Helping young people build immunity to persuasive technology – Alt Ed Austin



Alt Ed Austin is delighted to bring the work and voice of guest contributor Seth Bunev to our readers. Seth is a remarkable young writer, researcher, and educator whose new book, Screenfarers: Nurturing Deliberate Action in a Digital World, was released in paperback this month; both book and ebook can be found here. He has been rethinking education systems since age 7 and has participated in numerous forms of school, from Montessori to distance learning. Starting at age 17, he spent four years offline to better understand how digital technologies had shaped his experience and to try to experience something different. Seth teaches naturalist skills to children and is currently working with Turning Life On to develop a school program that facilitates a more balanced relationship with tech at a community level.

I grew up with the internet. In high school, I regularly stayed up till three in the morning watching YouTube videos. This was normal among my peers—it was also normal to have trouble remembering things, avoid eye contact, and be diagnosed with depression. It was obvious to me at the time that these things were, at least to some degree, related to our digital habits.

Why would we do this to ourselves? Well, in the moment, it seemed fun. Somehow, it seemed fun even when my eyes were bloodshot, I had a headache, and I had barely left my room for a week. There was always another interesting thing to read, or watch, just a click away.

While modern digital technologies are powerful, and can have many benefits, some of the less positive effects are increasingly obvious: the eye damage, attention disorders, compulsive behaviors, loss of social skills, even loss of a social fabric in which to practice those skills.

It is no accident that young people spend huge numbers of hours on digital media, with US teens averaging about 7.5 hours per day in 2019. Social media and video game companies carefully design their products to be as addictive as possible, because their business model usually depends on maximizing “time on device” to generate data and ad revenue, or encourage in-game purchases. On top of that, there is the cumulative effect of millions of people competing to create the most eye-catching and engaging online content.

As a result, compulsive tech use is rampant. If this were confined only to video games, or clickbait sites, the solution would be simpler—complete avoidance would be an option. But pretty much everything on the internet can create unwanted habits, from email to database searching to blogs. It is possible to live without digital media—I did so for four years, to better understand its effects on me—but at present that is not feasible or desirable for most people. Can we have the good things the internet provides, without the disruptive habits?

It would help to have cultural norms that restrict digital tech’s invasion of every aspect of life. Perhaps we can also hope for a digital paradigm that doesn’t aggressively leverage human psychology to keep people hooked. But those things will take time. While we work towards them, we need to help kids and youth develop the skills to take charge of their relationship with digital tech at an individual level—ways to build immunity to the nebulous thing variously referred to as habit-forming technology, persuasive technology, or behavior design.

The immunity-building regimen I have developed, through research and experimentation on myself and peers, involves three components:

  1. Understanding how persuasive tech works, the underlying motivations behind it, and how to recognize it in digital interfaces

  2. Practicing attention to one’s own digital habits and how they are shaped by design

  3. Cultivating habits that facilitate intentional use of digital media

Together, these three approaches can interrupt some of the unconscious habits and habit-forming mechanisms through which tech use gets out of control.



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