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The Role of Awareness
Post Date
December 2, 2025
Foundation
In a continuation my post about the pillars of Tech Consciousness, this article will outline why awareness of the technology you use is vital.
What is awareness?
Awareness: “Knowledge that something exists, or understanding of a situation or subject at the present time based on information or experience“.
Awareness is the first tool used when you want to prepare, protect yourself or perform well in a given situation. Students will utilise past exam papers. Coaches will study opponents to understand who and what they’re facing. Why do so? If you don’t know what you’re up against, you don’t know how to prepare. Awareness is the tactic that makes everything possible.
Why does awareness matter in a technology context?
Technology is made to bypass awareness. It’s designed to alter your behaviour and keep you hooked into whatever app you are using. You may want to watch a specific video but as soon as it’s done, autoplay gets you straight to another one. That isn’t an accident or a flaw. It’s built to keep you moving without thinking about what is coming next. You scroll and there’s another tweet or video, You like and suddenly you see 10 more videos just like that. You run out of what you want, there’s recommendations to keep you around.
The less you notice what’s going on, the more you’ll use. The more you use, the more your apps shape your habits.
Awareness keeps you from falling into loops you didn’t choose to be entered into. You all of a sudden open an app out of compulsion, not choice, You’ll go from using an app for a couple of minutes into hours long binges. Awareness is you catching yourself, being mindful of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, before you get pulled in deeper and deeper. Awareness gives you the option to fully choose what YOU want, not what’s given to you.
What do I need to be aware of?
I outlined the four areas of awareness in the pillars of tech consciousness article, I’ll flesh them out here.
- Setup: Platforms are designed to make you stay on as long as possible. That’s it. How thousands of psychologists and engineers have worked on these. Ask yourself, as a platform, if you’re making money from how you design it and retain user attention, why would you regulate yourself heavily? The next biggest weapon for social media is out there to be found, to make them irresistible. Infinite scroll, autoplay, the like button, notifications with specific sounds custom to certain apps – these were all designed for a reason. Perhaps not for malicious reasons but what they’ve evolved into is obvious. Awareness of setup allows you to understand the arena you’re stepping into.
2. Input: The vast majority posts, videos, headlines, videos & trends you come across are chosen for you, not the other way around. You aren’t given what you need to see, you’re given what keeps you around the longest. The negativity bias is where negative content affects your mental state more than equally positive content. Why are news headlines so negative? Why is ragebait content so popular? Awareness of input lets you ask yourself, “Why am I watching / reading this?”, “Why was this put in front of me?’. Whatever you consume slowly becomes the noise that rattles around in your brain all the time. Have to make sure you know what’s going on up there.
3. Response: This is how your body and mind react to what you consume. This can be anything at all, more apparent feelings like fear, stress or excitement. It can also be subtle, being on autopilot, numbness etc. Responses can also evolve over time, a clear one is becoming more and more desensitised to shock type content. Not being shocked by NSFL content, people are able to just shrug it off. Response awareness is noticing how the content makes you feel, “What is this doing to me?”. If you can’t track how you feel or where pain is coming from, it’ll be much more difficult to look after yourself while you’re using technology
4. Substitution: This is where your offline life is replaced by your online one. The phone use is overriding whatever you’re feeling. Boredom is replaced by scrolling or bingeing. Watching other people do what you want to do replaces doing it yourself. Substitution awareness is realising what gaps you’re filling or what you are trying to avoid. When your online life overtakes your offline life, you lose time & you lose connections.
Closing
Awareness gives you the power to choose your path, to protect your intuition and to put yourself first. The human experience is a beautiful thing and letting it slip through your fingers due to unconscious, careless tech usage chips away at that beauty, day by day, moment by moment.
In my personal view, all that exists in life are relationships and experiences. Anything physical you own can disappear at any time. After enough experiences, you realise all that matters is the people that you share them with. Awareness helps remember this. It helps in staying mindful of what really matters.
Letting technology take away from the people and experiences which enrich your life is a self-inflicted crime. Don’t give yourself a life sentence.
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