In Grebing’s TED Talk, she argues that cell phones are meant to be addictive and that our addiction to cell phones is detrimental to our health and social lives.
She points out that the reason companies are able to keep us attached is through ‘intermittent rewards’, which is the idea that we continue to constantly check our phones in the hope that we have received some notification. She also mentions that we feel compelled to obey the commands of different companies, for example, Facebook compels us to tag our friends in our posts by giving us the prompt, which we all tend to obey. This action then feeds forward to the people we have tagged, who are now locked in on Facebook to see what they were tagged in. “We are being conditioned to look at our smartphone”, Grebing says, which is no longer a conscious choice and is comparable to that of drug use, a neurological study found.
I think the ideas talked about in this talk are really interesting, but one thing that isn’t talked about is the incredible scalability that these companies have managed to achieve with each user. By this I mean that they have installed a hunger for us to want more followers because then we receive more likes, comments, and interactions. With those increased interactions, come more followers and so on. So, as we gain followers we also increase our attachment to the application, and to our phone.
I agree with this TED talk that we are addicted to our phones. What I find so interesting about your response is your thought about how we increase our addiction because these websites, more specifically social medias, are interactive in the sense that we crave more followers and likes. This in turn causes us to be more reliant, and therefore, more addicted to our phones.
Hi Zach, I watched this TED talk as well and my thoughts were similar. As much as its uncomfortable to admit, we are all addicted to our phones to some extent. I think the question now is how this is impacted us and our society.
I agree that nowadays many people, especially the youth, have strong addiction to cell phones. They may just continually checking their phones and they don’t know what exactly they want to do or see. They might feel anxious and have a lot of deadlines, but they still play with their phones without purposes. It just became a habit, and hard to change. Now, we have some external help such as setting time limits, which might be useful.