Hijacking the mind

[Eichhörnchen]

I'll comment on the first link here (I haven't time to read the others right now... I need to budget my online time ). But I opened my own website for selling my work six months ago and almost immediately began receiving offers of help in learning how to manipulate others into buying. There was a mini-tutorial (a taster to get me on the hook) which outlined something called "The Paradox of Choice": this basically asserts that when confronted with endless choices, the consumer becomes paralysed... unable to decide... and walks away. This led me to remove 'superfluous' items from my site. It made no difference.

I know the main point at the beginning of the piece is how we are given only the choices they want us to have, but this was by way of an interesting point I hadn't considered before; many people don't stop to consider how they are being tricked.

I've always been fascinated by the cynical tricks used by retailers in the offline world anyway... like the pumping of the smell of baking bread through a store, the placement of difficult-to-sell products on easy to reach eye-level shelves, also the tossing (apparently carelessly) of items into bins on the ends of supermarket aisles; the shopper assumes (as he or she is meant to) that these are sale-priced goods, when they are to be found on the shelf in their usual place (at this same usual price) elsewhere in the store.

I get pleasure, though, in contributing and creating in the social media I use, like Subsim and Facebook, rather than simply consuming and browsing (and I don't have a smartphone).

One other thing... Tristan Harris talks about "agency"... people having decision and control for themselves, but we are increasingly being coerced into having to do everything online, from submitting our income tax returns to claiming state benefits. We're soon not going even to be allowed to have 'agency'.