Caught in the Facebook Frenzy: My Experience with the Unstoppable Photo Scroll

So, Biz Stone hit the nail on the head the other day when he was like, ""People are nuts about Facebook."" Take my mother-in-law, for instance. Whenever she decides to dive into her Facebook, she looks completely spellbound.

And she's not the only one hooked. Did you know ComScore figured out that Facebook’s got a grip on 11 percent of all the online time in the States? Average time folks spend on the site? A whopping 400 minutes a month!

Man, I totally get that trance-like state, and I bet you do too. Ever find yourself deep-diving into your friend's friend's vacation pics, and suddenly, boom, an hour's gone? It's almost relaxing in the moment, flipping through those snapshots. But the second I snap out of it, I feel like I’ve just tossed a chunk of precious time down the drain. Yet, while I’m in it, it's like I'm stuck on repeat: Click. Gawk. Click. Gawk.

Sometimes it hits when I'm winding down at night, scrolling through Twitter. I’m not even engaging, just mindlessly refreshing over and over sneak a peek at these guys.

And don’t get me started on Tumblr's endless scroll. It's like a sweet sadness that just keeps you hanging on.

Is this what love looks like in the age of tech? They say the more time you spend on a service, the more you must dig it, right? So, lots of time equals big love .

But my gut tells me this isn't love. It's something else, something MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll calls ""the machine zone.""

""It's Not About Winning, It's About Getting Into the Zone""

So, Schüll spent a decade chilling in Vegas, getting the scoop from gamblers and casino folks about slot machines, right? And what she finds is that these folks aren't playing to strike it rich. They’re there for something else entirely. As Roman Mars breaks it down on his killer podcast, 99% Invisible, about Schüll's study, it’s not about the cash; it's about that zone casino1.it.

What exactly is the machine zone? Imagine a rhythm, a kind of loop that sucks you in. You hit a button, something goes down. Hit it again, and it's like déjà vu with a twist. Win or lose, who cares? It's all about that repetitive comfort.

""Everything else just fades away,"" Schüll tells Mars. ""Your sense of money, time, space, even who you are, it all just evaporates when you're in the grip of this zone.""

In her book, Addiction by Design, Schüll chats with a gambler named Lola who says, ""I go into a trance and become one with the machine. It's like I'm playing against myself. I am the machine, and the machine is me.""

There it is again, that word: trance. Gamblers throw around phrases like that a lot. They say stuff like, ""You zone out, you're on autopilot. The zone's like this magnet that just latches onto you and won't let go.""

Why these terms, these metaphors? We don’t understand the state we're in; we just feel its pull – like we've become one with the machine. You are the machine; the machine is you . And it's indescribable... like words just fail you. It's like standing on the frontier of human experience, spilling into a digital universe that can only really be explained through data and code.

The machine zone is the shadowy side of ""flow,"" this psychological concept from Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. In flow, you’ve got a goal, rules to get there, and feedback along the way. The task has to be on par with your skills, so you feel this awesome mix of control and challenge.

In a 1996 interview with Wired, Csíkszentmihályi describes flow as being ""totally caught up in an activity for its own joy. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows naturally from the last , kind of like playing jazz.""

But Schüll sees something else in front of Vegas's new slots. They throw in these tiny illusions of control to enhance their feedback loops. Instead of feeling the fulfillment and bliss that Csíkszentmihályi talks about, a lot of gamblers come away deflated and depressed after their time on the machines.

The games tap into our thirst for flow, minus the significance or skill linked to the state. The machine zone is where the mind drifts as the body gets lost in the task. ""You can wipe away everything at the machines,"" a gambler tells Schüll. ""You can even wipe away yourself.""

You can escape it all in the machine zone, but only for as long as you’re in it.

When we get sucked into a monotonous activity on our devices, I reckon we hit some milder version of the machine zone. Clearly, if you're chatting with friends or texting your mom on Facebook, that ain’t the zone. If you're actively reading and scribbling poems on Twitter, that’s not the zone. Creating art on Tumblr? Nope, not the zone. The machine zone is all about solitude, marked by a total lack of real human connection. Sure, you might be looking at snapshots of people, but your clicks are mechanical, repetitive, fueled by computer algorithms.

I'm not saying folks are ""hooked"" on Facebook. Some gamblers in Schüll’s research do indeed have serious issues. But her insights are like a window into understanding the zone, not to claim that the average person's Facebook session is identical to hitting the slots.

I bring this up because there's a tendency to fling around this idea of addiction to tech like it's no biggie. But it's a serious thing.

All this to say: I'm not railing against Facebook as a whole. This is about calling out specific behavior patterns that can emerge on such platforms UK Aims to Tighten Gambling Oversight: Poker Players Weigh In.

The clearest example of a path into the machine zone? Clicking through Facebook photo albums. There's nothing inherently rewarding about it. But, show me someone who hasn’t burned hours doing just that. Why do we do it? To find the zone. Click. Photo. Click. Photo. Click. Photo. And maybe, if you're lucky, you stumble upon something that catches your eye (""Hey, my buddy knows my cousin!"") or something downright adorable (""Aw, a kitten!""). Jackpot! Click. Photo. Click. Photo. Click. Photo.

Facebook is the top dog of photo sharing. Back in '08, with 10 billion photos stashed, users were pulling up 15 billion images every day. That was 300,000 snaps every second. Click. Photo. Click.

Fast forward to 2010, Facebook had 65 billion images, serving them at a rate of 1 million a second at peak times. By 2012, folks were uploading 300 million photos each day. And earlier this year , Facebook said they were sitting on a stash of 240 billion pictures.

If we guess that the upload-to-view ratio hasn't tanked, users are probably browsing billions of Facebook pics daily, clocking millions per second. Click. Photo. Click.

Add it all up, and you’ve got a ton of time lost in that loop. A 2011 ComScore study shows users spend 17 percent of their Facebook time just browsing photos (which doesn't even count the time spent on stories and notifications from those uploads).

To give you some scope, ComScore's 2013 Digital Focus report pointed out that Facebook owned 83 percent of the time spent on *all* social networks online. So out of all the social networking time, 14 percent is just that one loop. That’s more than Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn put together!