The Quest for Intentionality.
Okay, hello. hi. thanks for being here.lol. I’m really glad you’re here.
I don’t know if exponential is the right way to describe the progress of the world today. There has been so much advancement in so many areas. Health, Finance, Communication, Transport ( The first week I was in Arizona, my jaw dropped out of my mouth and I stopped so abruptly my friend walked into me, for I saw a car at the signal with no driver, it then went on to drive by me, by itself, it also had a passenger). Progress in so many ways and so many fields, so many lives made better. I would say this is such a great thing for humanity in a whole, but is it the same for the individual person? Let’s talk about tech, about which I know a thing or two. There have been so many massive changes to the whole landscape with Artificial Intelligence and its agents. Similarly, the curiosity of entrepreneurship has led people to utilise and leverage this growth. Everyday on twitter I see someone posting a new product they’ve built, Product Hunt keeps exploding. So many of my friends have benefitted from this growth, they’re trying to build things on their own, learn stuff, get their hands dirty. I’m so proud of this. I’m so happy for my fellow people.
But sometimes I can’t help wonder about the impact of this unprecedented, uncontrolled and unmonitored growth on the individual person. I’ve seen so many things and experiences that make me think if all this is necessary? I remember studying in school that food, shelter and clothing are the three primary needs for humans. But now I’ve seen this list grow to tens and hundreds. I have so many apps on my phone, sometimes it makes me frustrated and I’ll want to delete them all. But then I’ll remember I need it to do something, damn. And this is the answer I give to the question what has this progress led us to: This increased dependency. The inability to completely rid ourselves of things we don’t want. This blurring and sometimes complete removal of the line between choice and necessity.
Two years ago, I started a quest to understand digital devices and human behaviour in relation to them. I explored and studied about digital dependency, the digital rewards system, numerous other fields like gamification, cognitive science. Now I study Human Systems Engineering, specifically social psychology and behaviour. I’ve come to understand from my work that there are so may things taking away our choices in the digital world. It isn’t entirely our fault, there are deeper psychological phenomenon that are making you dependent. Numerous studies that point out the role of social acceptance, approval, battling inner psychological demons, childhood influences, parental figures that lead us to doing things. For that matter there’s this whole field called Behavioural Economics ( which I also study ), that is trying to understand why people behave the way they do in the real world. Your mind is not the only thing that is to be blamed, there’s another whole discipline called behaviour design, ( which I try to study), that deals with how to change human behaviour. This field has come up with insights that established the foundations of todays social media and most of the internet.
We’re being lured by so many shiny things that attract our brains that we take them all and put them in our bags without realising that it is us who will need to carry it. We no longer have complete control over our time, emotions, mental state and most importantly our identity. The world has become a place of influences and distractions and addictions and motivations. Individual identity is getting lost to mass hysteria, mass excitement and conformity. It’s become so easy to lost your identity, beliefs and values.
The world is progressing at an exponential pace, it is growing so fast that we don’t have the proper time to breath and make sense of what’s happening. There are some really great things that come out of it, like those voice morphing apps that let you prank your friends or that new software tool that lets you perform statistical analysis without even knowing what an ANOVA is, lol. Honestly progress is good, but have we ever wondered what it is causing us. Us as in individuals. I don’t think so. We’re prone to adapting to everything thrown at us by our society, we don’t want to be that one person who doesn’t use the new cool financial tracking app, right? Especially when everyone you know is using it? We adapt to things, bring them into our lives and grow dependent on them, without ever thinking properly about them. In a world full of such stuff, what can be the answer: intentionality.
I was visiting a friend in Chennai and I was travelling on a bus. There was a guy sitting beside me and was immersed in his phone, as I like people-watching whenever I’m in Chennai I didn’t have my phone out. As it was perfectly normal (jk) i casually peeked at this guys phone, he was editing a video to upload a WhatsApp status, I guess it was some song. A couple of stops pass by and I peek again, he was still editing the video, but I could see it was a different one, he deleted that one, opened his gallery selected a different video and started to edit that, nope, he didn’t like that too I think because put on a different one. I was sitting beside that guy for about 25 minutes and by the time I got down at my stop that poor guy still hadn’t uploaded a status. I forgot about that incident for a while and a few weeks later when I reading a paper on digital habits I randomly started thinking about that guys behaviour. He was on his phone for at least 30 mins and what did he do the whole time? I was baffled with so many questions. Was it necessary to invest 30 minutes of time to upload a WhatsApp status that was a song. What prompted him to be so meticulous about that decision. Was he trying to send a message to his audience with his song choices? Was there someone specific he wanted to dedicate the song to? So many questions. I couldn’t find answers to any of these questions, I just mused for a while.
Currently I’m a graduate student studying Human Factors, along with a little bit of social behaviour and behavioural economics. I’ve tried to understand digital and social behaviour these past year or so. Now I look at that person from a completely different perspective. Nobody taught him what was a correct WhatsApp status was but why did he spend 30 mins of his time looking for one? Where did he learn to discern what is a yes and what is a no. You should have also guessed that this person must have had a significant collection of videos to choose from. What prompted him to make such a collection. As far as I remember, all of the videos were songs, what made him decide they must be songs, not video clips of something else or images. You see the theme of my questions subtly change from why did he do it to what made him do it? Because I have reason to believe someone or something made that person spend 30 minutes of his life debating over a WhatsApp status that his audience would forget about in the next minute they’ve seen it.
