Does the internet make us dumberer?

Ah, the scapegoat of the 21st century. The internet.  Instead of taking blame for our own actions, we decide to blame the internet for how we are acting like total buffoons. This isn’t anything new. First it was The Beatles and their evil brand of rock music. Then it was the hippies and the counter-culture movement. Then it was heavy metal. Then it was rap. Then it was violent movies and video games, yet watching CNN yields more ACTUAL gore and violence than if you watch every violent movie end to end. Now, we have the internet.

I still watch this show. Judge me.

In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr wonders if the very nature of Google is making our brains weaker and severely decreasing out attention spans by allowing us to bounce between as many topics as we want to. Yet, this concept is nothing new. Way back in the 1970’s researchers and down right grouchy people were claiming that Sesame Street’s program structure, or lack of, was causing young children’s attention spans to suffer. So forget Google, blame it on Sesame Street. Blame our stupid lack of attention span on Kermit, Grover, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and the rest of the cast. Me? I loved Cookie Monster. Is that the reason why I can’t think straight? I should sue PBS for warping my poor child brain back in the early 1980’s!

Another article wonders what harm having too many friends on social network websites can cause to our free will to think. Once again, I don’t necessarily agree with this concept. Do we think that  groupthink and going with the crowd is something the internet created? Absolutely not! People wanting to be a part of the “popular” crowd has been around since one caveman decided to wear Zebra stripes instead of a leopard print loin cloth. The other cavepeople said, “Hey! Look at Og over there! Let’s be like him because he’s getting all the cave-ladies!” Have we forgotten that Hitler was moved into office in a democratic way? Facebook wasn’t around in the time of the National Socialist Party days.

So I guess we can’t go blaming all of our problems on the internet. I can guarantee you that in 10 years, we will be blaming something new for our own problems. Perhaps we should look inward to ourselves. You can’t read a book for more than one page? How about you concentrate on yourself. How about you stop thinking you need to check gmail? Can’t do it? Wear a rubber band and every time you want to check your gmail when you are not supposed to, snap yourself. You will be amazed at how well the brain responds to negative reinforcement.

The Attention Economy: Hey You! Read This!

Every second of every day we are bombarded with information. Studies have shown that our feeble human brains can only process about 110 bytes of information a second. This is why it is hard to listen to more than 2 people speak at the same time. There is much discussion about people who claim to multi-task, as some researches say that you cannot actually multi-task. Yet instead, you task switch as your brain fires over from this task to that task. You do not actually work on two tasks at once.

So what does that all mean for you as an advertiser? You’ve got to get my attention about 5 seconds ago or you’ve lost me as a consumer. In the book The Attention Economy by Thomas Davenport and John Beck, they discuss just this task. Think about how much you are bombarded each day by information. How do you decide what to focus on? How can you reach people?

For me, if I were in advertising, it would to be as annoying as possible in 15 seconds or less. Anyone remember the Quizno’s commercials? I don’t know how many times I went to Quizno’s singing this ridiculous song in my head.

How about the Geico eyes commercial? It gets to you doesn’t it?

So why do we as humans remember the more annoying things? Why is it that these so simple commercials are vastly more effective than big-ass budget Levi’s Jeans and Coca-Cola commercials?

I don’t really know. All I do know is that annoying creates stickiness, which as discussed in the book as always a good thing.

A Takeway of Everything is Miscellaneous

See what I did in the title? Taking a queue from the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger from the first-order order theory, I’ve started my title of this blog with an “A.” That way, this would be near the front of any alphabetically ordered list, which in turn, would greatly help it’s chances of being seen and being read.  Similar to the towing companies example if you are looking for a tow truck in the yellow pages. Aaron’s Towing would get more business than Ziggy’s Towing, simply because humans are inherently lazy and we generally will pick the first thing in a list. Now, Ziggy could be the best towing service in the world and Aaron could be a complete buffoon but thanks to the first-order order Aaron will get more business. Grocery stores are notorious for exploiting this short circuit in our brain’s wiring. They generally put the most expensive and higher profit items on the shelves at eye level. They know we will buy the first thing we see and we are quite lazy and do not want to look around the shelf. Think about it. Go to the cookie isle. Are the discount, yet just as tasty cookies, ever not on the bottom shelf? No! It’s always the high-profit brand name cookies on the shelves at eye level. I can get the same amount of “discount” brand cookies that taste just as good as the Chips A’hoy! style cookies and save a few bucks. But I have to bend all the way down to the bottom shelf to save some money? To hell with that! I’ll just grab these right here at eye level. I’m serious about this, look at the ordering of the grocery store shelves next time you are there. It is completely designed to play with our feebly lazy human brains.

