How Social Media leveraged Notification feature in the wrong way
We all know about the tricks and algorithms that social media use to control us. But we all are unaware of the part how notification — a feature used by almost everyone is messed up by them. This article explains how Social Media leveraged it in the wrong way.
Notification as a feature:
Notification is a feature that is used to inform the user about something important to them. On the base line it provides information that user needs/waiting for. For example, it is used to notify users about plan expiration, Bank account balance, messages from a friend etc.
But now social media uses Notification feature to drive the attention of the application users towards them. They just sends notifications just to trigger our brain to open it. And once we fall into the trap we surely gonna waste at least the next 5 minutes in our life by selling ourselves to them for their own benefit. Even if we decide to limit the usage of these social media apps, notification plays a vital role in destroying our will. They keep on pop-ing in our screens again and again, that at one point we desperately wait for it to come (likes and comments notification for example)
We have a separate section in Facebook just to manage unwanted notifications. The point is why those company are enabling all of those unnecessary notifications by default and proving an option to disable it? Does you new iPhone comes with all the apps they have in their app store and they provide us the option to delete it? No, we choose what we want in our phone and there are only some pre bundled apps comes along with the phone. Ironically Facebook and twitter is among that list. This explains how this social media is slowly becoming a mandatory factor in our life.
Is this mental harming process is behind the curtains?
Obviously. In old age people used to control others by having a superior power physically. Every country used their military power to control other nations. This ideology of controlling others by excelling in man power and physical strength is presently not in use much. So all these physical harms are exposed and laws were maintained to punish the victim. But what about the mental harm we receive from these application? Is this even noticed by us? The answer is NO.
Conclusion
In order to over come this, strict laws should be framed which opposes the usage of the features in the wrong way. Everyone can kill anyone, but laws prevent it from happening. Similarly anyone can control anyone using the right tricks by developing softwares and applications and proper law should be framed in order to avoid this. Let’s be aware of it. The message that I want to convey is, please use a feature in the way it was meant to be used. People set traps by leveraging it in a wrong way. Let’s not fall for it.
