User:Rita Graca/thesis outline4

Introduction

Topic

Persuasive design, social media platforms, alternatives

Focus

Persuasive social media platforms capitalising on engagement and the search for better alternatives

Background

Design persuasion is not inherently evil. When I am waiting to cross the street I’m happy to have a traffic light warning me to wait. Indeed, manipulating me to stay, the pictogram telling me to not cross, and the red colour reminding me of danger. Even when talking about persuasion on online platforms I understand that a lot of the design features are there to glue me to the screen. And if sometimes that’s consuming and stressful, other times the infinite scroll has the kind of numbing effect that makes the 3-hour train go faster.

What worries me the most is not the features themselves, but what they mean in businesses obsessed with our engagement. How my personality, my friends, my likes and thoughts are manipulated to generate profitable transactions. How we are persuaded to engage, every time and everywhere because that means money. Through the promise of connectivity and participation, the mainstream platforms today live off our attention, and to feel like a target every time becomes exhausting. As a person interested in the ethics around technology, but also as a media student with enthusiasm over the alternatives, I wonder... what can we do?

Thesis Statement

Mainstream social media platforms compel users to participate through manipulative strategies to capitalise engagement. While abandoning these platforms doesn't seem a valid choice for everyone and demonstrates a system of privilege, users can gain agency through other means.

Body

INTRODUCTION

How design implementations can have socio-political effects. Well explained in Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Winner, 1980) with a lot of anecdotes.

Our daily lives are mediated through interfaces that are getting increasingly harder to recognise and understand.

D. Norman's idea that “the computer of the future should be invisible”, meaning that the user would focus on the task they want to do instead of focusing on the machine. Much like a door, you go through it to go somewhere else. (Norman, 1990) But Olia Lialina reminds us that computers are much more complex devices, and that closed or opened doors allow different degrees of agency. (Lialina, 2018)

It seems that the trend is to keep building imperceptible interfaces, e.g. conversational interfaces. "The irrefutable tendency to make all graphic interfaces as usable, engaging, simple, and social as possible is an expression of the values inherent to the discourse of Silicon Valley and global technoculture elites." (Belsunces, 2015)

Examples of how design choices regulate our interactions inside the platforms

no unlike button means fewer ways to show discontent; no anonymity means more accountability; no undo/edit/permanent delete button shows less forgiveness and agency.

Clarification on what is manipulative design

persuasive tech, weaponised design, technology violence, or other better terms.

FIRST TOPIC — PERSUASIVE STRATEGIES ONLINE

Point A: Certain features on social media platforms exist to influence users on taking certain actions. While some of them seem innocent, like a notification to remind us of a birthday, they also reveal capitalistic, seductive intentions.

In the 20th century, specialists moved past the idea that information drives behaviour to understand how to play with irrational emotions through propaganda and, then, advertising. Example: Torches of Freedom, how women smoking became a symbol of liberation. (The Century of the Self, 2002)
Nowadays this persuasion can be done even better with the help of technology. "It is not individual contracts or dollar amounts that matter so much as the habits that are produced and regimented. And new digital technologies have proven astonishingly good at regimenting humans." (Mantz, 2018)
Short reference on how persuasion can be positive. The idea of captology for B.J. Fogg is mostly positive, "motivating users to make better use of the application and supporting them in achieving their goals." (Fogg, 2003)
Clear examples of persuasive design features on social media. Notifications, auto-play, integrated buying features, next episode tab.

After a while without using your phone, you suddenly realise you have not checked it for a while. Maybe someone called, emailed, ping you. This is a habit that happens without triggers, a thought that seems to come from the vacuum, out of nowhere. A successful behaviour change happened in most of us, and we went through several steps until we reached this state.

Point B: Engagement has turned into currency and, without ethics guidelines, interfaces become aggressive to generate profit.

We are the target in the attention economy. Meaning of engagement for brands, people and algorithms, growing quantification of online life. "As Golub (2004, 2010), Boellstorff (2012, 2015) and many others (e.g. Nardi 2010; Snodgrass et al. 2011) have noted, yes, our online avatars are political economic actors." (Mantz, 2018)
The unfairness of this, how persuasion turns into coercion without supervision. Libertarian Paternalism on Obama's Social and Behavioral Sciences Team; Facebook experiment with the manipulation of 700,000 users' feed; Cambridge Analytica scandal, etc. (Shaw, 2017)
Especially important when looking at underprivileged groups. Research "explains that individuals with low self-esteem are more susceptible to the opinions of others as they are seeking social approval and acceptance." (Djafarova and Rushworth, 2017)

SECOND TOPIC — IS IT POSSIBLE TO GAIN AGENCY? SHOULD WE RUN, HIDE OR FIGHT?

Point A: Quitting media platforms doesn't make sense for everyone, is determinist and reveals a system of privilege.

Trying to improve our social media relationship is a fair move. However, this discourse targets a group of privileged people and we should acknowledge that.
"Quitting" overlooks all the political, social and economic conditions that influence social media users.
The alternative seemed to be to leave the surveilled platforms, but is exactly ‘the vulnerable populations who are the least able to “quit Facebook.”’ (Nakamura, 2015)

I find the metaphors between food dieting and social media dieting very interesting. It's often said to overweight people to just close their mouth or put down the food. Which seems the same as saying to just not use your phone, to quit social media. But these arguments overlook all the political, social and economic conditions that determine obesity rates and the same applies to depression (or the other effects social media diets are curing).

Point B: Users are persuaded to believe centralised platforms are the only real option. Who are the alternatives for?

We are persuaded to believe centralised platforms are the only real option to engage in social media. Persuasion comes back! "The concept of centralization does not pose a problem in and of itself: there are good reasons for bringing people and things together. The situation becomes problematic when we are robbed of our choice, deceived into thinking there is only one access gate to a space that, in reality, we collectively own." (Verborgh, 2019)
A short overview of what are the alternative social media platforms, what does it mean to be federated and decentralised. Why it is important, who makes use of them and why?
It's not appealing for most people to move to the alternatives. Going back to the first topic, the user experience is decisive. Users prefer to trade privacy, centralisation, etc for the best user experience. An egocentric view of the world? Or an efficient one?

Conclusion

The debate on what is acceptable behaviour within persuasion on social media platforms is complicated. It easily piles on ambiguous questions such as who is the authority, how it imposes limits and based on what morality. But users have been engaging with these issues in practical ways: either by building other platforms or by joining movements that tackle directly their concerns. The more the users amplify their interests, and experiment with their resources, the easier it gets to catalyse change.

Link to annotated bibliography