Something really strange is going on with today’s youth, and it involves cell phones. Ever since being invented April 3rd, 1973 — roughly 45 years ago — our society has been obsessed with cellphones.
It is certainly easy to see the appeal: stay connected to friends, conduct business, ease aspects of your life, and have a phone in the event of emergencies. Why then, are large amounts of people finding most of their time being spent on social media?
When we look at the statistics, more than 95% of adults in America own a cellphone and the majority of people believe they use it too much; demographic-wise, the largest group of social media users are Gen-Z females and this is the same demographic being targeted by marketing campaigns.
Interestingly, online buyers are typically young, tech-savvy people who are urged to buy the same shoes or clothing that they see people wearing when scrolling through social media. Recent studies show that most American millennials have spent money without having planned to do so in advance, because of what they saw on social media.
In the past, people saw enviable lifestyles only in grocery store magazines, but now many are constantly exposed to it via social media. Research shows most millennials feel inadequate about their own life because of what they see on social media.
With the advent of Instagram shopping, people can shop without ever having to leave the app. Cellphones can be a beneficial tool, but there are downsides:
- They negatively impact consumers spending habits
- Attention spans will deteriorate with social media use
- This change can influence buying behaviour and correlate with impulse buying
Is social media killing our attention span?
The numerous prompts/notifications we receive daily promote divided attention, which in turn decreases our capacity to focus on a single task.
People who spend their time regularly switching between online activities require more cognitive effort to keep concentration. Aside from making us distracted, the internet has become somewhat of external memory for us.
Researchers have been studying online social media trends and have found that in 2016 a global Twitter trend lasts for an average of 11.9 hours, contrasted with a 2013 Twitter trend which would last for 17.5 hours. This implies that the effects of technology are a global phenomenon and not limited to a single country or continent. The professors who conducted the study explain that there are too many topics constantly competing for attention in our collective minds and this content only continues to grow in volume.
Scientifically, constant use of social media platforms can change your neuroplasticity — the idea that your brain is constantly rewiring itself based on its behaviour. For example, the average social media user seeks short-lived highs through content that is short, catchy, and controversial — characteristically similar to an addictive drug.
Most adolescents will sit down to read a book or do homework and find it harder because their brains are out of shape, having invested so much time in switching attention in quick bursts. Why would adolescents be addicted to social media in the first place? If it doesn’t seem like they would benefit from it why would they use it so often?
It’s because these applications are designed to lock you into a “ludic loop” — repeatedly doing something because occasionally you receive a reward, in the case of cellphones the reward is notifications. Therefore, slot machines and social media platforms have similar business models, they focus on attention-driven results.
Consider the example of Instagram, a person receives a notification that guarantees to show them some interesting or worth their time. The satisfaction in receiving a notification creates a small rush of dopamine, resulting in you checking over and over again.
Unfortunately, there are not many solutions to combat the ludic loop, the most obvious solution is to delete the most time-consuming apps so that you no longer use them. However, an alternative approach is replacing the bad habits with better ones, which could mean reading or listening to audiobooks, but that takes a little willpower. Then again, it’s difficult because people read less and watch less due to decreasing attention spans.
What will marketers do when their consumers no longer have attention spans?
The answer to that question lies in online shopping. Technology has made it easier than ever to spend money, due to innovations like one-click checkout, PayPal, one-day shipping, and customer reviews. While these innovations unquestionably make it easier to shop, it’s altering how consumers make purchasing decisions.
Currently, people save 3% of personal income compared to 12% saved 50 years ago, and the debt-to-income ratio has increased from 15% to 22%. Amazon is the main culprit when it comes to encouraging impulse buying.
“We see that consumers who have more digital lives… are actually getting better at processing information and then encoding that to memory. So that is good news for marketers overall. It changes the way we market to them.” — Alyson Gausby, a researcher at Microsoft
Gausby claims, “our digital behaviours are correlated with attention spans.”
Implying that consumers are better at deciding what they want and require less brain power to commit things to memory.
Wouldn’t consumers be less likely to purchase if it’s harder to garner their attention? While it’s true that social media has eroded the consumer attention span, they are more likely to engage with content that they filter in. Studies conclude that “the more selective consumers are, the more receptive they will be to the content they find valuable.” Marketers thus benefit from consumers being selective, allowing them to garner more revenue depending on how effective their advertising is.
We live in a time where making a large order such as a washing machine can be done from the comfort of our own house with a few taps of our fingers. This ease of use is just another reason consumers, especially younger ones, are drawn towards making purchases on their mobile devices.
Younger generations spend a large majority of their time socializing, relaxing and even doing work on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets; it is only a small leap to start shopping on these devices too.
The same instant gratification we crave from seeing posts being liked are also received by making an impulsive decision like taking a vacation or making a new purchase. The solution? Make cellphones illegal for those under the age of 12. Just kidding. But what do you think is the answer?
