Is Twitter turning us into addicts? Research suggests it can
Due to excessive consumption of internet, video gaming and pornography boys are increasingly developing arousal addictions, according to research. They are becoming so used to constant stimulation provided by IT that their attention spans are withering away. Analog teachers in classrooms pose no serious competition to digital Facebook in the marketplace for children’s attention. This is particularly relevant to boys who tend to be keener on video games and pornography (which I have never watched myself).
In this short and entertaining sp
eech acclaimed psychologist Philip Zimbardo shares that:
- An average boy watches 50 porn clips a week
- By the time a man is 21, he has spent 10,000 hours playing video games
- Boys are 5 times more likely to have ADHD than girls
- Boys’ brains are being rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. They are totally out of sync with traditional classes at school and in romantic relationships
This time I will spare you from discussing my own romantic relationships but I can share that I can totally relate to the addictions bit. When I surf the web for my own pleasure, I notice that I don’t have much patience for anything. Almost always there is this nagging feeling that there is something more interesting out there. Something more interesting than what I am reading now. More interesting than this clumsy blog, perhaps. And I click, and I click, and I click… This never ending craving for novelty… In fact, internet, and especially checking my email, can be so addictive to me, that I had to set rules for myself. I have rules for when I allow myself to check my mail and when I can surf the web. Otherwise, before I know it, I get sucked into this black hole with ever intensifying gravitational pull. And even when I know I am being sucked in there I keep telling myself “one more article” or “well, this will be the last one”. And it rarely is the last one. In the same way I have also struggled with quite serious video gaming addictions when I was in my teens.
I consider myself to be a recovered IT addict. I am clean now. Hopefully I will stay that way a bit longer. As much as I love the freedom provided by IT, I am convinced that any pleasurable freedom can turn into a prison if not handled carefully. Thanks for checking this blog and by all means please enjoy your next Twitter read.
Six reasons why the internet loves a list.
Google Analytics reveals that one of our most popular blogs over the last few weeks was Top ten surprising psychological ideas which was basically a link to another site, prompted by somebody else’s tweet, with just a tiny bit of commentary from me.
Our Head of Media, Luke Robinson, was quick to explain the reason for this blog’s particular success:
1)It’s lists.
2) The internet loves a list.
3)Fact.
But why?
1) Lists generate suspense.
Once you know the number of things on the list, there is a ‘gap’ in your mind to find out what is on them.
2) Lists are relatively easy to read.
More precisely, they are easy to skim- you get your ‘meaning fix’ without effort.
3) Lists give you a sense of control.
You know where you are with a list- you are not getting to get lost in dense prose and end up in a different subject. There are rarely nasty surprises.
4) Lists give a nice sense of completion.
They make you feel like you have learned a certain number of things.
5) Lists are tidy
We prefer things that look organised, especially when somebody else has done the organising for us.
6) Lists are shareable
Because everybody loves a list…
This time I thought for myself before surfing for content to link to, but for those who are hungry for more please read: 10 reasons why list-based posts work so well online! Just don’t get get carried away, or before you know it we’ll all have pinaciphobia, and I’m sure there are at least seven reasons why you would want to avoid that.
What is the Big Society Equivalent of Gandalf the White?
The internet sometimes feels like one big cavern of promiscuous information where intellectual swingers throw around their ideas in search of fertile ground. It has been called an ’echo chamber‘ and is fuelled by the urge to link, forward, quote, repeat, retweet and so forth with a gradually vanishing care for provenance or accuracy. What ‘works’ online is mostly a function of ‘forwardability’. The chamber thus abounds with misinformation laundered through a thousand servers, while the good, the true and the beautiful gradually lose their bearings.
That wasn’t meant to sound so negative…and of course I live with, through and sometimes even for the internet. I just wanted to give some context for an echo of my own, in which I repost something I have already written, simply because I like it, and because it might otherwise be forever overlooked.
