Is technology good or bad? What’s the double-edged sword of technology?
Adam Alter argues that some forms of technology are designed to encourage the doggedly relentless pursuit of personal growth, which can be a good and bad thing. This comes in two forms: skill mastery and all-around perfectionism.
Find out how the benefits of technology can also be a disadvantage.
Skill Mastery
Alter says that the double-edged sword of technology is that it’s designed to give users the feeling of accomplishment that comes when you’ve overcome a challenge or sharpened your skills—but this makes it easier for people to keep using the tech. This is especially common in video games—for example, in Minecraft, you might feel proud of the elaborate structures you’ve built. One way that game developers promote this feeling is by gradually increasing the complexity of the task so that you learn as you play and enjoy the process of becoming progressively better at the game. This can induce what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow) describes as flow—a period of blissfully intense engrossment that makes you lose all sense of time.
(Shortform note: Accomplishing video game objectives may make you feel good, but is it truly good for you? You might assume so, since the process induces flow, which is typically associated with happiness and progress toward constructive goals. However, Csikszentmihalyi explains that you can also experience negative flow during destructive activities, like war and crime, since those can be equally challenging and engrossing. Studies suggest that many problematic gamers cite the feeling of achievement they gain by playing as a motivation for their behavior—but since their gameplay hurts them more than it helps them, they may be responding only to the illusion of accomplishment. Thus, they may experience negative flow.)
Game developers proactively prolong this state of flow by making it easy for players to stay in the game. A game might automatically restart when you lose or, more subtly, might show you how close you were to winning—feeling like you almost won is a powerful motivator to keep playing, since it suggests that victory is within reach. Alter says that other technology designers use this strategy, too, by overriding or distracting you from your natural cues to stop engaging. For example, on X (formerly known as Twitter), you can easily swipe to see a new batch of tweets. You might find yourself obsessively refreshing your feed as a major news event unfolds, hoping to achieve mastery (in the form of comprehensive knowledge) of the topic du jour.
(Shortform note: By proactively prolonging your experience of flow, video game and social media designers incentivize you to make their platforms more profitable. For example, the developers of Candy Crush offer you chances to pay (or watch ads, which also generates revenue) to continue levels you’ve failed, which can be enticing if you felt you were “in the zone” and want to maintain your sense of progress. Using this model, the makers of Candy Crush have brought in over $20 billion. Social media apps are designed to be “frictionless”— that is, easy to use endlessly—and this generates profits by increasing the chance that you’ll view and interact with paid advertisements, for which social media companies are handsomely rewarded.)
All-Around Perfectionism
Some technology, like fitness tracking apps, helps you identify, quantify, and measure your progress toward goals in various areas of your life. Trying to reach goals isn’t inherently harmful, but Alter argues that the culture around goal-setting is toxic for three reasons:
It demands perpetual personal growth. Reaching a goal won’t satisfy you because until you reach a state of all-around perfection, there’s always more work to be done. When you reach your goal, you’ll just set another—and this means that you’ll never be satisfied with what you’ve achieved.
It’s numeric. Assigning numeric values to your goals can help you measure your progress, but these numbers are compelling, and it’s easy to hyperfixate on them to an unhealthy degree (for example, by pushing through an injury to beat a swim record).
It’s outcome-oriented. You’re more concerned with the achievement than the process of getting there, so you might not take time to enjoy the process. Furthermore, the joy you derive from the outcome itself is fleeting: Outcomes are short-lived compared to processes because they represent a single point in time. Once achieved, the positive feelings they evoke fade rapidly.
Alter says technology facilitates and amplifies the toxicity associated with perfectionistic goal-setting in three ways:
- First, some technology imposes arbitrary goals, as when a language learning app recommends that you complete three lessons a day.
- Second, some technology encourages obsessive progress-checking—for example, if a weight loss app prompts you to track your weight, you might feel compelled to weigh yourself more often than is healthy. Wearable technology can exacerbate this by providing constant feedback on your progress.
- Finally, some technology creates social pressure to perform by giving you plenty of opportunities to compare yourself to your peers (for example, you might notice your selfie got fewer likes than a friend’s).
