Preface
What Is This Book About?
We live much of our lives online. We follow friends on Facebook, browse news on the New York Times, share files on Dropbox, plan vacations on TripAdvisor, send messages on WhatsApp, set up dates on Match.com, shop on Amazon, watch videos on YouTube, and search for information on Google. The Internet has transformed our lives; we now have a world of information at our fingertips that we can use to make better judgments and decisions.
But is it possible that the Internet has also made life more difficult for us? Could it be that having easy access to information is a curse rather than a blessing? We will see in this book that the Internet hurts us in five important ways, which I call the five costs of living online: too much temptation, too much information, too much customization, too many comparisons, and too little privacy. Each of the five chapters describes a cost, explains its psychological origins, and suggests ways to minimize the cost. By the end of this book, you will understand why the Internet is not just a force for good but also a cause for concern. You will see how our judgments and decisions are biased when we go online, and what we can do to reduce these biases in our own lives. To take a few examples, you’ll learn why:
• surfing the Internet anonymously can encourage bad behavior
• using search engines to find information can hinder our ability to learn
• using social media can make us unhappy and envious
• customizing products on the Internet can lead to overspending
• doing online research can devalue the product we finally choose
You’ll also learn about techniques for avoiding these dangers and becoming a smarter user of the Internet. For example, you’ll understand why:
• deciding not to choose is as important as deciding what to choose
• most of the time, we should aim for “good enough” rather than perfect choices
• we should set up structural barriers to temptations on the Internet
• we should set up systems that expose us to contrary opinions on the Internet
• we should do “cold” rather than “hot” comparisons with others on social media
Why Did I Write This Book?
Before delving into the five costs of the Internet – what they are and what we can do about them – let me take a detour and tell you why I wrote this book, or really, why I felt compelled to write this book. My story begins in the city of Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India, where I grew up in the 1970s. This was a time before globalization and software, when India was a backwater in the world economy. There were power cuts in the evenings, and my earliest memories are doing homework by the light of a hurricane lamp. Clogged drains flooded the streets during monsoon rains, and cats, dogs, cows, people, and cars all went about their business in waist-deep water. We didn’t have a television set at home, and even our neighbors who did could only watch a few black-and-white channels of propaganda from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. And like most people, we didn’t have a telephone because there was a 20-year waiting list for a black rotary-dial phone. Don’t get me wrong: life was good in ways only children appreciate, but most readers of this book have probably not experienced the economy of basic needs and primitive technology that I grew up with.
If someone had described the Internet to me when I was a child or even a teenager, it would have seemed like a science-fiction fantasy from the twenty-third century. Listening to every song ever recorded on demand? Looking up other travelers’ reviews, and booking international airline tickets on my own? Video calls with friends and family on the other side of the world using a computer in my pocket? It would have seemed laughable, and certainly not on the cards during my lifetime. But as I grew older, the economy in India liberalized. Mobile phones leapfrogged rotary-dial phones, Coke and Pepsi resumed their cola wars, and the local Ambassador car was replaced by Hondas, Toyotas, and Fords. But the biggest change was the Internet. First with dial-up connections and then broadband, I saw new worlds of commerce, entertainment, dating, travel, and knowledge open up that simply did not exist before. These worlds couldn’t be farther from the one I grew up in, and I could explore them simply by tapping a few keys on a computer. Given where I came from, these changes were fascinating and I never took them for granted.
At around this time, in the early 1990s, I moved to the United States to pursue a doctorate in marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. Arriving at the Austin airport on a hot August evening, I found myself at the beginning of an Internet revolution. The university had excellent network infrastructure, and the dot-com boom was about to begin. I observed how the Internet was changing the way people worked and played. I saw how it was becoming a central part of our lives, helping us keep in touch with family and friends, shop for products and services, invest money, and find communities to belong to. The conventional wisdom at the time held that the Internet was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a magic potion that would make consumers happy and companies rich. There is truth to this, and it is important to remember that the Internet has indeed brought many benefits to society.
