How to Be Smarter than Facebook
Note to Self
WNYC Studios
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2014
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Habits are powerful. Tech companies know that. It's no accident we reach for our phones 150 times a day and spend more time scrolling through Facebook than caring for our pets.
"Our brain loves to latch on to rewards that arrive quickly and Facebook has taught us to expect novelty after novelty," says author Charles Duhigg. "Our brain becomes trained at the pace of rewards, and then begins to crave that pace."
But if you are wise to the tech companies' tactics, you can take control of your own habits. Charles Duhigg and New Tech City are here to help this week.
"These habits are powerful only when you are not aware of them. As soon as you make deliberate choices, the habit is delicate and falls apart."Duhigg wrote The Power of Habit: How We Do What We Do in Life and Business in 2012. It explains how habits are formed and altered and often manipulated. But his bestseller doesn't include much about technology even though Duhigg knows the tech sector pretty well -- so much so he won a Pulitzer Prize reporting on it.
So in this episode of New Tech City, Duhigg updates his habit thesis to address the clever and devious advances in addictive tech that have come out in the past two years.
"If you decide you want to read something deep and meaningful, then your brain will actually begin assigning more reward salience to a New Yorker article and less to Facebook," Duhigg says. "But you have to make a deliberate choice."
In this episode:-
Why Uber and Seamless are so satisfying.
Why Facebook makes you scroll down and down.
What the bevy of new fitness tracking apps are really offering as a reward.
What needs to happen for society at large to get smarter about tech habits.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City. |
| 0:06.6 | Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy. |
| 0:17.1 | This is New Text City, I'm your host, Benoosh Summerodi, and this week we have a special guest. |
| 0:21.9 | Sitting next to me in the WNYC studio is Charles DuPig. Hi Charles. Hi. |
| 0:27.2 | Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Now Charles, I'm going to brag for you for a minute here. |
| 0:32.0 | You are a reporter for the New York Times. You want a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting last year |
| 0:37.2 | for your series about Apple, right? Right, right. The eye economy and sort of Apple is this lens |
| 0:41.8 | for the American economy. Okay, so you are also the author of The Power of Habit, which is about |
| 0:47.2 | the science of habit formation in our lives, companies, and societies. Now Charles, the book came out |
| 0:52.8 | in 2012. It was on the bestseller list for 60 weeks, I think. But the reason why I wanted to talk |
| 0:58.4 | to you about it now was because you didn't really go into technology specifically in your book, |
| 1:04.1 | even though you know a lot about it. And especially since 2012, we have really seen technology |
| 1:10.2 | embed itself in our lives, in our communities. For example, I just saw this statistic on |
| 1:15.3 | ComScore that we now spend twice as much time on digital media as we did when you were writing the |
| 1:21.0 | book. So today, you're here to help us rethink our tech habit. It's actually fascinating what's |
| 1:26.4 | happened in the last two years since the book came out in terms of how data has moved from something |
| 1:31.7 | that corporations talked about and manipulated to something that people are using in their own |
| 1:36.2 | lives, right? And using to shape their own habits. All of us carry around cell phones now that |
| 1:41.0 | record how frequently we're walking or in what we're eating and allow us access to sort of measure |
| 1:46.4 | our schedules in ways that were previously completely impossible. And as a result, technology has |
| 1:52.3 | become this creator of great habits and troubling habits in a way that even just two years ago |
| 1:58.6 | didn't seem to happen. I want to start out with the basics of the habit loop that sort of works |
... |
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