So how can we best categorize items? That seems to be the central theme of this book and how it relates to the new era of Web 2.0. One suggestion is third-order order, which can be described as using tagging and meta-data. Third-order ordering allows us to organize items on the fly, and not necessarily in alphabetical order. For example you can find things by saying, “Give me a list of all books in this bookstore, divided by which era it was published and subdivided by erotic content. Think about how Amazon.com lists your search results. If you search Amazon.com using keywords such as, “erotic thriller”, the results returned are not in alphabetical order. Instead they are filtered using meta-data for each book. The idea behind this is so the top results should be as close to your searched key wording as possible. Another key is to give your customer base the ability to manipulate that meta-data so they can organize how they want to organize.

The one strange idea that kept going through my head as I was reading this book was that all of what Weinberger was talking about seemed to be so obvious. It seemed that the book was trying to convey such an obvious fact, like fire=hot. Of course third-order ordering is the best cataloging system to use! However, the book tends to want to force the third-order ordering system, but I think that system cannot be a universal system. I would have liked to have seen more coverage in the issues with the third-order system and potential solutions to those problems.

At least Weinberger briefly touches on the downfall of everyone can contribute to Wikipedia. While that is what makes Wikipedia so great, its what also contributes to the general consensus of higher education to actually see Wikipedia entries as legitimate sources of scholarly information. Several years back I had created a Wiki entry about Samuel T. Chair, inventor of the chair in 1904. That entry was on Wikipedia for 2 plus years before I decided to take it down. I even had people contribute to the false article. So I do agree with Weinberger that the fact that a lot of information that is open source is leading to great expansions of knowledge is a good thing. But as with everything in life, there is always two sides to the same coin. The very open nature is what hinders the greatness.  Just because I can categorize 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 pages with meta-data does not mean I’ll even find one good page that actually has to do with what I am searching for. Many, many virus installing pages are packed with common meta-data keywords to lead unsuspecting internet browsers into the trap.

So this is once again a double edged sword of social media’s power with responsibility. Somehow this book felt like watching an infomercial. It seemingly took a concept so easy and so packed with common sense and turned it into a hilarious portrayal of lunacy. Can’t open a jar of preserves without throwing your arm out of socket and blowing up half the neighborhood? Try E-Z Open! Only 19.95 plus shipping and handling! But wait! Order now and we’ll throw in third-order categorization at no cost to you! Hurry now! Supplies are limited, so act fast!

Tweeting a Presentation, Learning on the Web

Over the past two weeks, I had my first experience organizing a 30-40 minute presentation for my CGT 511 class using Twitter as the main avenue of communication between my partner and I. Overall, I thought it was a smashing success and shows that you don’t always need to be in the same room as someone to effectively communicate your ideas. My partner and I would tweet about which sections we want to take and how our progress was going or if any issue arose. From there we emailed each other our sections in Power Power, combined them, and continued to refine the presentation all over the tubes of the interweb. While, it would have been nice to prepare this in a more personal, face to face, environment sometimes that just does not work out. Using tools such as Twitter, we were able to pull off a just as effective and complete presentation as we would have prepared had we met in person. Unfortunately, my partner fell ill the day of the presentation and I had to do the whole thing solo. However, the because we had already prepared the slides it was an easy transition for me to learn my partner’s section.

Just today, I sat in on a webinar about image sampling using the Vray rendering system. This was done all over GoTo Meeting, and again, it was just as effective as if I was sitting in a classroom. The only downside to this particular presentation was that it was all one way. We could not ask questions. There was only a 1-hour time limit and there was simply too much information to cover and too many people sitting in for questions to be handled in an effective manner. Look for an additional post here soon about my take away from this class.

