Abstract
In this paper, we argue that boredom can be an important experience that contributes to personal autonomous agency by providing authentic motivation, and that strategies of social media providers to bind users’ attention to their platforms undermine this authenticity. As discussed in social epistemology and media ethics for a while now, such strategies can lead to so-called epistemic or filter bubbles. Our analysis of the relation between boredom and social media use focuses on a similarly impairing effect of social media on users’ autonomy, which we call authenticity bubbles.
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Notes
There may be factors that, perhaps against common intuition, can contribute to an authentic decisions-making process, if an individual endorses them as part of their personality, such as neurotic character traits. See Killmister (2015) for an account of how psychological conditions like this might still be considered authentic for certain individuals.
Here we refer to any mental states of an agent as internal factors and to activities of other agents as well as on social and environmental circumstances as external factors.
One male outlier has been reported to have applied 190 shocks to himself.
At least some of the applied user interface design strategies are often labelled as ‘dark patterns’, although the literature on this topic varies and is not always consistent. For a recent overview see, e.g., Mathur et al. (2021)
In that regard, our use of the term ‘nudge’ also includes what Thaler and Sunstein later label as ‘sludge’ (see, e.g., Thaler, 2018), which appears applicable to strategies that make people more likely to do things they don’t really prefer, like the one we describe in this paper.
There sometimes appears to be an overlap between instances that would count as coercion for Raz but could also be classified as domination according to, e.g., Pettit (1997). For our purpose, as outlined earlier, domination is an authenticity-diminishing factor, although perhaps to a slightly lesser degree than direct coercion.
Or rather, the data that online companies have that represent these convictions and attitudes.
Leung (2020) also highlights the effect that ‘habitual’ or ‘ritualised’ usage of smartphone apps might have on a user’s decision to engage with a certain type of media. While this type of effect might apply to any type of activity – one could, for example, imagine a musician who habitually picks up her guitar every time she is bored – the fact that smartphones have become such a constant companion in most people’s lives and social media are always ‘just a tap away’, might make the effect of ritualised usage more pertinent in the case of social media.
In that regard, boredom operates like pain. Also, like pain, boredom might even be pleasurable for some people and under specific circumstances. But even then, boredom will likely not always be pleasurable.
We assume that social media companies (or rather, the people running them) plainly have economic interests in keeping users on their platforms by optimising the choice architecture to this end. One could, however, follow a Heideggerian approach, for example, and argue that technology, and particularly contemporary digital technology, are not merely means to this end but rather a more comprehensive way of thinking or being, as developed in The Question Concerning Technology (1977). If one understands machines (or technological artifacts generally) as what he calls ‘standing-reserve’ or ‘Bestand’ (ibid., p. 17), they are things without individual character, without autonomy and, one might be tempted to say, without dignity. Further, this techno-ontological understanding facilitates, as some scholars argue, ‘a deeply instrumental and […] grotesque understanding of the world in general’ (Wheeler, 2020). From this perspective it is unsurprising that something like authenticity bubbles evolves from practices characterised (or perhaps even only made possible) by a world view like this. Yet, we prefer to not pursue this line of thought any further here, not least because Heidegger’s terminology is complex and often difficult to access, as others have noted before: ‘Heidegger’s theory of technology contains so many implausible notions that it is very difficult to defend it on a correspondence basis’ (Waddington, 2005, 578). Nevertheless, this remains a promising avenue for future exploration for philosophers of technology.
The degree of similarity differs depending on the account of akrasia one endorses. As our account of authenticity bubbles in the context of social media platforms clearly has a significant externalist component, our understanding of akrasia is found more likely in the neighbourhood of views like those defended in Stocker (1979) or Mele (1987) than of strongly internalist views.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank audiences at the PhiDOS Second International Meeting 2022, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association 2022, and the Conference for Practical Philosophy 2022 in Salzburg, where earlier versions of this paper have been presented. We would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions.
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Podschwadek, F., Runkel, A. From Boredom to Authenticity Bubbles: The Implication of Boredom-Induced Social Media Use for Individual Autonomy. Philos. Technol. 37, 50 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00741-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00741-z