There are no Online Stopping Cues.
Key Points:
- Create your own stopping cues by blocking anyone you don’t know in person who’s talking about selling you a service or product. These backdoor attempts to influence you may look like editorial comments from a friend but are they really?
- Be skeptical of disinfluencers. They’re a growing online presence
- Block and don’t respond to web queries asking you ‘Why did you block this ad?’ The more you inform the internet, the more it will tailor new products for you – which you don’t want. Don’t educate it
- Take firm no-internet breaks. Breaking the cycle is key to behavioral changes. Ask your family and friends to do the same
Stopping cues don’t exist on the internet. This means you must create your own, why? The internet is not your friend. The internet exists to collect data on you and monetize it for digital marketers. Digital and surveillance marketers are omnipresent and relentless. They help make shopping decisions for people based on algorithmic calculations taken from peoples’ online footprint and viewing preferences.
The long arm of digital marketing is sophisticated and frankly, almost unfathomable. I know that when I buy something online, I’m being guided by machine learning tools designed to benefit the advertiser, not me. Online digital objects we dwell on for a mere five seconds on our laptops or phones, end up in dynamic repositories of collected data on ourselves so further object sets can be pushed back to us. This results in ‘transactional consumption’. The more we buy, the more we spend. The more we transact, the more money we empty our wallets of. Transactional consumption exists because there are no online stopping cues on the internet.
To avoid overspending, we must become our own kill switch and create the online stopping cues for us to limit digital impacts. If you’re in North America, and you like the look of that online wool sweater over in online Dublin store, ok sure, buy it but don’t hang around on the website for long. The platform is tracking your dwell time on items, to entice you later. Here are several stopping cue suggestions from one of the focus groups from the Consumer Money Lab:
- Use free apps to block the sites you’re most vulnerable to. I use several of them.
- Block influencers that have ‘found’ you online
- Block anyone you don’t know in person who’s talking about selling you a service or product. These backdoor attempts to influence you may look like editorial comments from a friend but are they really?
- Be skeptical of disinfluencers. They’re a growing online presence.
- Block and don’t respond to web queries asking you ‘Why did you block this ad?’ The more you inform the internet, the more it will tailor new products for you – which you don’t want. Don’t educate it.
- Take firm no-internet breaks. Breaking the cycle is key to behavioral changes. Ask you family and friends to do the same
References:
- Voggeser, Birgit J., Ranjit K. Singh, and Anja S. Göritz. “Self-control in online discussions: Disinhibited online behavior as a failure to recognize social cues.” Frontiers in psychology 8 (2018): 2372.
- Shillair, Ruth, et al. “Online safety begins with you and me: Convincing Internet users to protect themselves.” Computers in Human Behavior 48 (2015): 199-207.
About the Author:
MATT DRUCKER, D. Psych., is the founder of The Consumer Money Lab, an integrated research network in Australia. The Consumer Money Lab studies consumer financial behavior and how and why people spend money.
For more information, go to www.conversationwithmattdrucker.com