Infinite Scroll

 Have you heard about ‘Infinite Scroll’?

Yes?

No?

Do you know what that is?

Yes. You know. Either you know about it well or you know what it is but you were never conscious about it or paid attention to it.

Yes, it’s that web development technique that makes you scroll endlessly on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all your favorite social media sites. If you have seen the web in the pre-social media age and remember how the web pages used to be those days, you will realize the difference. There were web sites and then there were web pages within each site. You go through the content on the first page and then click a ‘Next’ link at the bottom of the page to see what is there on the next page. If the content was heavy on each page, you read the entire page and clicked next after that, your fatigue was quicker. If it was just pictures or light content or you just skimmed through those contents, you might be left with some more energy to see more pages. Just clicking the next button so many times would drain your energy. Compare it with what’s happening today. You are never tired of scrolling through thousands of stories, pictures or products. 

It’s not the same, but almost similar to the development in televisions. You had to get up and walk up to the TV to change the channel every time, so the chances of changing channels were limited and hence there were fewer channels overall. Then came the remote control, which made changing channels so easy, making a large number of us what was fashionably called ‘couch potatoes’. Imagine you don’t even have to put so much effort to flip through channels with an even more advanced technology. That’s what has happened in the web world. You are stuck in it forever.

Do you know when this all started?

Not very long ago. Someone by name Aza Raskin invented this concept only in 2006. Yes, don’t make a mistake. There was no infinite scrolling on the web before that. 

Do you know what he felt about his invention?

He said his own idea wastes about 200,000 human lifetimes per day. Yes, read it again. 200,000 lifetimes, not hours or minutes, all within a day.

Infinite scroll on the web just on computers would have been a different story. You still get tired of scrolling down using a mouse or touchpad. But your index finger is much much more enduring. A pen is mightier than a sword and the fingers have become even more powerful for some, addicting the rest of the population to their powerful as well as useless content.

It’s invented in 2006. The idea almost captures all of the internet users. 10 years later, McAfee coined another term for the extremists of this phenomenon. Zombie Scrolling. When infinite scrolling enables you to scroll endlessly and mindlessly without knowing why you are doing it, you become a zombie scroller. 

Are you a zombie scroller?

Yes? 

No? 

Sure? 

Not sure?

Even if I am a zombie scroller, what’s wrong with that? And what’s the problem I am creating for society?

Information overload in general has been a problem post information revolution. That’s amplified by infinite scrolling.

I have a cousin who reads too much. Isn’t it information overload? Is she not overloaded with too much information when she reads so much? 

She does learn a lot when she reads a lot. That’s not necessarily information overload.

How?

When one reads a lot, most times they know what they are reading and they do that with a purpose. It’s also streamlined knowledge intake in a focused subject or area at any point in time. On the other hand, when you scroll infinitely on a social media site, what happens is automatic collection of discrete, unrelated and often irrelevant information without your brain’s permission. You have too much information in bits and pieces and you don’t know what to do with all of it and you don’t even have time to organize them in a useful manner. 

An avid reader collects what she wants. If she is looking for gold she collects gold, if she is looking for stones she gets stones and if she is looking for garbage she ends up with garbage. Look at the other one. He doesn’t know what he wants. He collects whatever comes his way - gold, stone, garbage… and much more that he doesn’t even want! What would he do with them? All his valuable space (brain space) would be used to store more useless stuff than anything he wants. That’s the difference.

What does information overload do to the human brain?

Just like in a computer, the human brain has a working memory, which is used for processing information. When that is overloaded with too much data, the processing power is impacted.

Information overload either paralyzes us from taking a decision or a good decision with more and more confusing data than convincing information. An individual gets confused, frustrated and stressed. A society coins terms like infobesity, infoxication, and information anxiety. In the long run, it also modifies the human brain to bias towards quantity over quality. Those who come with reems of useless data will be appreciated over someone that comes with a one pager containing the most relevant information. Yes, we start going back in development, valuing data more than information. 

It’s not just information overload. Infinite scroll has other problems as well. In most cases, infinite scroll is almost like multitasking with too much context switching and format switching. You switch from text to audio to video to pictures in no time. It’s like watching TV, listening to music and reading a book while running on a treadmill. If multitasking is a productivity killer, what would infinite scroll be?

While we are busy consuming what it offers, infinite scroll just consumes us and takes us away from our priority tasks and even sleep. It overexposes us to negative content and makes us negative people in general. This is called doomscrolling. One of the recent examples for this is the COVID-19 news stories. While the real pandemic hit the world on one side, doomscrolling was spreading its wings as a pandemic in parallel. There have been studies linking infinite scrolling to increased depression, anxiety, and even self harming behavior including suicide in extreme cases. When you doomscroll, you don’t just scroll for doom, you are also doomed to scroll infinitely.

How does this happen?

It’s all due to a hormone called dopamine. Dopamine levels go high when we experience pleasure and low when we feel a lack of it. Once we get into infinite scrolling, the dopamine levels go up seeing the type of contents that give us pleasure. We want more and more of those contents to keep it high. On the other hand, not every content is pleasure-bearing as we want it to be. So the scrolling continues, expecting more and more and more. Stop scrolling, the dopamine level falls down. Then you pick up your phone and this cycle continues. This is called the dopamine loop. You need to consciously do something to break this cycle.

If it was this bad, why did the social media companies adopt this design technique? Very simple. It’s bad for the user, not for those companies. Their only goal is to increase your engagement on their site so they can sell something to you by making you click on some of their advertisements and make some money out of that.

You might say, “I don’t buy anything like that. I just use it to my benefit.”

That’s great. So the company doesn't gain anything by engaging you on their site, but you gain a lot by using their content. Still, your engagement helps the company to make you see more advertisements on their platform because they are paid based on the views. And, they would use these engagement statistics to attract more advertisers towards their platform. Or maybe you don’t even realize what you are buying and what gets added to your mental kart to buy later. You don’t buy anything today doesn’t mean you will never buy. So either they identify their current buyers and seed a thought in you to become their future buyer.

So where is the end?

Companies talk about corporate social responsibility. What do these social media companies claim as their corporate social responsibility? Sharing a fraction of their profit for some charity work? That’s not enough. They have to become responsible and go for pagination instead of infinite scroll or they can provide the best of both - infinite scrolling with timers reminding their users every 15 minutes or so to start with.

How reasonable or absurd does this sound to you?

That would tell you how much faith you have in the concept of corporate social responsibility in general and that of the technology companies in particular.