In a previous post, announcing the launch of our recent report on the Big Society, I made a passing reference to the connection between a character in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf, and the Big Society:
“I have already used a Lord of the Rings reference on the Big Society, describing the emphasis on community at a time of austerity as an attempt to build the Shire in Mordor. At the moment it feels more like Downing Street are carefully planning a resurrection that has to be the same thing, but different. In this case the next iteration of the Big Society looks more like Gandalf the Grey reeling from his battle with the Balorog of Morgoth, when he “strayed out of thought and time”, “but it was not the end…” and Gandalf the White was “sent back, until my task is done”.
(sourced via Wikipedia)
The character is part of popular culture, but the analogy might be somewhat obscure for those unfamiliar with the Gandalf’s character, and his role in the epic. I read very little growing up(too busy playing chess) so my first encounter with the works of JRR Tolkien was Peter Jackson’s triopic, which I have in extended DVD versions, and have watched far too many times. These films led me to chase down the Tolkien Canon, and I had to promise my wife Siva that I would never attend a conference on Tolkien’s work. I now feel a healthy distance from middle earth, but I still find that most issues in life have some parallel in the character and stories there.
I don’t want this to become a Lord of the Rings love fest, but I am curious to know what readers think of such parallels, and whether they have any value. I promise not to take this as a license to generate more of them!
Networked facts are the new black
Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being.
This is one of the points that David Weinberger puts across in his new book, Too Big to Know, launched yesterday in the US (not out in the UK til 19th January). Weinberger calls these configurations of linked data, in which two ideas are connected by a relationship, ‘triples’. In an interview given to Thomas Rogers for Salon, Weinberger elaborates:
OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement, so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but in itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.
Now, I think I get this, and when we think about the ubiquity of the hyperlink, it’s pretty clear that Weinberger is absolutely right. But, even before the Internet, information was still linked, and it was still necessary to reference one idea in order to construct a basis for another. Aristotle, Darwin and Newton all did it. It was just a slower process. You had to have located and read the relevant source, be it a book, paper or article and access to these things was far more restricted than it is now. But, the basic principle was the same. I think it’s reasonable to say that Weinberger’s point about metaphors rings true not because of a fundamental shift in what facts are, but rather that the Internet age has speeded everything up and made access to data (almost) universally accessible.
Of course, I may be missing the point, particularly given that I’ve not read Weinberger’s book, but am instead responding to some bits and pieces I’ve read about it online.
The title of the book, Too Big To Know, implies that the volume of information we now have access to could be leading to a kind of overload, and there is a genuinely important (and unanswered) question about the impact of this on our brains. Are we getting cleverer or stupider as a result? Our burgeoning taste for punchy, sound-bitten data is obvious – if you can’t express an important idea in 140 characters, you’ll struggle to be listened to in some circles. Indeed, this review of Weinberger’s book on Inc.com is designed to give you the top line messages in about the time it takes to write a tweet. And, this very blog post indicates that I’m clearly as much as sucker for this as anyone.
Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that Weinberger expresses some important ideas, not least that it isn’t individual cleverness that really matters, but the collective cleverness of the networks in which we operate. In his interview for Salon he says:
With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.
Alpha Ingenuity
If there was ever a field in need of a little resourcefulness, it’s public sector IT. In the past the UK’s government has had the dubious honour of awarding some of the largest IT contracts in the world. Some of these have been simply too big to manage, and have failed at significant cost to the public.
On Monday, the Cabinet Office launched alpha.gov.uk. In response to digital champion Martha Lane Fox’s recommendation, this is a prototype of a single domain for all government information and interactions with the public. The parallel is with the BBC’s single domain website (ie bbc.co.uk), on which you can find everything from the latest table tennis results to instructions on how to roast a chicken. The result looks something like a Google for government.
But what’s more notable than the idea of a one-stop-shop for digital delivery of public services (having had Directgov, and Gordon Brown’s MyGov idea etc.) is the process behind its creation. An alpha site is usually a pre-release version (ie. bits of it might break), but the team behind this one have taken the unusual step of releasing it to the public to gather feedback. This is particularly unusual for the public sector, which has often been described as a bit ‘1.0’ when it comes to the internet.
