Rainblog

I recently came across a post in which John Scalzi explains why he deleted his Klout account. To paraphrase his argument in my own words, Klout creates an artificial anxiety about your Klout score, which leads to you behaving in ways that are presumably in Klout’s interest, not yours.

I’m a little surprised that anyone takes Klout seriously, given that Klout scores are notably arbitrary. I signed up for Klout, looked at my score once and then immediately lost interest. Klout attempted to get me back by sending me emails I hadn’t asked for and from which I couldn’t unsubscribe (their software was broken) but eventually I managed to wriggle off their mailing list, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

Klout’s … let’s call it a psychic model … is a variant of what I call ‘leaderboard anxiety’. The idea is that some service sets up a metric by which you can evaluate your status. You are then supposed to obsess over this number and - the goal of the whole thing - keep coming back to the service to check on your score. Klout scores, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Foursquare mayorships, Reddit karma, all work on the same principle: get more, improve your score, earn worthless badges, feel bad about yourself if you don’t ‘measure up’.

Closely related is ‘attention anxiety’. Again, there’s a ‘score’ to track, but this time it’s a local score linked to a specific action that you have taken: Tumblr reblogs, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, upvotes on Digg or Reddit, Pinterest repins. You do something - tweet something witty, blog something insightful - and then you check back obsessively to find out how many people have liked or repeated what you said.

The infamous Zynga, maker of Facebook games, invented another anxiety to keep you coming back. Call it ‘tamagotchi anxiety’, or ‘spinning plates anxiety’. You have an unstable system - a Farmville farm - that requires constant attention. Unless you attend to it continuously, everything goes rapidly to hell, and your virtual pets reprove you pathetically for your heartlessness, tongues lolling and little x’s stamped on their tiny eyes. It’s rather like being a system administrator, but with less lifting heavy servers into racks.

These features aren’t accidental: they’re deliberately engineered and their common goal is to get you to keep coming back to the service and keep participating. Maybe if I do this, I can improve my Klout score. Maybe if I post a funnier tweet, more people will retweet it. It’s an artificial addiction based on our need for constant validation.

Anxieties aren’t the only tool social media has up its sleeve to keep us hooked. Another is what you might call “distraction satisfaction”. We’re drawn to look for new stimuli, for little crumbs of new information that give us something to think about or act on. Twitter and Facebook play on this. It’s very easy to think “I’ll just check my Twitter/Facebook/email/phone messages to see if anything new has come in; it’ll only take a second.” But of course it doesn’t just take a second. If there is something new, it leads us off down a procrastinatory rabbit hole. If there is nothing new, we’re left feeling dissatisfied, so we try again. If Twitter didn’t deliver, try Facebook. If Facebook didn’t deliver, there’s email, Reddit, Digg, text messages, Twitter again …

Catering to our natural urge to procrastinate might be a little more benign than deliberately inducing anxieties but it’s equally insidious. Moreover, the end goal is the same: to keep us coming back and to get us to participate. As a bonus, our own involvement makes the service more effective at dragging our friends into a similar spiral. As we send out our tweets and post our Instagram photos, we’re baiting the trap for others. When we mention someone’s Twitter handle, or tag them in a photo on Facebook, we’re passing out a little packet of distraction. The designers know this. Each new feature added to a social media service is designed not to increase the utility of the service for its users, but to increase the utility of its users to the service.

The lesson to take away? Social media is not your friend. You are being manipulated in ways that are harmful to you.

Speaking for myself, I’m mostly immune to leaderboard anxiety, but I do worry about how many people repost or retweet what I say (although based on my performance to date, I should just give up). And, I will admit it, I check my email and Twitter far more often than I should.

The odd thing is that following people on Twitter gives me a quite different anxiety, one that I don’t think has been designed by the social psychologists. It’s that all the people I follow seem to be doing such cool stuff - building web applications, staying on the cutting edge of their discipline, writing novels, taking photos, traveling to exotic places, making art. When I read about their projects and their successes, I start to feel anxious about how little I’m doing in comparison.

Maybe it’s because I spend too much time using social media …

A little while back, I wrote a post about belief in global climate change, in which I argued that people’s willingness to believe in anthropogenic climate change was directly tied to their political - or perhaps philosophical and psychological - position. New studies from the Cultural Cognition Project seem to support that conclusion. Don Braman of the project says that “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view”. Another member of the project says that “… the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values. If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way.”

Put another way, you can throw all the scientific studies you want at people, but if they don’t like the conclusions, they can’t hear you.

The package of ‘core beliefs’ associated with any worldview may shift slowly over time - it is no longer controversial to say that our world revolves around the sun - but if you need to orchestrate a rapid response to a pressing problem before it’s too late, you may just be out of luck.