Now look into you’re life or the last few days to see how much time you spent on mindless pursuits across the internet. It could be famous things like doom-scrolling and binge-watching and less famous things like watching productivity videos or engaging in intellectual twitter debates about World or Warcraft. We’ve all done it, just last week I spent about and hour and half deciding what food to order. You know what’s the worst thing out of it, I don’t think of it as time wasted, but I’ve attached a label saying “finding healthy food options” to cover it up and bury it, so I don’t have to feel guilty about it. This is a common pattern in lives. We engage in behaviour that is not beneficial to us, but we often find ways to twist it into a perspective that makes it appear beneficial so we don’t have to fret about it.
Going back to our WhatsApp status guy let’s look at a couple of reasons for his behaviour. It is clear that he is looking at achieve something from that whatsapp status, we do not know what. And I would say that even he doesn’t know what it is, but he has a feeling of what that’s supposed to look like or feel like. This is where the curious and mysterious effects of the human mind comes into play. The human mind categorises experiences as desirable and non desirable and it works to recreate as many of the desirable experiences as possible. The human mind also has wants and needs, the mind represents a semblance of the self. Thus what the mind wants is what I want. These needs and wants are influenced by so many things throughout our life. Things such as childhood influences, parental figures, need for approval, trauma, social acceptance influence and mold our likes, dislikes, values and beliefs . These are the very things that dictate how we behave. So, it is not going overboard to say that our influences dictate our behaviour.
But this whole phenomenon has been disrupted entirely in the past two decades. In the twentieth century we have very few ways to be influenced, it was either or books. With the growth of the internet, the smart phone revolution and social media, these primary influences have been blown up exponentially. There are so many ways in which a person can be influenced these days and the worst thing is there is no way to identify if you’re acting intentionally or if there is something influencing you. Researchers have seen an increased dependency on digital devices and the internet in the past few years. It is undeniable that they have become a crucial part of our lives. But the human mind also works in mysterious ways.
Human behaviour refers to the range of actions and reactions exhibited by individuals in response to various external and internal stimuli. That was the definition I found on the internet, it basically says behaviour is what we do in response to something. We live in an environment and there are so many stimuli in it. We exhibit a certain behaviour while paying the bills and we exhibit a different behaviour while courting somebody, there are reasons for these differences. The most interesting thing that is we do not always know why we’re behaving in a certain way. I once saw a guy try on many videos just to upload a 30 second WhatsApp status, he went on trying stuff for at least 30 mins. This was his behaviour, but what was the stimuli that was causing it? Stimuli are always present when there is something to be achieved, it could also be quenching the need for something, especially since we humans are social creatures living in a society there are so many needs that need quenching. Human behaviour can also exhibit something, state something, proclaim something.
When we think of this guy and try to understand his behaviour numerous questions come to mind. What prompted him to be so meticulous about that decision. Was he trying to send a message to his audience with his song choices? Was there someone specific he wanted to dedicate the song to? Why was it a song and not some other media form? All of these unanswered. On the other hand, human behaviour can also be influenced. We can learn things, form knowledge representations and use it later in life, it is an important part of being human. A couple of the most significant influences that humans deal with are psychological and social. Our mind and its inhabitants along with the world and its inhabitants can cause significant changes in our behaviour. These influences can directly or indirectly influence us, this is how we can explain most of the unreasonable actions that we take.
Let’s get a little deeper into psychological and social influences. These influences play a profound role in altering human behaviour. They often alter our actions, perceptions and attitudes without our knowledge. Psychologically these take the form of Subconscious Processes, Unconscious Motivations, Conditioning, Learning and Defense mechanisms. These are ways our mind chooses to protect us and survive, these are deep rooted in our consciousness and as we age we grow to rely on these to find our place in the society. Which brings us to other set of influences: social. Most of social influences are indirect, we are affected by these subconsciously. Things like Identity, Acceptance, Approval, Comparison and Conformity lead to to behave in certain ways. From a very young age we are taught of what is right, wrong and acceptable and we have behaved as such. These influences along with so many other are rooted in the concept of being human.
In the twentieth century influences were limited, it was either people or books. In the twenty-first century owing the rapid progress of technology these primary influences have blown up so much that they are incomprehensible at the least. The number of influences that we can exact are too much to count. The world is celebrating the advancements and its progress towards a completely digital self. But should we accept what it is becoming without looking at what we are loosing?
This phenomenal progress is the primary reason for the loss of the individual identity, there are so many people doing so many things and expecting so many things from. Our human mind is tuned to respond to any and all of the influences, it doesn’t stop unless we stop it. And we are not. We are adapting everything being thrown at us without a second thought. The dependence on internet is
And it also works hard to ensure we don’t repeat those non desirable behaviours. We could say this is where the feelings of like and dislike and more importantly comfortable and uncomfortable arise from. We do not like going to the gym, workouts make us feel uncomfortable
Let’s by consider his behaviour to be influenced, but by what or who?
What influences human behaviour? Current growth of technology and its role on influencing human behaviour how human behaviour is growing to become involuntary but a series of responses to keep up with expectations hot its forcing people to adapt to sterotypes ad