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Ending tyrannic man’s dominion
Published in Kathy Knox, Krzysztof Kubacki, Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, Stakeholder Involvement in Social Marketing, 2020
All this changes with the acquisition of power. In the hands of an MNC marketing, axioms like ‘consumer sovereignty’ and the ‘customer always comes first’ are eviscerated by the fiduciary imperative and the precedence of the shareholder. Customer service becomes an Orwellian construct when the commercial determinants of ill-health are so well recognised; when so many products – tobacco, processed food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, leaded paint, guns – are known to have caused such harm, even when used as intended, that a new descriptor, the ‘industrial epidemic’ (Jahiel & Babor, 2007), has had to be coined. If we extend the definition of harm beyond the individual to the collective and then the planetary, the list of products multiplies. Arguably it becomes endless; the problem is consumption and a system honed to command it is of very questionable value. In these circumstances, marketing is a tool for manipulation not cooperation. Teenagers are beguiled with tobacco; gamblers are captivated by fixed-odds betting terminals; and everyone is being enthralled by their devices; “in an attention economy, addiction is not so much a scourge as a means of production” (Seymour, 2019).
Why Canada’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Act Needs “Mental Data”
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
Dylan J. White, Joshua August Skorburg
Physical harms, damage to property, and economic loss may be more-or-less quantifiable, but what are we to make of psychological harm? Recent work on the ethics of the attention economy (Castro and Pham 2020) has identified psychological harms such as nudging, manipulation, and attention commodification in many applications powered by AI (especially social media). Yet, these harms are notoriously hard to pin-down and often rest on unsophisticated empirical accounts of human psychology (White under review). By proposing a new subset of data categorization called “mental data,” Palermos (2023) complicates this already fraught landscape by proposing to include “the non-neuronal parts of extended minds” as additional sites of potential psychological harm. This complication is necessary, however, because if Palermos (2023) is on the right track, then psychological harm at the hands of AI is more widespread than the proposed legislation can accommodate.
Flow mediates the relationship between problematic smartphone use and satisfaction with life among college students
Published in Journal of American College Health, 2023
Andrew D. Pearson, ba, Chelsie M. Young, phd, Faith Shank, ma, Clayton Neighbors, phd
Smartphones have features that seem to intentionally contribute to problematic use, such as a random reward schedules that reinforce habitual “checking behavior”.23 In fact, tech developers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere openly work to make their products habit-forming. The "attention economy" centered on selling advertisements relies on getting users to spend as much time and attention as possible staring at screens.24 Using simple tricks such as haptic feedback, random reward schedules, red notification icons, and gratifying "likes" and retweets, social media giants have managed to reinforce habitual behavior, and capture large proportions of attention on any given day.25,26 These strategies seem to be working as some estimates find that the average consumer spends over an hour on Facebook and about five hours on their phone each day.27 Although intentionally cultivated, some of this behavior is a natural result of sociological factors. Social norms such as pressure to answer messages from others are also cited as possible contributors to PSU.28 Many of the features of phone dependence are shared with Internet addiction; in fact, scales for evaluating Smartphone Addiction are based on scales for Internet Addiction29, but differences in predictive factors between Internet addiction and PSU suggest that smartphone use is a distinct phenomenon.30 This distinction seems to arise from the availability of the smartphone at all times, and the variety of uses the smartphone possesses. Reliance on the smartphone for such a wide variety of tasks may also contribute to addiction proneness, leading to widely reported anxiety when one loses access to one’s smartphone.31