The Wisdom of Crowds

At first glance, the phrase that is the title of this book “The Wisdom of Crowds” seems like an oxymoron. Similar to the likes of great phrases such as, jumbo shrimp, crash landing or peace keeping force.  It seems every time I’m near a large group of people, I wouldn’t say that the overall quality of the group is wise. In fact, I just witnessed a rather large group of people streaming onto the football field at Ross Ade Stadium after Purdue’s upset victory over Ohio State.

Francis Galton in all of his muttonchops glory.

However, the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki does provide a few more uplifting examples of how people in crowds can provide much higher quality solutions than individuals. One example was looking at the work done by Francis Galton, who was attending a fair in 1906. He was intrigued by a contest where people would guess the weight of an ox after it was slaughtered and dressed. Note: dressed does not mean that the ox was put in a tuxedo and a top hat. It simply means to prepare the meat. Though for a real dress made of meat, check out this rather odd fashion design. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. Galton notice that even though 800 people tried to guess the weight, no one was correct. However, Galton discovered that the mean of all of the guesses was extremely close to the actual weight. The actual weight was 1,198 pounds and the mean of the guesses was 1,197 pounds. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Surowiecki also gives the example of the tragic story of the submarine the USS Scorpion (SSN-589). The USS Scorpion was a United States nuclear submarine that disappeared during one of its training deployments. This posed obvious challenges to the teams of Navy personal who were tasked with finding the submarine. How do you find something that is designed to be stealthy? Finding one submarine wreckage on the ocean floor is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. Sure, the Navy knew the submarine’s last known location but that doesn’t mean the submarine just dropped directly down to the ocean floor. Who knew what happened and for how long the submarine may have drifted in the ocean currents? Along comes Dr. John Craven and with an idea similar to what Galton witnessed with how accurate the average means of many guesses were, Dr. Craven enlisted the help of many of his colleagues. Instead of having them all collaborate on one best guess, Dr. Craven asked each of them to formulate his or her own theory. Dr. Craven even put up a bottle of booze, good booze by the way, as a prize for the person with the closest guess. Then, taking the statistical mean of these guesses Dr. Craven formulated a search area. Sure enough, the area contained the wreckage of the USS Scorpion.

However, do these examples really show the wisdom of groups or are these just blind luck examples that can be explained by math? Sort of, if you throw enough darts you are bound to hit the bulls eye at least once. Even if you’ve never played darts before. It is a very hard question to answer, but one thing that Surowiecki expands on is that a group of so-called “experts” in a subject is more often wrong than a group of people who have little to no knowledge of the subject. This could be due to the fact that with the experts, the Ego of them supposedly knowing the subject may come into play. Whereas the group of your random Joe Sixpacks are more likely to guess correctly becuase they do not have any pre-existing knowledge. They are just taking swags (scientific wild-ass guesses).

But as with all human behavior, crowds can also be destructive. Next time you are on a high building, climb out to the ledge. More often than not, the crowd will actually start chanting for you to jump. There was an infamous YouTube video posted a while back of a suicidal man threatening to jump from a building in Europe and the crowd below was egging him on to do it. I won’t post the link here, but I’m sure you can search for it if you really want to see the dark side of crowds.

Classic business meeting

Another rather large danger to crowds is the groupthink phenomenon. Group think can be explained by simply stating that all members of a group tend to think alike, no matter what their feelings are internally. Rioting crowds are a good example of this, as I experienced in 2000 and 2001 here at Purdue after the basketball teams lost late in the NCAA championship tournament. 99% of the crowd is filled with law-abiding people who are just going with the flow. They know it is wrong and I knew it was wrong, but still go along with the destruction that is happening. They may not take part in the actual destruction, buy they provide the audience for those who are willing to destroy things. Does that make it right? Absolutely not! Groupthink is also exceedingly dangerous in the corporate environment. The CEO can come up with the most boneheaded plan that will surely bankrupt the company, but since the board of directors does not want to rattle any feathers they are just going to go along with the deal.

