Why do you use your phone so much? How social media and games are like drug addiction and gambling, with companies having little incentive to change
- Modern tech companies are preying on our capacity for ‘behavioural addiction’, marketing professor Adam Alter says
- The long-term consequences of technology addiction can be social, financial and even physical, he says, suggesting people schedule screen-free time
Walking, reclining, dining, playing, commuting, shopping: people around the world read their smartphones regardless of where they are or what they’re doing, unable to tear their eyes from their screens regardless of whether they’re on a crowded street or working out at the gym.
Adam Alter, an author and professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, believes modern technology has never been so “efficient and addictive”. In his 2017 book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, he describes the problems of rampant behavioural addiction and the calculated ways games, apps and other tech products get and hold our attention.
“We thought addiction was mostly related to chemical substances: heroin, cocaine and nicotine. Today, people spend three hours a day tethered to their cellphones, and Snapchat boasts that its youthful users open their app more than 18 times a day,” he says.
If big tech companies worked on a subscription model – as newspapers and magazines do, for example – they’d be forced to cater to our welfare rather than to the needs of advertisers
When Alter read that Apple co-founder and tech titan Steve Jobs refused to let his children use the iPad when it was released, he decided to investigate further. In a Ted Talk he gave in April 2017, titled “Why Screens Make us Less Happy”, he said Jobs’ decision struck him as unusual because one of the golden rules in business holds that executives should use their own products. His subsequent investigations added further fuel to the fire.
“I discovered that the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Silicon Valley doesn’t allow any tech – no iPhones or iPads – for under 11-year-olds and that 75 per cent of the parents are tech executives,” he says.
Alter decided to find out why experts considered their own products to be so potentially dangerous. He discovered that the programs and apps we use are laced with hooks that make them near impossible to resist.
