52 GENIUS INTERVIEW Adam Alter
law firms at an earlier age. Financial stocks with simpler names perform better on the markets than stocks with complex names. The book is full of these strange effects – cases where seemingly insignificant or irrelevant cues shape consequential outcomes. FEED: How did you become interested in the topic of problematic screen use? ADAM ALTER: As with most of my research, my interest was at first very personal. I bought an iPhone in 2009, and it changed my life for the good, but also in many ways for the bad. I love live music, and when I moved to New York I spent two or three nights a week at mostly small indie concerts. On some nights I’d attend with my phone, and on others I’d leave the phone at my apartment. The concerts were always better – more engrossing and immersive – without a phone. And that’s how we enjoyed concerts for decades, and even longer, until smartphones changed the experience of being away from home. I also started downloading games on my phone and struggled to stop playing. I once flew from New York to Los Angeles – a six-hour flight – and spent the entire flight playing a very basic game called Flappy Bird. I barely remembered the flight when we landed, which isn’t a terrible thing, but it did suggest the power of these screens to attract and keep our attention. After that flight, I started to work on the book, and I realised I wasn’t alone. Millions, if not billions, of people seemed to be at the mercy of similar so-called behavioural addictions. FEED: Can you talk about your new book, Irresistible , and what you discovered while writing it? ADAM ALTER: Irresistible is about the rise of a new form of addiction – behavioural addiction, which doesn’t involve the ingestion of substances and instead relies on carefully designed experiences. Think of slot machines or video games or pretty much anything you do on a smartphone that you’d prefer to spend less time doing. The term ‘behavioural addiction’ is controversial, because ‘addiction’ is such a loaded term. To me, it refers to an experience that you choose to pursue in the short term, despite its capacity to diminish your wellbeing in the longer term, whether socially, psychologically, physically or financially. A person who sits playing games for hours and hours at a
HOOK, LINE AND SINKER Adam Alter’s book, Irresistible, is about our behavioural addiction to screens and technology
time will experience many of these costs – diminished social interactions, the health costs of being sedentary and perhaps loss of income or overspending on the game. Some of these behavioural addictions have been around for decades – gambling is a good example – but most are very, very new, and in the past decade or two they’ve come to affect a huge portion of the population in both the developed and developing worlds. I wanted to understand why this was happening. What is it about these experiences that makes them so difficult to resist, and why have they changed how we spend our time and attention so dramatically in such a short period of time?
FEED: Are screens inherently addictive?
ADAM ALTER: Screens are just vehicles for content-delivery devices. They aren’t addictive until you fill them with content that’s designed to capture our attention.
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook