How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

Hijack 7:
‘Respectful’ Delivery vs. Instant Interruption

Companies are aware that synchronous messages are less convincing at persuading people to respond than asynchronous messages (like email or any deferred inbox).

Instead of encouraging users to respect each other’s attention, Facebook Messenger (or WhatsApp, WeChat, or SnapChat, for that matter) would choose to build their messaging system to interrupt recipients right away (and display a conversation box).

So interruptions are advantageous to business.

They also have a reason to make people feel more reciprocal and urgent. Facebook, for instance, immediately notifies the sender when you “see” their message rather than allowing you choose whether to hide the fact that you didn’t read it (“Now that one knows you’ve seen the message, you feel even more pressure to answer”).

Apple, in contrast, allows customers to toggle “Read Receipts” on or off in a more courteous manner.

The issue is that increasing interruptions for business purposes leads to a tragedy of the commons that destroys attention spans worldwide and results in billions of pointless disruptions every day. We must use common design standards to address this significant issue.

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