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PR: "The prevalence of icons, symbols, and glyphs across the screen interfaces interacted with on a daily basis, and their basic shorthand command work equivalent to the first steps of written language. To communicate, at a glance, tallies of river cargo hauled on the Euphrates (c. 3100 BC), memorable recordings of mastodon hunts and campfires, what gets attention on the App Store."
Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." Walczak has proven for some time now, with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.
