Many a parent and teacher has
despaired over how easily young people’s attention is diverted, especially when
they’re online. Stay
focused! we urge them. Don’t
let yourself get distracted! Our admonitions have little sway
against the powerful temptations of the Internet. But there may be a better way
to help teenagers resist the web’s lures: let them know that their attention is
being deliberately manipulated and exploited. If experience with another bad
habit—smoking—is any guide, teens’ own desire for self-governance is a force
far more compelling than the exhortations of their elders.
Ever since the first Surgeon
General’s Report on Smoking and
Health in 1964, public health advocates have searched for ways to stop young
people from picking up the habit. They’ve said that smoking makes them look
stupid and makes their breath smell bad. They’ve tallied up how much cash teens
would have if it weren’t wasted on cigarettes. And, of course, they’ve told
teens that smoking kills, adding graphic images of black lungs and tracheotomy
tubes.
None of these approaches has
worked as well as supporters hoped, and some have even backfired, making
teenagers more
likely to smoke. But a few savvy individuals—advertising executives,
mostly, with an assist from teens themselves—did come up with a strikingly
effective way to turn young people against smoking. They took a page from cigarette
companies’ own playbook, tapping into adolescents’ fierce desire for autonomy.
Instead of flaunting that independence by smoking, these teen-whisperers
suggested, do it by resisting the manipulations of Big Tobacco.
As journalist Tina Rosenberg recounts
in her book Join the Club, the
“counter-marketing” approach didn’t feature a “long, boring lecture in church hall
or school auditorium about proper behavior. And it didn’t look like more recent
attempts at swaying teens—the booklets and posters showing rows of graveyards
and cancer statistics.”
Instead, it introduced
public-service campaigns with names like “Rage Against the Haze” and “truth”
(the lowercase first letter attesting to its youthful subversiveness). It
broadcast commercials—some of them directed by teens—that quoted from tobacco
companies’ internal documents, in which executives mused about how to replace
the customers who were dying off with a new generation of smokers. And it sent
young, attractive staff members into classrooms to deliver an unaccustomed
message: “We’re not telling anyone how to live their life. We’re not against
smokers or smoking. We’re just here to give you information on how tobacco
companies are manipulating you.”
After decades of lackluster
results (“The Bottom Line: No One Knows What Works,” read the headline of one article about
antismoking efforts), the counter-marketing approach in the late 1990s
generated impressive outcomes: In Florida, for example, the “truth” campaign led to an 8 percent
decline in smoking among high school students and a nearly 20 percent decline
among middle schoolers.
Counter-marketing relied,
successfully, on teenagers’ indignation about being exploited by the tobacco
companies. But Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds are bush leaguers at
manipulating young customers when compared to today’s technology companies. The
creators of today’s most popular apps, games and websites have perfected, quite
consciously and deliberately, what writer Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has called “the
commodification of distraction.” Who wants Joe Camel when you’ve got Facebook?
Pang—the author, aptly, of a book titled The Distraction Addiction
— urges us to see the web as man-made artifact, the product of particular
intentions and interests. “Some people talk about how the shiny-blinky flashing
Internet appeals to our visually-oriented brains, how Facebook ‘likes’ and
re-tweets give us a little shot of dopamine,” Pang writes on his blog,
Contemplative Computing. “But these effects aren’t merely an accident.
Technology companies actively design to maximize our engagement with them . . .
Social media, gaming, and entertainment companies now spend enormous amounts of
time and energy trying to get you to spend more time interacting with them, to
recruit your friends to join them, and to intentionally or accidentally share
as much information as possible with them.”
Young people, for whom a
connected world is the only one they’ve ever known, are especially liable to
accept the Internet as the state of nature, simply the way things are. Perhaps
this blithe acceptance helps explain the furor that erupted last
month over the revelation that Facebook had involved users in a psychological
experiment without their knowledge, deliberately manipulating their moods by
determining which of their friends’ posts (upbeat or morose) they saw.
From the perspective of
academic research, this was indeed a troubling violation: investigators are
obliged to obtain the consent of the subjects in their studies. But from the
perspective of online product development and marketing, this was business as
usual: companies that earn their money on the web do their best to manipulate
our moods (and our attention, and our wallets) every minute we’re online.
Let’s encourage teenagers to
discover (maybe with the help of their peers) that the freedom and autonomy
they feel when they’re at the helm of their computers is in some ways an illusion,
and let’s help them develop the skeptical, critical stance that would allow
them to be truly autonomous users of the Internet. A template for such a
project might be the efforts to show young people—especially young women—how
magazine editors and advertisers seek to manipulate their sense of what the
female body should look like. (The Photoshopped before-and-after images
available through the Common Sense Media blog could well be the
fashion world equivalent of internal tobacco company documents.)
Although there have been some
attempts to teach students “critical thinking skills” with respect to the web,
too often these programs adopt a sanctimonious tone, with all the rebellious
appeal of extra-credit study hall. The history of antismoking campaigns offers
a potentially more effective alternative. Granted, clicking a link or posting a
status update won’t give teenagers lung cancer. But the undisciplined use of
technology can waste their time, fragment their focus, and interfere with their
learning. Just like their health, young people’s attention is a precious
resource, and they should be empowered to resist the companies that would
squander it.
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