Tag: apps

What’s on the menu?

Significant changes that are going on in the modern world bother a lot of scientists and geeks. Tristan Harris, like other technophobes, is pessimistic about the influence of new digital technologies on our lives. To test his idea that by shaping a menu, tech designers can manipulate users, I decided to conduct my own simple research.

In the essay “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist”, Harris puts a spotlight on a set of tools by dint of which tech companies control their clients. The author pays close attention to menus. Modern people encounter these interfaces all the time: when they swipe faces on Tinder, answer emails or search for a bar on Yelp. According to the author, we are vulnerable to menus’ influence as we don’t worry about what is left behind them. Hardly do we ponder a menu provider’s goals. Proceeding on these premises, Harris states that technology “hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones“.

To my mind, it’s dubious that users deem a set of options provided by various apps, like Yelp or Tinder, as a complete set of available alternatives. Indeed, the use of Yelp doesn’t necessarily mean that we give up the opportunity to walk in a park with friends. It means that we want to hang out at a bar. In other words, we understand what is not included in menus and use only those apps that satisfy our current needs.

 To support this thought, I created a Google form with one question: “What would you ask a genie for if you encountered him?” There were three given variants: two options were supposed to be popular (money and teleportation skill) while another one was less popular (the perpetual summer). Moreover, respondents could come up with their own answer. The poll consisted of one question because I didn’t want to let indolence distort the results of the experiment. Poll participants are likely to ponder questions and give a sincere answer if there are few of them.

According to my hypothesis, respondents should have offered a great number of their own answers which would have disproved people’s negligence toward options behind a menu. More than that, the dominated variant should have been opted for by a smaller number of people as they were supposed to choose options from the menu only when the latter aligned with their own opinion.

Orange, red and blue section correspond to the number of people who have chosen variants from the menu

The form was uploaded on a popular Russian social networking site Vkontakte. 70 random people, mostly students, gave their responses. The results approve my hypothesis: a significant number of respondents have come up with their original answers (39.7%). Many crucial themes, like family’s wellbeing, success and social issues, were touched in their responses. It demonstrates that participants have responsibly approached to the poll. Only few of the rest have opted for the unpopular variant (4.4%). Consequently, we may state that the poll participants have opted for the given variants consciously. Otherwise, they would choose variants randomly, and we wouldn’t see the correlation between the popularity of a variant and the number of responses.

Modern reading techniques

The way people read texts have been evolving since the very advent of writing: while Cesar’s contemporaries couldn’t read silently, modern people can process an impressive amount of information without any sounds. An influence of new technologies on our reading practices is touched in the Robert Clowes’ article “Screen reading and the creation of new cognitive ecologies”. In order to check whether his description of tendencies in reading corresponds to my personal experience, I decided to analyze my reading practices.

Reading is a powerful tool for acquiring new knowledge. Some scientists mentioned in the article claim that in order to gain real understanding of a subject, you should be immersed in a text. This type of reading is called deep-reading. It’s characterized by reflection, insight and inferential reasoning. As Clowes states, after digital technologies grew pervasive, a new type of reading, so-called hyper reading, developed in response to the abundance of available information (4).

In contrast to deep reading, the novel type of reading is non-linear and shallow. It includes skimming, scanning and text fragmenting (4). However, the author concedes that some ways in which people do reading may lie beyond the scope of deep/ shallow dichotomy. For instance, most academics don’t read a whole book when they make research, but we cannot label their way of reading lightweight.

Today, I woke up and checked my email via an internet browser on a laptop. Looking through the web page, I identified the most important messages and read them more attentively. To write answers to some of them, I had to visit some web sites and extract necessary information, which can be done in several clicks. Although the Internet gives you the opportunity to find whatever information you need, it also distracts you. For instance, when I hyper read checking the email, I always have to combat an overwhelming desire to watch some videos on YouTube or to chat.

Then, I read a prompt for a new writing assignment. I did it twice in order to understand it better. Close attention was paid to the deadline of the task and the limits on the number of words. In contrast to messages skimming, the reading of the prompt was linear and immersive. However, it would be ridiculous if I evaluated my deep reading ability by immersion in sequential description of the task.

The Clowes’ article, which makes up the ‘they say’ part of this post, fit my needs. Being aware of my vulnerability to external irritants, I protected myself from the Internet having shut off a Wi-Fi router. It turned out that I should blame my attention problems on propensity for idleness rather than on access to the global network: sitting on the kitchen, I often abandoned reading to make a cup of tea.

Then, I moved to the living room, far from food, and thereby motivated myself to read the article. I needed to extract only necessary information: the author’s view on the changes in reading practices. Therefore, at the outset, I scanned the text and sought the key words. Using Microsoft Edge, readers can search for a particular word, underline text and make notes. These tools were useful for me at the stage of hyper reading: when I tried to extract the material for the post. After I found an appropriate fragment, I immersed in the authors’ narration to get a handle on his ideas and not to distort them in the post. It worth mentioning, that the latter part of the reading process lasted for a longer period of time.

Thus, after my small analysis, I have learnt several things. Firstly, despite the fact that pervasive digital media have created an information-intense environment, they may not be guilty for our lack of attention. There are a lot of irritants beyond the scope of a digital world. Moreover, scientists’ concerns notwithstanding, the hyper reading may co- exist with the deep reading. For instance, I hyper read when I need to define important information and sort out a ton of useless data. But if I try to process a particular piece of information, I switch to deep reading.

Works cited

Clowes, Robert. “Screen reading and the creation of new cognitive ecologies”. 2017. Springer-Verlag London Ltd.