses sell the attention of its users to other advertisers. You are, in other words, the product, not the customer.

1. Intermittent Variable Rewards

Let’s take a closer look at some of the persuasive design techniques which social media companies employ to sustain our attention for as long as possible. There’s probably a wide array of hidden mechanisms embedded in the design of these platforms, but I’ll just touch on a few of the more powerful and well-known design techniques. It’s important to know just how these mechanisms work so that we can engage with these platforms in a more mindful and healthy way. Without being aware of the traps that litter these apps and sites, we are more prone to fall into them again and again. One of the most addictive design elements which social media companies have jumped on is the use of intermittent variable rewards. Intermittent variable rewards are rewards that are given at irregular intervals. This mechanism lies behind the appeal of buying a lottery ticket or playing on a slot machine. These activities are addictive because there is always an element of uncertainty involved. You just might strike it rich, so why not play one more time? This term stems from psychologist Michael Zeiler’s experimental studies with pigeons. In 1971, Zeiler conducted an experiment in which he attempted to train pigeons to press a certain button in order to receive food. The pigeons proved to be much more likely to perform the desired behavior of pressing the button when it released food only 50-70 percent of the time. Just like the brains of the pigeons in this experiment, our human brains produce far more dopamine when we receive rewards at an unpredictable rate.⁴ The mechanism of the “like” button on Facebook draws on this psychology. Every time you post something on Facebook, you are in a sense making a gamble. You don’t know how many likes, comments, or other reactions you might get on a given post, and it’s this element of unpredictability that drives us to post again and again.

2. The Infinite Scroll

Think of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts. We usually mindlessly consume these short form videos, swiping up repetitively on the off chance that we just might stumble on something that will make us laugh, something amusing enough to give us another hit of dopamine. Pinterest does something like this too. On the main page of Pinterest, you can keep scrolling for as long as you want. If you choose to stop, there are cut-off images at the bottom of the page which provide a sneak peek of what’s just ahead. This preview can entice you to keep scrolling and hunting for more variable rewards. Reddit and Twitter both have a pull-to-refresh feature which is again taken from the slot machine and the motion of pulling the lever. With this feature, you can reorganize your page with new content which you may or may not find entertaining, introducing more variable rewards. Because so many of these platforms allow you to scroll infinitely, you are not obliged to make a conscious decision to exit the app or site after browsing for some time. There are no natural stopping cues which encourage you to take a break. This makes it much harder to put down your phone and turn to something else. 

3. Adaptive Algorithms

Unlike most other addictions, an addiction to social media is particularly difficult to break because social media constantly evolves according to your preferences.⁵ On the one hand, this makes the content you consume particularly engaging and useful because the content you are exposed to is specifically tailored to you. On the other hand, this quality makes it extremely difficult to break a social media addiction. Social media companies collect all kinds of data about you while you engage with their platforms. They monitor the amount of time you spend looking at different kinds of content, and adjust the nature of its content accordingly. These companies use adaptive algorithms to keep you engaged for longer and longer periods of time. The more that you engage with a platform like Youtube, for example, the more data Youtube will have about what you like and don’t like, and the more they will be able to suggest to you videos you will likely want to watch. I think UK artist Dave sums it up pretty well in the rap song “Children of the Internet” by Future Utopia: “Your software’s better and your phone knows everything / If anything it’s getting George Orwellian / Look, it’s all connected / Nobody’s protected from business collectives / Your info’s collected”. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but sometimes my Youtube algorithm will suggest to me just the type of video I was looking for, without me having to search for it. It always feels a bit uncanny when that happens. It makes me wonder whether my phone knows me better than I even know myself. And maybe that’s the reason I’m addicted to it. How can I not spend time on my phone when it has become an extension of myself? 

4. Hacking our Goal-Orientedness

If I haven’t made a case for it already, let me restate that the addictive technology we use is informed by behavioral psychology, which makes it particularly dangerous. The engineers behind social media platforms are tapping into our deep-seated pleasure and reward systems, our intrinsic desire and need for social validation, our sense of identity, and to add to all of this, our need to make progress in life by making and meeting goals. Goals are presented to us as soon as we begin to engage with social media and other internet platforms. Snapchat streaks are a prime example of this. Follower counts and subscriber counts also create new goals by encouraging the desire to attract more people to your profile and increase your popularity. Email notifications have us checking our phones more often, striving after the elusive empty inbox. The pressure to check notifications, maintain streaks, and raise follower counts all intrude into our lives offline and affect the way we see ourselves. The commercial logic of social media can turn dehumanizing when we internalize its values and become obsessed with numbers and productivity. There’s an insidiousness to all of this that I think isn’t addressed enough. 

All this to say, I’m not anti-social media or anything, and to be fair there’s a big part of me that enjoys the internet. I like memes after all. And I’m susceptible to doom scrolling every once in a while, even while knowing all of this research. I’m not proposing any solutions here. I just think all of us have the right to be aware of the deeper, underlying reasons why it might be so hard for some of us to break our addictions to the internet and social media. I’m also advocating for greater transparency from tech firms who draw on behavioral psychology to purposefully create addictive platforms. They owe it to us to be more honest about the persuasive design techniques that they use in order to increase engagement. Although it’s uncertain whether such companies will provide greater transparency in the future, I think as long as we keep the conversation going about this, there is a chance they will. In the spirit of keeping this conversation alive, I wrote this blog post, but now I shall sign off, close my laptop, and go touch some grass.

1. Al-Heeti, Abrar. “We’ll Spend Nearly a Decade of Our Lives Staring at Our Phones, Study Says.” CNET, 12 Nov. 2020, www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/well-spend-nearly-a-decade-of-our-lives-staring-at-our-phones-study-says/. ↩︎
2. Bhargava, Vikram R., and Manuel Velasquez. “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.” Business Ethics Quarterly 31.3 (2021): 321–359. Web. ↩︎
3. Alter, Adam. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Penguin Press, 2017. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. “The Impact of Social Media: Is It Irreplaceable?” Knowledge at Wharton, 26 July 2019, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/impact-of-social-media/. ↩︎