How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

Technology Is Hijacking People’s Minds

Here’s how it happens.

Hijack 1:
If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices

Western culture is based on the principles of personal autonomy and freedom. Millions of us passionately defend our ability to make ‘free’ decisions while unaware to how those decisions are influenced earlier by menus that we didn’t choose.

Exactly this is what magicians do. They give people the possibility of free choice while designing and implementing the menu so that they earn, whatever you choose. One cannot overstate how profound this understanding is.

When presented with a menu of options, people hardly ever would ask:

  • “What has not been offered?”
  • “Why are these the only alternatives available to me?”
  • “Do I realize the aims of the menu provider?”
  • “Are the options on this menu empowering for my original need, or are they just a distraction tactic?”

Take Tuesday night, for instance, when you’re out with pals and want to continue the conversation. You open Yelp to see a list of bars and to discover suggestions for your area. The group collapses into a scrum of faces comparing bars on their phones as they look down. They compare cocktail drinks as they closely examine each person’s photos. Is this menu still appropriate for the group’s initial goal?

How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

The issue isn’t that bars are a bad option; rather, Yelp changed the group’s original query — “Where can we go to keep talking?” — by rewriting the menu to read, “What’s a bar with excellent pictures of cocktails?”

Moreover, the group believes the Yelp menu to be an entire list of options for where to go, which is deceptive. They miss the park across the street where a band is performing live music because they are too busy looking down at their phones. They overlook the temporary art gallery serving coffee and crepes on the other side of the street. Both of those are absent from Yelp’s menu.

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The more options we have thanks to technology in almost every area of our lives (data, activities, places to go, contacts, relationships, careers), the more we come to believe that our phone is always the most useful and empowering menu to choose from. Is it?

The menu with the “most empowering” options is not the one with the greatest number of options. But when we mindlessly accept the menus that are provided, it’s simple to miss the distinction:

  • “Who is available to hang out tonight? becomes a list of the most latest people who texted us (who we could ping).
  • The question “What’s going on in the world?” changes into a list of news feed stories..
  • “Who’s available for a date?” appears as a menu of faces on Tinder (instead of neighborhood gatherings with friends or nearby urban activities).
  • “I have to reply to this email.” transforms into a keyboard with response options (instead of encouraging ways to communicate with a person).

When we wake up in the morning and touch our phone to see a list of notifications — it frames the experience of ‘waking up in the morning’ around a menu of ‘all I’ve missed since yesterday.’

How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

Technology hijacks how we view our choices and substitutes new ones by modifying the menus we choose from. However, the more we focus on the options presented to us, the more we’ll notice when they don’t genuinely meet our needs.

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