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The best minds of our generation work in the big companies of Silicon Valley looking for the formulas to keep us more hooked on technology and for longer . That is the key to the so-called attention economy in which an important part of the business of companies such as Facebook resides. However, such efforts to play and manipulate our attention have a negative effect on our brain .

Trivial facts related to the management of technology, such as the amount of battery that we have left in the phone, play tricks on our minds and even cause anxiety and affect our mood , a study has shown published in the City University of London .

When the battery goes down by 30%, "I don't have a good time," says one of the participants in the study. Another compared the fact that the battery runs out with the fact that your bath is empty on a winter day: "You freeze and feel naked and cold." On the other hand, the study shows how, in the opposite case, when the battery of the phone is full, the subjects of the study experienced a feeling of eurforia making them "feel positive with the confidence that they could go anywhere and do any thing".

The battery case is simply an example that points out how technology affects people's mood and self-perception .

The perception we have of ourselves is fragile and mutable . This is demonstrated by a study conducted by the Ohio State University in which they studied the influence of personalized advertisements we receive on social networks on the image that a person has of himself.

This research shows that when users are aware of seeing personalized ads, the image they have about themselves is influenced .

"Consumers who knew that they were seeing personalized ads were more interested in the advertised products and even changed their perception of themselves to align with the ads, " the study explains.

An effect of which, however, warn that it is necessary that the brand and the ad are in some way alienated with the values ​​and behavior of the consumer, that the " target of the brand is somehow right ", they affect.

During the research, academics managed to identify niches, such as products related to ecology, in which changes in perception became more evident. "The fact of receiving personalized advertisements on green products made consumers feel that they had a greater ecological awareness of the consumer," he explains.

A manipulation not only applicable to the field of commercial marking, but also has a translation to the political sphere .

Beyond the content injected by brands in social networks, the mere fact of displaying organic content on social networks - the one that users hang on their own, although later it is an algorithm programmed by the technicians of the social network who has hierarchized it and decided when and to whom it is shown - it can also cause sadness and depressive thoughts among those who have consumed it.

"If you see on Facebook how well an acquaintance is doing economically or how happy an old friend is in a relationship - issues that generate envy among humans - the use of the platform can lead to depressive feelings . We have discovered that users of Facebook is envious of the activities and lifestyle of its friends on the social network and they are much more likely to express feelings of depression, "says a study from the University of Missouri .

However, these are just some of the examples of the side effects that the attention economy of platforms and social networks have on the human brain and in which consumers and the time they spend hooked (we look between 80 and 100 times the mobile per day) are the raw material with which they earn money.

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