The team have written about the ethos behind the project that have guided the site’s development. The ‘agile’ approach they have taken emphasises a much faster and iterative approach (as well as being people-centred), in stark contrast to large IT programmes which become too big to fail, soaking up ever more money.
There are similarities between their approach, and a paper we recently published on ‘ingenuity’, which defined ingenuity as a sort of creativity on a budget. In this paper we defined ingenuity as the ability to solve problems by combining few resources in a surprising way.
So is alpha.gov.uk ingenious?
Well, it’s been developed in three months on the fairly minimal resources of 261k (not at all a fair comparison, but Directgov’s design and build costs came in at over 6 million). It may (time and the results of their feedback will tell) solve the problem of how to help people interact with government more successfully and cost-effectively. I’m less sure whether it uses its resources in unexpected ways, but seems to have at least used off-the-shelf rather than expensive custom technology.
Verdict? Too early to tell, but promising…
Maybe the internet isn’t the answer to all our problems…
It’s never been easier to contact our elected representatives but is this a good thing?
Recently we have heard about MPs who complain that they are bombarded by emails from lobby groups. If you’ve ever returned from holiday to 1,089 new emails, I am sure you will have a bit of (grudging) sympathy for them.
More significantly, perhaps, it strikes me that being able to quickly and cheaply send an email to an MPs or sign a petition throws up a couple of problems.
Firstly, there is the principle of “willingness to pay”, which, in essence, asks us to consider how much money we are willing to put where our mouths are. This principle has been applied to “public value” for example at the BBC.
It is fine to ask people to draw up huge wish lists of how they would like the world to be improved but if they are not willing to pay (in the broadest sense of the word), then how much weight should be given to these preferences?
This approach means that many MPs and policy makers discount emails. They think that because it is so easy to send an email, that the people who send them do not necessarily really want change. Perhaps there is some truth in this assumption?
Secondly, there is the problem of “cultural capital”.
We might have expected free entry to museums to increase dramatically the number of people going to museums. But in fact, this did not happen, partly because lots of people feel like museums are “not for them”. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that museums are for wealthy and educated people.
Similarly, we know from the Hansard audits of political engagement, that people from certain backgrounds (e.g. BME groups or lower income) are less likely to take part in various forms of civic activism (e.g. petition signing).
Those who think that lobbying your MP is not for “people like us” are not going to change their mind simply because it’s easier and cheaper to do so. Instead, people who would already consider lobbying their MP will do more of it.
So what is the answer?
Civic Geeks
What does “civic behaviour” look like? Voting springs to mind, as does volunteering, with perhaps starting a charity or social enterprise towards the black-belt end of being an active citizen. Debugging a page of code in the evenings is not something many of us would immediately point towards. But this particular example of civic behaviour, hidden to many of us, is going on across the country.
It’s become much more visible to those with an interest in technology through the example of pioneers like mySociety, who presciently argued for public sector data to be freely available in helpful formats to everybody at the same time as demonstrating how it could be put to social use through sites like TheyWorkForYou – created entirely by volunteers. And while the slowly-turning machinery of government chewed the idea over (now manifest in data.gov.uk), ingeniously came up with their own solutions of scraping it from the Government’s very web 1.0 sites and making it available to others.
Other enterprising groups have established their own community websites, which pull local residents around their neighbourhood, achieving in a Big Society-ish way some of what local government would like to do, while hacking events like those run by Rewired State (“Geeks meet Government”) bring people together to make useful and open applications from public data.
Rory Cellan-Jones broke the news today that many government websites could be cut, after a review from the government that highlights some of their soaring cost. This review seems in sympathy with a report the RSA published earlier this year that heard a variety of stories around the depressingly wasteful cost of public sector IT and argued for a more parsimonious approach to technology in a cold economic climate.