Overall I thought the book was well written with many supporting examples both for the good of the wisdom of crowds. However, you cannot take away the achievements of singular individuals who made discoveries all throughout history. Take in the case of Galileo. He argued that the Earth was not the center of the Universe as was the “wisdom” of the crowds at the time. He was practically banished, ridiculed, beaten that he could have such a heretic view of the Earth. Yet, we know that he was right. He went against the wisdom of the crowd and made an astonishing discovery hundreds of years before Man explored space. Look at what happened recently to the housing and banking systems in America, or even the American auto industry. Despite the banks knowing full well that these loans were high risk, they decided to lend money anyways. Why not? Bank B over there is doing it, so why not Bank A? I don’t have to tell you how well that worked out do I? The book also indirectly teaches you that the best way to control the crowd, is to ensure that dissent isn’t present. Keep all of the members going with the grain. Heaven forbid if any members go against the grain. Humans are generally afraid to rock the boat, even when they know a course of action is wrong. Remember groupthink?

Generally, as shown by examples in this book, crowds can be a great source of wisdom. But as a rule, when I see three or more people forming a group. I tend to walk the other way. Even if that crowd is giving something away for free.

Epic Facebook Fail!

Epic way to fire someone

Ah yes, when Facebook rants go bad. I’ve always wondered why some people feel that their actions online or outside of the work environment give them absolute freedom from accountability. Sure in pro sports you can get away with murder, literally, but this is the real world here folks. There is only one classic rule that you must follow and that is: Mean what you say and say what you mean. Do we all need that warning to pop up every time we tweet or update our Facebook status?

This is where the need to manage your online identity comes into play. Think of it as Darwinism for social media. Those who do not know how to evolve properly will be a dead end species. It’s the same as in real life. If I lack the higher brain function to realize that if I eat a lead bar for lunch and wash it down with a refreshingly cool cup of Drano, then hopefully, I’ll not survive to foster any offspring. I think that’s fair, right? What’s worse, is that now this person who was fired via Facebook has been splattered all over the internet. Good luck to them seeking future employment!

Here Comes Everybody; (Even the Stupid Ones)

As I was reading the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, I thought that the book was written being skewed a little bit too far towards the optimistic side. Yes, the launch of Web 2.0 and social media has helped, for the most part, for the better. For example, say little Timmy gets cancer. Start a blog, Facebook page, and connect with other child cancer survivors which will only lead to Timmy’s better chances of himself becoming a cancer survivor instead of a victim. Shirky also covers the fact that the power has shifted from the elite to the common people. But what happens when the elite decide they want the power back? What is going on in Iran and even China? Those Governments are actively blocking the very tools that empower the people. What happened with P2P sharing? Instead of the music industry embracing the power, they decided to squash it as much as they can. Napster may have lead to musical innovation we never dreamed of, but we’ll never know.

Overall, I agreed with the premise of the book that this digital age of being interconnected is leading to information sharing on a global scale that had never even been dreamed of. Not even in anyone’s wildest dreams. If I want to know how to build a 14th century sailing ship inside a bottle, while hanging myself from the ceiling by my feet, while listening to music backwards for hidden pro-Satan tracks, and having my mistress whip me, well, I’m sure there is a blog post or internet community out there that supports that. All I have to do is fire up the Google tubes and go!

But Shirky left out one critical fact, and that is never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. Just because we now have the balance of power for good, we must also have the balance of power for malicious activities. Think of this like the city of Las Vegas. Sure, it’s all clean and glitzy on the surface and in a absolute oxymoron of words, is family friendly. But peel away the thin layer of Las Vegas and you’ll still see the seedy, mob controlled underbelly that made Las Vegas what it is today.

You have been warned...

Tricking Yourself to Play Nice on the Internet

We’ve all done it. We’re all ashamed of it too. The anonymous nature of the internet and even some social media tools allow us to be a much more different person that if we were interacting in real life. We’ve all said some nasty things over chat, in forums, on blog posts, our Tweets, our Facebook updates, etc. Would we really say all of that stuff in real life, to that other person’s face?

So how can you get yourself to behave? It’s simple because all you have to do is trick your brain which is a stunningly easy task once you understand cognitive biases. One of the more successful ones to use is known as the “Mirror Effect.” Plainly put, people tend to behave more virtuously when they feel they are being watched. So you can put a mirror near your computer screen and then watch your internet habits. They tend to shift away from being like Larry Flint to Mother Teresa.

We're watching you

What if you don’t have a mirror that is small enough to put on or near your computer desk? Well, thankfully there is another option that apparently is even better than mirrors. We’re talking about eyes, and not even real eyes. Just pictures of eyes are enough to force people unconsciously think they are being watched and judged. Imagine, putting these on your monitor. I think it’s already working as I’m refrained from writing what I really think about looking at these eyes. Sexy? Yes. Annoying? Completely!

