- [Cameraman] Are you ready, Myles?

- [Camerapeople] Myles.

- My bad, y'all.

Joking about being addicted to our phones is as common as breathing.

We've all been on our phones scrolling infinitely, waiting for a notification or refreshing the page, hoping to see something funny.

When I started using YouTube, dang that sound old.

When the video ended, it just ended.

There wasn't any autoplay and when you got to the bottom of your Twitter or your Instagram feed you had to click the next page or there was something telling you that it was the end.

Now apps use design tricks which are basically ways tech companies grab our attentions through design features.

You can scroll for as long as your thumb will allow.

Videos will autoplay and jump right into the next video without you having to do a thing.

But it's not by accident, it's by design.

Yep, that's right.

Our favorite apps are designed to keep us on them as long as possible.

It's how they make their money.

So today we're asking what are the design tricks tech companies are using to keep us hooked?

So how did we get here?

A lot of it starts with this dude, BJ Fogg.

He founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University in 1998.

As a graduate student at Stanford, Fogg ran the first ever series of experiments to discover how computers could change people's attitudes and behaviors.

He was inspired by this dude, B. F. Skinner.

Basically, Skinner did a famous experiment where he put a rat in a box with a lever that gave the rat a snack when pulled but the rat didn't get a snack every time it pressed the lever.

This is called intermittent reinforcement, and as a result the rat pulled the lever more often like a gambler pulling a slot.

This is exactly what's happening when you're clicking through TikToks or watching reels.

You keep going because you don't know when you'll see something good or rewarding, a few boring or irrelevant videos and posts.

Then you see something you like.

Then you repeat.

The idea behind Fogg's work is that computers can be designed such that they influence the behavior of the people who used them.

Basically, if computers can make our lives easier, here's a funny video, human, then we'll spend more time with them.

I'm never letting you out of my sight.

I love you so much.

(angelic music) And it wasn't just Fogg though.

This was the late 90s going into the early 2000s, dot coms were all the rage.

Computers were becoming a part of folk's everyday lives.

Silicon Valley and Fogg were discovering these powerful tools to predict human behavior at the same time.

One discovery Google figured out was that if they analyzed search history they could help with spelling errors and searches.

So that's why "did you mean" would pop up when you misspell restaurant.

This was helpful for the users but they also realized spelling errors weren't the only thing that they could predict.

They continued to explore this data and realized it has surprising power to predict things about us.

Those predictions turned out to be very interesting to people selling things, products, ideas, political candidates and campaigns.

So companies started selling those predictions.

They realized the more data they had, the better the predictions were.

- Whether an 18 year old to a 60 year old, these big tech companies and companies in general want to ensure that you are scrolling and using their device for as long as possible.

- That's Emma Lembke who started Design It For Us while still in high school as a multimedia coalition for young folks to share how online spaces should be designed safely and intentionally with young folks in mind.

- Because what that ensures is you are scrolling for longer, you're engaging for longer, you are able to generate for them more profit, and thus they want to maximize your attention at all costs, even at the cost of your own wellbeing, safety, privacy, security.

- And let's face it, folks spend a lot of time on online spaces.

It would be a waste of my time to tell you to get off that dang phone.

Plus, I'd be a hypocrite.

Like I spend an average of seven hours a day on my phone or so Apple says I do.

That's 49 hours a week or 196 hours a month.

Basically I'm spending 96 days a year on my phone.

That's like three months.

And that's very sad and draining to say out loud.

Maybe I could have taken a wood shop and finally made that table and chairs I've always dreamt of.

Or you know, knowing me, I actually probably would've just found another way to procrastinate.

But the point is, we spend a lot of time on our phones and there has to be an acknowledgement of how that's affecting us.

- And what those addictive features can do to you can have long-term impacts.

It can result in a worsening of one's mental state.

Lead to increased rates of anxiety and depression from scrolling and not being able to unplug, that can feel, that can bombard young people with feelings of hopelessness.

You can feel FOMO which pulls you even more into addictive apps into platforms that keep you scrolling, even if you're not happy.

- The things we're seeing online can heavily influence our thoughts and ideas about ourselves and the way we see the world around us.

But not everybody on all platforms are being affected in the same way.

Facebook did a whole report acknowledging how their apps were negatively affecting some young girls' images of themselves.

It's pretty complex and certain groups can be more vulnerable than others to the negative impacts of social media.

The creators of many addicting features were well-intentioned.

The idea started as a way to enhance user experience and make it more engaging.

But now all of that operates within an economy that gathers data from users and needs them on a given platform for as long as possible, interacting as much as possible to provide more data.

A vicious cycle that none of us are immune to.

But I have seen folks try to control the devices and not the other way around.

Articles about teens going back to flip phones or adapting the uses of an app so that it doesn't have this constant feeling of extraction.

Heck, the creator of infinite scroll even has second thoughts.

So if we have folks acknowledging that maybe we need to do something about the beast that is addictive apps what are we gonna do about it?

- Most of the people who are in office right now are of another generation, of a much older generation and it's not their fault that they don't understand the complexities and the importance of regulating online platforms.

But what that means is that those lawmakers need to begin to listen to young people as a way to inform their decisions and as a way to move forward quickly and decisively to create substantive legislative action that will like I said, by design, really attack these business models and these operations to companies.

- But the big question is what laws will be the most helpful?

Should there be laws that regulate features?

Like, hey, you're 13 years old and you're using social media.

You can't use autoplay.

I mean, it would be great if we could like, trust our lawmakers to enact laws that make us feel safe and protected on social media and on the internet.

But in reality, it looks a lot like this.

- Will you commit to ending finsta?

- Senator again, let me explain.

We don't actually do finsta.

What finsta refers to is young people setting up accounts where they may wanna have more privacy.

You refer to it as privacy from their parents.

In my interaction with teens what I've found is that they sometimes like to have an account where they can interact just with a smaller group of friends.

- This is one of your- - That was actually- - This is one of your products or services.

We're not talking here about Google or Apple.

- And lastly, there's no real way to know or predict how technology will be used or how it'll impact us.

We don't even totally understand how it's affecting us in the present.

You think the people who made plastic bags were like, hey, we are going to destroy the planet.

No, they were probably like, look at this cheap, lightweight option to transport things.

But the thing is, at this point, tech companies know that designing apps to be as addictive as possible is negatively impacting us.

What they don't know is how to survive as a business without doing so, which is why some things gotta change.

What do y'all think?

Knowing what you know now, how do you protect your wellbeing even when you use technologies that can make it worse?

Oh, and I wanna shout out our partners at Common Sense Education and the Center for Digital Thriving.

They helped us produce this episode As always, I'm your host, Myles Bess.

Peace out.

(calm music) (dramatic music)