Digital Marketer and Entrepreneur John Hill's blog post on Google's Discover update and digital engagement addiction

The TL;dr

I’m about to go a little tin foil hat here.
Google and Facebook are throwing down trying to take digital advertising dollars from each other.
I don’t agree with the tactics they use and I despise the wolf in sheep’s clothing narrative they hide behind.

Google announced a new product enhancement this week. Unlike most product enhancements that Google is a part of, this one was oddly not widely publicized. Google announced that they were changing the brand on “Google Feed” to “Google Discover.” Google describes this new product enhancement as a feed that will surface relevant content to you, even when you’re not searching.

If this sounds weirdly familiar, it’s because this isn’t exactly a new concept. This is basically Google taking on Facebook in the battle royale of stealing your attention and creating addiction by feeding you content based on your website activity that will drive engagement with their respective platforms.

The Skinner Box

In the 1960’s, in the glory days of Las Vegas, there was a man named B.F. Skinner that was a Harvard professor that had very little to do with gambling. What Skinner did do was study human behavior, more specifically, how human behavior is influenced by positive and negative feedback. Skinner conducted a study that put pigeons into a box that had a lever and a small chute that dispensed a tasty treat every time they pushed the lever. After some time, Skinner then changed the box to where treats were distributed at random times and not every time the pigeon pressed the lever. Guess what a pigeon does when they first experience a treat after pressing a lever and then that cadence is thrown off and treats begin to come out at different times? That poor unknowing bird starts to push the lever more and more often…

“The Skinner Box,” as Skinner’s study was later called, was groundbreaking for all kinds of reasons and spurred several similar studies on human behavior. Of course, Skinner himself had his own name for the experiment. He called it a slot machine and the behavior of the pigeons in the research, gambling addicts.

You’re probably reading this now thinking that I have the attention span of an eight-year-old and that I’m all over the place. What in the world do slot machines have to do with Google mobile enhancement? Bear with me. If you remember, I wrote here about how I observed my twelve-year-old son going through withdrawals from being away from his phone this summer during a camping trip in West Texas.

From Slots to Smartphones

Google used to have a motto that was something like “Don’t be a douchebag” or “Don’t be evil” or something like that. I’m probably off on that a bit, but not by much. Well, guess what? They are undoubtedly being evil with their new “Discovery” in my estimation.

Facebook’s algorithmic news feed was a lot of things that were not great, but probably the worst of all those bad things, Facebook’s news feed was an algorithm that was/is built to keep you engaged. Sure it’s made it possible for you to keep with the daily activities of your high school crush, but it’s also pretty much thrust Western soceity into pure chaos as well by being used as a tool to manipulate people in all kinds of kind of evil ways.

I have admired the fact that even though Google has always had an agenda, and yes sure they’ve used their stockpile of the smartest people on earth to manipulate CapEx investments and markets across the world. Maybe they have let their ideology drive strategy to the point where they use engineering to drive diversity in freaking google search results. But one thing they did very little of was attempt to to steal my attention and disrupt my flow.

Well, guess what, Now we have the smartest, most potent slot machines in the world in all of our pockets at all times. Pinging us, notifying us, discovering for us, influencing us, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Driven by two of the largest, smartest, most innovative companies in the world throwing down for our attention by feeding us what they already know that we long for, all in attempt to aggregate more and more of the market in digital advertising.

The Good News is…

Kind of a dark story up to this point I know, but stay with me. There is hope. Full disclosure, I market on both of these platforms, so it’s in my best interest economically for people to stay engaged with both of them. That said, I see trends in the market where people are beginning to become more and more aware of what the large tech companies are doing. I know several people much smarter than me that are deleting Facebook and Twitter from their phones and have research to speak to how its improved their productivity. Google’s tactics are beginning to raise flags as well, and those flags are spawning a discussion around transparency in search results. The type of debate that usually creates opportunities for competition in a market.

Parents are beginning to recognize more and more that we aren’t dealing with merely turning off the Xbox and telling little Stevie to go outside and play. Mobile devices built to drive addiction are severely impacting children in ways that are becoming more and more noticeable. Those things too will eventually force the type of feedback that change markets and technology.

Personally, I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone. I’m switching over to Bing as a browser as they at least aren’t trying completely to pimp out all of my data. Facebook and Instagram are probably not far behind.

Honestly, I have no idea how good or bad it is that Google is getting into the attention-stealing game with this news feed type of distraction trap. It may turn out to be groundbreaking tech that opens the door for AI sims that change history. I have no idea, but what I can tell you is that using technology to steal people’s attention and disrupt production flow is not something to be taken lightly by anyone. If you’ve managed to stay focused long enough to read all the way to the end of this post, you probably understand that as well as anyone possibly could. Work to keep it that way as more and more of this type of tech continues to roll out.