One striking phrase kept coming up in the landmark personal injuries lawsuit awarded against Meta and Google this week. Twenty year old Kaley – referred to in court by her initials, KGM – won her case after a jury agreed Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive. It awarded her damages of $6 million, with Meta to pay 70 per cent and YouTube the rest. More importantly, it cleared the path for a raft of other lawsuits.

The phrase in question is “infinite scroll”. It could have been the name of an experimental art rock band formed in a New York basement in the 1960s – but what it is, is a devious little innovation designed in the early 2000s by a Silicon Valley wunderkind (a label that is generally overused, but in this case earned by giving his first tech talk at the age of 10) called Aza Raskin. You may never have heard of Raskin or his innovation, but infinite scroll has had such a profound impact on our lives that he felt compelled in 2019 to publicly apologise for having invented it.

It is one of the reasons why I – and possibly you – have troubled relationships with smartphones.

Before the age of infinite scroll, if you wanted to keep looking at something on the internet, you had to click through to the next page, prompting a subconscious decision: do I want to keep doing this? When Raskin was working at Firefox, he figured out that allowing people to keep scrolling downwards instead of clicking through would make life easier for everyone.

Traveller feuds: How family pride and social media are driving extreme........

© The Irish Times