When the RSA was founded it aimed to “embolden enterprise, to enlarge Science, to refine Art, to improve our Manufactures, and extend our Commerce”, and offered premiums or awards “for any and every work of distinguished ingenuity”. William Shipley, a drawing master, felt deeply about the importance to Britain of the skill of drawing. One of the first premiums given is recorded in the minutes of the RSA’s very first meeting on 22nd March 1754:
“It was likewise proposed, to consider of giving Rewards for the Encouragement of Boys and Girls in the Art of Drawing; and it being the Opinion of all present that the art of Drawing is absolutely necessary in many Employments Trades & Manufactures, and that the Encouragement thereof may prove of great Utility to the public, it was resolved to bestow Premiums on a certain number of Boys or Girls under the age of sixteen…”
Drawing was a key skill in the eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first, it seems to me as though developing computer code is also important to solving some of the real problems we face. Developing code that helps people to feel attached to their neighbourhood, strengthens community, helps keep the government accountable, and reduces the burden on public money is of course a civic behaviour.
It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
Share the Love?
Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as “one of the digital pioneers” in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, ‘You Are Not a Gadget.’ In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.
Instead, he argues that a more pernicious by-product of the mantras of ‘open culture’ and ‘information wants to be free’ is coming to dominate. This by-product is a destructive new social contract whereby, as he writes, “authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
This raises an interesting point for us in Connected Communities, for it suggests that this ’social contract’ might be re-spun in a more positive light, whereby culture becomes precisely nothing but altruism. This possibility is deflated, however, when we consider what John Tierney, in the New York Times, describes as a “crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.” The problem, then, isn’t so much the giving, but rather the disequilibrium that has emerged between those who provide and those who retrieve online content.
It is in part in response to this disequilibrium that Jaron proposes an overhaul of the ideological underpinnings of the Web, comprising a revision of its software structure and, notably, the introduction of a universal system of micropayments (among other innovations). The suggestion is that even in the online world where the scope for a global economy of regard is huge – in so far as transaction costs can be minimised and information shared with incredible ease – penalties, controls and prices need to be introduced to ensure that this vast potential is not abused.
This seems, in sum, to be a call for a more healthy form of reciprocity, whereby payment is not so much seen as antithetical to reciprocal relations – as Tim Harford put it recently “many policy wonks believe …that cash incentives are counterproductive and even morally corrosive” – but rather, where needed, as a formalisation of the very process of reciprocation.
Back on the ground, in traditional, place-based communities, the implications of this are as yet unclear. However, as we start at Connected Communities to try to lubricate the exchange of individuals’ and groups’ social capital, assets and resources, it does raise the question not only of how we should expect communities to cope with unequal flows of time, knowledge and resources (time banks may be one possibility), but also of how any regulatory framework that we develop around this accounts for the differentiated stocks of social capital (and so individuals’ capacity to share) that already exist.
Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty?
Bill Gates has scattered quite a few nuggets of remunerative star dust over the years, but one quotation should be more widely known:
“The first rule of any technology used… is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Wonferful!
But is it true?
Discerning readers may have guessed that the dot dot dot above replaced ‘in business’, but Gates’s point might apply to the labour market. How efficient are the mechanisms that connect labour supply to labour demand? If there are generally inefficient, will using technology merely compound matters, or are we missing important tricks that might radically increase Britain’s porductivity?
These thoughts amount to a quick cyber shout to anybody watching about tomorrow’s RSA Thursday Lunchtime event:
How can we use online markets more effectively to ensure we create value and opportunity for the low-paid and unemployed?
The Speakers are Wingham Rowan, project director at Slivers of Time Working; Jerry Fishenden, founder of the Centre for Technology Policy Research and there will be a “contribution” (presumably verbal) by Rt Hon James Purnell MP. The event will be chaired by Mathew Taylor.
The blurb from the RSA events team is below:
E-marketplaces have developed exponentially in the last 15 years, and financial institutions now turbo-trade billions worth of assets every day. But the benefits of these new marketplaces are primarily concentrated at the top levels of the economy, and have neglected the resources that people at the bottom of the economic pyramid could sell. A new generation of marketplace could utilise the time, potential and skills of the less well-off or unemployed – simultaneously creating value for the individuals concerned, and flooding the market with hitherto untapped products and services.
Creating ‘modern markets for all’ should now be a priority, but the private sector can’t work alone to create the marketplaces needed. Is it time for policymakers to make modern, inclusive marketplaces a priority across multiple sectors at the bottom of the economy?
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
