Are we aware of what we are consuming?

It was 5.30 pm, just wrapped last meeting of the day. The work was not actually done, it's like there were deadlines everywhere and 1 thought I had to continue working.

At the same time, I was still trying to summarize everything I had done at that hectic day. So I decided to laid down on my office chair for around 30 minutes (my initial plan), doing nothing, just relaxing.
However 5 minutes later, I ended up scrolling through something on my phone, then got back to my laptop. Instead of continue working, I went to a marketplace and found cool gadgets and stuffs.

One hour later, I checked out keycaps set for my keyboard and couldn't wait to try it. I started to imagine how cool my keyboard with this new keys and searched for some ideas on YouTube to tweak it to be even cooler.

Time goes by and eh, it's 10 pm. Time to go bed.

Does it only happen to me? Or do you

relate?

Currently I'm doing product management and one of the most important things I learned is that sometimes to keep a product alive, I need to think how do I keep my
users engaged with the products. To put it another way, sometimes we need to "use" their attention.
Imagine another situation.

You are relaxing after a hustling day. You are tired and starving, then suddenly you got this message.
Well if that's me, I would click that
offer immediately, for sure.

If I didn't get that notification, I might cook some meal or bought food from somewhere else. So in this case, that notification won me.

I think we can not avoid this marketing phenomenon since this is how our economy work at the simplest thing. Due to this reasons, we tend to buy or consume something we don't necessarily need.

Well I'm not a psychologist, but in my experience, I usually in the most vulnerable when feeling tired. This is where technology actually plays a huge role since it is extremely good to provide you instant gratifications.

Is it wrong to use that service to buy a food then? I'm starving and I have worked hard and want to treat myself, so why not?
That's not the point.

Stay on Your Toes, Stay Sherp Above notification is the example of personalized marketing communic ation. That is smart since it directly hit user's emotion and "needs".

There is a research on: The exploitation of vulnerability through personalized marketing communication. I quote a section which I find interesting:

Receiving messages person- alised in a way that specifically targets the personality of indi- viduals hinders their ability to accurately sense when and how they are being manipulated.

The sender can identify and target specific consumers that are more likely to react to a particularly framed message based on their personality traits, while bypassing others
for whom this message could have an undesired effect (Tufekel, 2014).

For example, impulsiveness can be triggered by targeting personality traits. Such traits can be predicted from one's language use on social media and past research has shown that certain personality traits strongly correlate with one's Impulsiveness (Park et al, 2015).

Such targeting of personality traits leading to human irration- ality shows that psychological targeting can also be seen as exploitation of individual vulnerable states.

The point is, your attention is the commodity. Or to be more concise, you are the commodity. And once the commodity can be identified, it can be easily "exploited". Who are not tempted by quick and
easy money? This problem will most likely be amplified when you are in a stressful situation.

Let's get back to this smart notification
Is it wrong to use that service to buy a food then? I'm starving and I have worked hard and want to treat myself, so why not?

No it isn't. As long as you are aware that you are the one that make that decision consciously.

And yes it is. When you don't realize that you are being "used" to do something you initially don't need to do, which in this case order food
from that service.

Technology is a wonderful stuff. It can help us to solve complex prob- lems in no time. In the other hand, it can lead us to make unnecessary or impulsive decisions.

This is how I learned the import- ance of being mindful and con- scious, especially when my battery is low.

That's it for now, see you later!