Who is mediating whom?

Most of us have spent a lot of time in the course of our lives staring at progress bars like this one, whether we are waiting for some content to download, waiting for an app to install, or waiting for some online process to be completed. Most of us probably take the ‘meaning’ of progress bars pretty much at face value, believing that they accurately communicate the amount and the rate of progress being made on whatever processes we are waiting to complete. Most of us also invest a certain amount of emotional energy in progress bars: we feel frustrated when they move more slowly that we would like, and we feel a pleasant surge of anticipation when they seem to indicate that a process is almost complete. In his blogpost The Psychology of Progress Bars, Oli Salisbury notes that the ‘feeling of progress’ that progress bars give us, and the ‘rush’ of neurotransmitters we feel when a task has been completed, mean that progress bars are likely to make us more committed to the process they represent and less likely to back out of it (for example, to decide not to download that app after all).

For these reasons, most people would probably be surprised to learn that what is shown on a progress bar usually has very little relationship to the amount or speed of progress that is actually being made. The progress bar is lying to you. This, in fact, is a very good example of what I said in the last lecture: that with digital media, there is always a ‘front end’ communication and a ‘back end’ communication, and what we read on our screens is often not the same as what’s going on behind the scenes (or rather, ‘behind the screens’).

In his book, What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn uses the progress bar as a simple but effective example of the way algorithms control us. Progress bars, like everything else we see on our screens, are controlled by algorithms, strings of computer code which tell them how to behave. The problem is, sometimes the agendas of algorithms are not the same as the agendas of users. Algorithms may have ‘hidden agendas’. In the case of progress bars, the agenda of the algorithm is not to tell you how much progress is being made, but to keep you committed to the process that it represents, to create a kind of emotional connection to that process, and sometimes, to keep you staring at the progress bar so that other messages, entertainment or advertising can be delivered to you while you wait. Everything about the speed and rhythm of the progress bar has been carefully engineered to create a psychological effect of excitement, anticipation, impatience, seduction.

A more sinister example can be found in Natasha Schull’s book Addiction by Design, in which she talks about how the algorithms that control casino slot machines and online betting sites gather information about their users’ habits and then formulate strategies to keep them playing, figuring how when they need to let users win and how much. Of course these algorithms are a lot smarter than the ones that control progress bars; they can actually learn and change based on the behaviour of human users.

In the lecture we talked about the concept of mediation. We said that the key to understanding how digital media affect how we communicate is understanding how they mediate our actions, actions like communicating with our Facebook friends or breaking up with our boyfriends or girlfriends. Different media allow us to do different things, or to do the same thing in different ways. In this theory, the underlying assumption is that it is us that are using technology to do things. Another way to look at it is that technology is using us to do things. Technologies are the actors, and we are just the tools. One of you came close to this idea when we were discussing the ‘Like’ button, suggesting that its real purpose is not to communicate what we like to our friends, but to communicate what we like to Facebook, so that it can serve us more effective advertising.

Can you think of other examples where you think, rather than using technology, technology might be using you?