If you control your reactions to these things, you have a stronger will than me. This interpretation from the OP lines up better with my observations of myself

If you control your reactions to these things, you have a stronger will than me. This interpretation from the OP lines up better with my observations of myself and everyone I know who gets text messages, Facebook notifications, email notifications, or a red box at the top of a white page: These notifications are not meaningful requests for your immediate attention, they're things designed to get you to lose half your day to the service that created them. That's evil. No one understands human behavior and motivation, conscious or otherwise, better than advertisers. Google and Facebook are the new advertisers, and thanks to the internet they now have better data than ever on how people respond to what's put in front of them.