Hi Jaski,
Good luck finding that unicorn!! I don’t believe you can’t. Like Carl Jung once said, I rather be ‘whole’ than good, anyway! I believe it’s just like salt and pepper in food, you need to find that fragile balance between all the ingredients to make it work out at the end - anything taken to its extremes won’t be ‘sustainable’! Problem is, we only have one dopamine centre and it doesn’t differentiate between any addiction, sex, drugs, gambling, etc… our dopamine centre has been hijacked by platforms like facebook, google, etc, as they all fight for our time!! When I start looking at this ‘relation’ with new technology I thought it was an emergent property of the ‘system’, but it’s not, it has been designed!!! Our relationship with technology (and by that i mean all technology not just the digitally, electrified one) has always been like holding a double-edged sword, it can swing either direction, it’s up to us to use it responsibly!
How to design a memorable, irresistible experience? You can boil it down to six key ingredients, accordingly to Adam Alter: “compelling goals that remain just out of reach; unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social connections.” Taken together, these ingredients compel us to act.
Adam Alter writes in his last book (Irresistible – the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked), is that 41% of the population has suffered from some form of internet-addiction, whether it’s email, gaming, or porn. This finding comes from a 2011 review paper of 83 studies with a combined total of 1.5 million respondents from around the globe. And it forms the backbone of Alter’s thesis: addiction is not a disease of the brain affecting “addictive personalities”, but is rather a learned experience shaped by memory, environment, and circumstance.
I personally live on the edge of all this paraphernalia of gadgets, apps and whatnots and at the moment I’m trying to understand how to design meaningful interactions between society, technology and the environment - understanding how to make it better is not so obvious as we cannot tell each other what to do and there isn’t a solution that fits all!! What troubles me is the fact that we are creating and maintaining an ‘ecology’ of ignorance, an overflow of information where we cannot tell the difference between false and true anymore, losing our ability to communicate (communication is much more than just a couple of zeros and ones on a screen), and most important our critical thinking, our ability to reflect and share on our experiences - this is how we learn, this is how our culture is formed, layer upon layer… the way we are mediating our interactions through technology has taken all these away! I believe that this social experiment will have serious implications in human behaviour, down the road, that could be compared to hard drugs epidemics…