Benefits of the Internet
The most important benefit of the Internet is that it gives us more choices, as well as more information about these choices. Amazon offers a greater selection of books and music than any physical bookstore; Spotify offers many more stations than terrestrial radio; Netflix has more movies any physical video store; YouTube features millions of video clips; and we can buy shoes in every imaginable style on Zappos. More choices should be good for us, since having more options makes it possible to find the ideal product that’s perfect for us. The Internet also offers us more information about these choices. Interested in an ecotourism trip to Bhutan? Chances are that you’ll find discussions about this or any other destination you can think of on websites like TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet. As with more choices, more information about choices should be a good thing because it lets us evaluate our options in a more thorough fashion.
Information is only useful if we can find it, and it is now much easier to find information online. Search engines like Google and Bing are constantly refining their algorithms to deliver the most relevant answers to our queries, and social search engines deliver results tailored to our online profiles and those of our friends and family. Amazon and Netflix have even reduced the need to search by giving us personally relevant recommendations based on our past behavior and the choices of those similar to us. The easier it is to find relevant information online, the more useful the Internet is for making judgments and decisions.
Another advantage of the Internet is that we can analyze information to make better decisions. When we search for airline tickets on Expedia or Travelocity, we can sort the results by price, airline, travel time, or any other feature that might be important to us. Political websites ask questions about the economic, social, and political opinions of website visitors and then identify the party or candidate closest to the visitors’ views. Such online tools distill insight from raw information and help us better understand our preferences for products, services, and political parties.
The Internet never sleeps; we can search and shop at our convenience, any time of the day or night. Given our busy lives, the sheer convenience of the Internet makes it an attractive platform for making choices. The Internet also permits greater customization, both for firms and for consumers. Firms can customize their offerings by tracking online behavior, analyzing search terms in Google, and pinpointing location using GPS coordinates. Similarly, consumers can tailor products to their own tastes, in categories ranging from computers to watches. The early success of Dell was based on its ability to deliver customized computers rather than the standard models offered by competitors. Swatch prospered by giving consumers the option to create custom-designed watches with unique dials, faces, and straps. The greater the ability to customize, the more likely it is that consumers will get exactly the product they are looking for, and the happier they should be with their choices.
These benefits of the Internet apply not just to product choices but also to social and recreational choices. Our social opportunities have been greatly expanded by the Internet, which offers companionship and community without the traditional constraints of place and time. We can browse thousands of prospective partners on dating websites, join Meetup groups, keep in touch on Facebook, and follow the blogs of like-minded people. Online social connections are especially important in fast-paced modern societies where close personal ties are often difficult to forge. And the Internet offers new ways to cultivate our interests and expand our horizons. Regardless of whether we’re in Toronto or Timbuktu, we can learn at our own pace by following online courses, video clips, and discussion boards about issues close to our hearts.
Costs of the Internet
Although there are many benefits of the Internet, I found myself wondering if the Internet – or technology in general – also has a dark side. I got an opportunity to explore this issue when I was thinking about my dissertation research. The dissertation is the culmination of a doctoral program, where a PhD student focuses on a research question and conducts a scientific investigation to answer this question. One of the pleasures of academia is that researchers can investigate any issue that interests them personally, so I decided to pursue why people respond differently to technological products. For readers younger than a certain age, technology is second or even first nature. When I teach at university, my students usually have one eye on me – if I’m lucky – and their other eye fixed firmly on a phone, tablet, or laptop, and sometimes all three at once. Our daughter learned to swipe and select cartoons on the iPad by herself when she was less than a year old. Other people, however, have a more adversarial relationship with technology. If you think about your grandparents, parents, or older relatives, you probably know a few people who are allergic to high-technology products. My mother, for instance, firmly believes that the iPad she was given is her sworn enemy, with a ghost in the machine who takes personal pleasure in sabotaging her FaceTime sessions.
