‘I wish I spend more time digitally’, is something you never heard anyone say. There’s some fine people with great balance in their digital lives, but most of us struggle to reduce our screen time. For many it’s Social Media, TV-Shows, video games, or Youtube – the latter being my biggest problem. Others get drawn in to the news, spend most day texting, watch adult content or get lost in conspiracy rabbit holes. The truth is, we’re doomed to fail; we’re facing software that is designed and optimized to suck us in. I’ve been prisoner of this more than I would like to admit, so I’ve been very interested in why that is.
One of the biggest culprits is dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, often called the feel-good hormone, which is not accurate. It’s more like the desire-hormone. It’s what makes us crave food, get sleep, want to have sex, going to the bathroom, or shoot drugs through our nose. Without it, we would not feel motivation to pursue anything. It is essential for us, but it can be exploited. And that’s what digital tools got good at: giving us a dopamine kick that makes us come back for more.
A good example is human interaction. Our brains are wired to feel good about positive social interaction; it is essential for our survival. For the systems in our brain, it doesn’t make much of a difference if the interaction is digital or not. It didn’t evolve to recognize digital environments. That’s why we mistake a like or a connection request with getting social approval in a face-to-face interaction. We feel good about that, which is why our brain wants more of it, so we often adapt our online behavior to pursue that goal. The problem is: even if our reward systems doesn’t make a distinction between digital and personal human interaction, there is a big gap between how qualitative they are.
If you’re thinking, ‘not everything on the internet makes our brain feel good’, you’re right. A lot of it is junk, and the brain knows it. I always realize this when I see other people scrolling through Social Media (not because I’m not equally or even more prone to this behavior, but because it’s easier to recognize in other people). Most videos or posts are quickly ignored, jumped over – our brain qualifies them as not interesting.
But every now and again, we hit a jackpot. Quite literally: Social Media whistleblowers have been vocal about big tech companies copying the same methods casinos use to create cravings. It’s the promise of potentially getting a reward (a like, something entertaining or someone attractive half-naked) that keeps us coming back for more.
Which bring us back to dopamine. Dopamine is not at its highest once we finished doing an action that our brain sees as rewarding. It’s at its peak just before. For example, dopamine peaks during orgasm, just before, well… finish. But once we, well… finish, it drops immediately. Or applied to consuming chocolate bars: dopamine increases with the anticipation of eating one. It peaks just at the first bite.
Applied to scrolling, that means something like this: you find content that your brain likes for whatever reason. Your brain then wants more of it, so it releases dopamine to make you go hunt some. Then you find more, your dopamine levels peak just before the most rewarding part of the content, and you feel good for a second or two. Then your dopamine control center tells you ‘cool, let’s do it again’. Looking for news articles or switching from one TV-Channel to the other is not any different from this.
Very linked to this is the unpredictability of our digital experiences, which our brain loves somehow. I say somehow, because it is true that our brain often prefers activities that are predictable (that’s why many people love to rewatch The Office or other shows). There’s an interesting interplay here: predictable outcomes are more comfortable for our brains, but unpredictable ones create more addiction as the dopamine release is bigger. And since most successful digital tools have become somehow reliable in providing you with some kind of novel experience, most online activities combine weakness both for predictable and unpredictable outcomes. Somehow, we can come to predict unpredictable experiences.
Crucial is also the attention-grabbing design of our tools. By trial and error, many applications have been optimized to get our attention the most efficient way. Initially, pop-up notification were not a thing, neither was a red box with the number of unread messages. But, over time, developers have seen that such mechanism increase how much we interact with their software. Drag and release animations when refreshing a page (also something that was taken straight out of casinos — specifically slot machines) is another example. Personalization of pages, color schemes and designs all have been carefully chosen considering what works best to increase user engagement. From a developers’ perspective, the tools have been improved (because they increase time spend on their tool and the attention they are able to grab), but it’s hard to argue that this has been an improvement of the tool from the consumer’s perspective.
Here’s another element that we can’t forget, and this one is specially relevant for my addiction to YouTube: it’s an open space. There’s always more content to consume. There’s practically an unlimited number of stuff to look at once you open something digital. Compare this to reading a book. When you finish one page, you stop reading completely, or read the next page of the book, or read a page from another book. But that’s about it. When you finish a YouTube video (if your attention span even lets you finish one), you can not do anything and wait for the next video that will automatically play and which the algorithm will have chosen for you. Or you can pick one of the dozens of recommended videos the app has prepared for you on the right side of the video. Or you can go to the uploaders side and find hundreds of videos from the same channel. Or you can update the homepage and find an infinite amount of recommended videos. Or you can search for anything your brain thought of right now. Or you can jump back to the open Instagram tab. Or open some newspaper and get lost there.
And we’re not talking about platforms being increasingly tailored to your interests, which deserves a post for itself. The algorithms (name that we use to describe logical expressions we don’t understand) are made to give you the content that will suck you in the most, often knowing better what will grab your attention that you. The problem is not that we’re seeing things that are of our interest (which is a benefit), but that it exploits our interest for it. I’ve typically heard things like ‘well, my Instagram is basically healthy cooking videos and workouts’ to justify using it. Yes, you’re consuming ‘good content’ and you may think that makes it a rational decision. But the nature of the content doesn’t justify spending hours on a weekly basis watching other people cook recipes and do workout routines you’ll never do.
All in all, most digital tools are powerful machines pointed at our primitive brain, created by teams of very smart people, designed to get your attention in order to monetize it. And the more they get your attention, the bigger their benefit. They have found ways to hack our brain, and have snuck them into tools that are supposed to improve our life.
And in the end, most of us struggle in one way or other with this. We develop habits of digital misuse, and then find it impossible to break those. Whilst we can hope that regulation and governments will eventually find ways to protect us, the best thing is to find out for ourselves how we can individually protect us against it.
This, in my experience, requires knowledge of how these tools work, reflection on our desired relationship with these tools, and radical measures in our day-to-day. If not, you’re doomed to fail.
One last note; Dopamine is not bad (it’s essential for survival). Neither is connecting with people and getting news over the internet, it’s a great feat in humanity. I’m very happy that we have the technology to do this. And precisely that is what makes it so dangerous and difficult to control: since it is a big advantage, and you’d be missing out without it, platforms that have addictive designs and blurry lines will easily suck you in.
leo burghaus 
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