Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, did a Ted talk in October of 2017 in New York on the dominance of the major technology and media companies on society. His talk titled; How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google manipulate our emotions, discussed how these big shareholder companies are placed on a pedestal yet engineer their sites to be more addictive to consumers to yield the highest profit margins. These companies make more money in a year than India’s GDP.
First of all, Scott is a phenomenal speaker that captured my attention within the beginning 5 seconds. I think this partially derived from his long time career as a college professor who has learned to be an interesting speaker in order to get his students to engage. He equates Google and our inherent search for answers to a modern god. “One in six queries presented to Google have never been asked before in the history of mankind. What priest, teacher, rabbi, scholar, mentor, boss has so much credibility that one in six questions posed to that person have never been asked before?” It’s true, we go to Google for any question we cannot answer ourselves. One of my professors told my class on the first day not to ask him any “googleable” questions, hence any question in which the answer is easily found with an internet search.
In today’s society we depend too much on the false validation of social media. We base our self worth off how many likes we can get on a picture. Social media was intended to be a form of entertainment. Never before has there been an age in which access to entertainment was as constant and easily accessible. Tapping into entertainment from the time we wake up until we go to sleep cannot be healthy, and the companies know this. They hire attention engineers to create algorithms to maintain users interest. Facebook and instagram’s features of “liking” other people’s posts creates a false sense of connection and caring, a fundamental human need. We can interact and see our friends without ever leaving the comfort of our beds. It’s scary to think that were reaching a point in society that we could potentially lose the very personal touches that make us human.
Austin Hepburn says:
His TED Talk seems super interesting. I 100% agree that Social media has overrun our lives, both positively and negatively. Just the idea of the “attention engineers” you brought up would have been laughed at back in the 18th and 19th century.
October 18, 2018 — 4:18 pm
Lisa Li says:
Wow, it’s scary how these companies are manipulating us constantly without us knowing. They care more about profit rather than actually helping us and making our lives easier. People are becoming too reliant on technology, and are starting to abandon books, which could contain the same, if not more, information.
October 18, 2018 — 4:42 pm
Emma Lutz says:
It is crazy to think that the current generation of young children will never know an age without the likes of social media. Even our ‘Gen Z’ has never known the world without the internet. These drastic changes in how we gather information and who influences our opinions are sure to have concrete impacts in the future of society.
October 19, 2018 — 3:44 am