Given the prevalence of technophobia in modern society, I thought it would be interesting to study this phenomenon in my doctoral dissertation. To my surprise, I found that although technophobia was a term in common usage, it was defined rather loosely and there was little scientific research into its psychological causes. My own intuition suggested that learning cost – i.e., time and effort required to learn new technologies – might be an important reason for technophobia. Other researchers had already shown that negative information has a bigger effect on our opinions than positive information, so I thought negative learning costs should have a bigger effect on people’s attitudes towards technological products than the positive benefits likely to be delivered by these products. I tested these ideas in a series of research studies where I showed different groups of people various high-tech products, such as new computers and phones, and measured their responses, such as their attitudes towards these products, expected learning costs, and expected benefits. I found that, as predicted, perceived learning costs often overshadow the future benefits of high-tech products, especially when the complexity of the product is high. Thus, learning costs are an important driver of technophobia.
After completing my doctorate, I started working as a professor in the business school at McGill University in Montreal. During my research career, I have conducted many studies on the effects of the Internet and other technologies on consumers. A general finding in my research was that the Internet has significant costs that are often overlooked by its users. For example, I found that information overload on the Internet can lead to poorer decision-making, and social comparisons on social media can undermine our happiness and well-being. I also found that other researchers were reporting similar results, namely that the Internet imposes costs on users that are not always easy to anticipate in advance.
The more I learned, the more I saw the need to bring this growing body of research to an audience beyond academia. So I decided to write a book that would summarize key research findings about the costs of the Internet, in simple language accessible to general readers. Equally important, I wanted to examine some fundamental questions about the nature of modern life. Thanks to mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology, the Internet has become our constant companion. Before long, we will live in a world where the Internet of things, and perhaps biologically implanted Internet, will become commonplace. The line between online and offline will become blurred and, like the movie Matrix, the network will be everywhere. Do we understand the implications of this brave new world? What can we do to benefit from the upsides and avoid the downsides of the Internet? These are the questions I want to explore in this book.
What Does This Book Cover?
This book describes five costs of the Internet – five ways in which the Internet biases our judgments and decisions, reflected in the chapter titles: “Too Many Temptations,” “Too Much Information,” “Too Much Customization,” “Too Many Comparisons,” and “Too Little Privacy.” Chapter 1 shows that the Internet reduces our self-control and makes it easy to overindulge. Chapter 2 points out that having a world of information at our fingertips can paradoxically make it more difficult to make good choices. Chapter 3 discusses why having it our way can set us up for disappointment. Chapter 4 shows that we often compare ourselves with others on the Internet in ways that make us less happy and productive. Chapter 5 reveals that people say they have little privacy on the Internet but then behave online as if no one is watching. The conclusion summarizes the central themes of the book and looks into the future of our relationship with the Internet.
The five costs discussed in this book can be grouped into two categories: commercial costs for consumers, and social costs for individuals. The costs in the first two chapters – too many temptations and too much information – are relevant to consumers, while the costs in the next three chapters – too much customization, too many comparisons, and too little privacy – apply to both consumers and individuals. To be clear, this book is not intended as a comprehensive listing of all the costs of the Internet. Besides the five costs described in this book, the Internet could be harmful for us in other ways as well. For example, spending more time on the Internet could reduce face-to-face interaction, leading to greater social isolation and reduced social skills. Constantly switching between phones, tablets, laptops, and wearables could reduce our attention span and ability to focus on extended tasks. Citizens who become dependent on the Internet for information could be manipulated by governments that control information or plant fake news online. I have chosen to focus on five important costs in this book that I have personal knowledge of, through either my own research or the research of my academic colleagues. I believe this approach makes the book more reliable by basing its conclusions on scientific evidence.
There are two other features of this book worth mentioning. First, each chapter explains the psychological reasons underlying the costs of living online. For example, the effect of too much information on the Internet is explained using psychological concepts such as the limited information processing capacity of our minds and our use of mental shortcuts to simplify choices. Similarly, other costs are explained using psychological concepts like self-control, confirmation bias, social norms, hedonic treadmill, and reference point. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of the five costs will help the reader understand where these costs are coming from. And second, each chapter ends with solutions – actionable steps that we can take to minimize the five costs and thus maximize the benefits of the Internet in our own lives.
How Does Research Inform This Book?
As mentioned earlier, this book is based on scientific research and not on conjecture or personal anecdotes. Many researchers, including myself, have conducted studies on the effects of the Internet. These studies, however, have mostly been published in specialized journals aimed at an academic audience and written in technical language not always intelligible to lay readers. Research findings are also scattered across different journals, making it difficult to see the forest for the trees. This book is useful because it condenses a large body of academic research into five key costs of the Internet and describes these costs in simple language illustrated with everyday examples.
A broader objective of this book is to foster greater understanding of the scientific method as a key for unlocking the secrets of our world. When we think of scientists, we usually imagine white-coated chemists or biologists studying the natural world in laboratories or in the field. What is perhaps less well known is that social scientists use similar methods to understand the social world, consisting of people and their interactions with technology. What is the scientific method? To simplify, the scientific method consists of asking questions about the world and collecting data to answer these questions. Data can sometimes be qualitative, as with interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observations. At other times, data can be quantitative, such as responses to surveys, behavior in experimental laboratories, and actual behavior in daily life.
Although both qualitative and quantitative data are useful to answer questions in the social sciences, this book focuses on quantitative data based on experiments. The goal of an experiment is to understand cause and effect: for example, the causes of technophobia, spending during Christmas holidays, or customer satisfaction for products and services. Experiments pinpoint cause and effect by isolating a particular cause and slowing down the underlying psychological process so we can observe how the cause influences the effect. Reading a description of an experiment is a bit like watching a movie in slow motion – we can see events unfold in detail and thus see exactly how the cause leads to the effect. I focus on experimental research in this book for a simple reason – my training is in experimental social science, and I have personally conducted many experiments to study the psychology of the Internet. I am also well informed about experimental research conducted by others through my participation in academic conferences and work as a reviewer for academic journals. Since experiments are an important research tool, I would like readers to gain a better understanding of how experiments are conducted in the social sciences. To this end, I will describe many interesting experiments throughout the book, often with insider details not reported in the published articles. I have written these descriptions with a general audience in mind, to convey essential aspects of the experiments without burdening the reader with unnecessary minutiae.
How Should You Read This Book?
I suggest reading the chapters in the order in which they appear. Psychological concepts introduced in earlier chapters are sometimes used again later with the assumption that readers are familiar with them. The five costs are also organized in a sequence from consumer-related to individual-related. This book will be most useful if readers can see the relevance of the five costs to their own lives. To help make these personal connections, the book includes many real-world examples and case studies. Readers will further benefit by thinking about how the five costs apply to their own experiences with the Internet. The more actively and critically you consider the ideas in this book, the more you will understand and perhaps challenge the conclusions of this book. If you feel informed and stimulated after reading this book, I will consider my writing to be successful.
To sum up, here’s how you can benefit from this book – whether you are a curious person interested in the Internet or a manager interested in the business implications of the Internet. The Internet has become an essential part of our lives and represents a significant change in our physical and social environment. During thousands of years of human evolution, information search consisted of seeking out personally known experts rather than doing a Google search. Choice consisted of picking from a limited number of products at local markets rather than unlimited choices from around the world. Social networks did not mean hundreds of Facebook friends or Twitter followers but the few people we actually met and interacted with face-to-face on a daily basis. Education was for the elite, based on books and manuscripts locked inside schools, bookstores, libraries, or monasteries. Our minds were shaped in this simpler environment, which has been upended in the evolutionary blink of an eye. After reading this book, you will better understand the implications of this fundamental shift in our environment – what are its dangers and what steps we can take to avoid these dangers. You will also gain broader insights into human psychology – how people think and act – and be able to use these insights to make better decisions in your own life.
I believe ideas improve through dialogue and feedback. If you have any comments, suggestions, or criticisms about this book, I would love to hear from you at ashesh.mukherjee@mcgill.ca. Let’s get started.
Ashesh Mukherjee
Montreal, Canada