So I came up with a better plan to make myself play a bit better with my internet friends and even, yes, my internet enemies. This is an actual photograph of my computer area in my apartment.  So now I’ve got Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States of America, making sure I play nice on the internet. By the way, if you want to know more about cognitive biases, I suggest reading the book I am currently reading and inspired this post. It is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment by A.J. Jacobs, and the chapter is Chapter 5: The Rationality Project.

Richard Nixon. Always watching, always judging.

Threadsy Review: One App to Rule Them All?

The Overview

On the surface Threadsy looks like a decent media wrangler but once you get into the interface, it does need some work. But to be fair, Threadsy is still in an early release and the creators are on the search for feedback to improve the service.

Threadsy User Interface

Currently Threadsy supports Twitter, Yahoo email (US accounts only at this time), Hotmail (US accounts only at this time), Gmail, Gtalk, Google Apps, and Facebook connect. I was under the assumption from the press releases there would be more social media accounts supported, but maybe those are coming as this still gets developed. As I mentioned before, this is still in an early release. Overall, this application has some serious potential.

My Personal Take

While I think Threadsy is a great tool, I do not like being forced to use an email address. You can’t start using this application until you have at least one confirmed email account. I simply do not trust an external application to store that kind of information about me, especially for my personal accounts. Another item that needs to be worked on is that this application does not give you the choice of saving emails on whichever account you access. If you delete them on Threadsy, they are deleted from your account’s inbox as well. Generally, I do not like this as I prefer to have superior control over deleting emails and like to have backups. I know, I’m a control freak.

Gmail users – Important!

• Shortly after testing my gmail account with Threadsy, I was forced by Gmail to change my password due to “suspicious” activity. This is a known bug that has been reported several times on the feedback forms. This is due to how Threadsy accesses your Gmail account(s), which is through an IMAP server from a different IP address. I had traced the one that showed up at the bottom of Gmail and it belonged to Amazon.com. (How to check your IP in Gmail and account access) Also, while you have Threadsy open and if you have Gmail open at the same time, Gmail will warn you that your account is open in another location which is your Threadsy account. Again, this is because Threadsy does not use your IP address  to access your account.

The test of Threadsy was overall a success and I do think it has potential, but I am going to set up a secondary email account to use with it as I am just not comfortable giving an external application that much control over my information. There are obviously bugs with this program, but within a few minutes after reporting a bug the Threadsy staff was already posting new information. So the support for this by the development team so far is phenomenal.

Final Project Proposal

Problem:

How can I effectively use social media tools to create my personal and professional identity in the community of computer generated visualization?

What is the importance of the problem? Why investigate?

Some of the main points of importance of this project are, but not limited to, the following:

• This will be a launching stage for my upcoming venture out into the world of freelancing. This is probably the most important point, so I have to do this right. You only get one first impression.
• I want to create my identity out in the industry not only to clients, but to collaborators and peers. I want to do this effectively without it seeming like I am forcing the issue. I do not want to be perceived as just another loudmouth.
• Surprisingly enough, very few companies in this area use social media and even fewer companies use it effectively. So success in this area could potentially have impacts outside of my company.
• I had been a guarded skeptic of the power of social media over sites such as Facebook and Twitter to name a few. I am really excited to open my eyes to a world I may not have explored if not for this class and final project.

Questions I need to answer:

• Why hasn’t this industry as a whole embraced social media?
• What are come companies, either in this industry or perhaps other industries, that do it effectively and can I learn anything from them?
• What can I learn from classic PR teachings, practices and theories? How can I apply those to the digital age?
• What is the best way to get my feet wet so to speak? Just cannonball into the pool or slowly lower myself in while adjusting to the change?
• How do I want my identity to be seen? Am I a collaborator? Am I a one-way teacher? What advice or tools can I offer than isn’t already out there?
• How finicky is my target audience? Do they bounce around websites like water in a hot skillet?

Research methodology:

I would like to be able to conduct information gathering from existing companies, but this may be tough to do. These companies may not be willing to share this kind of information or have a very biased view towards social media. As a supplement, or backup plan, I am looking to reading several current articles and research publications that tie into the needs of my project. These articles should revolve around:

• usage numbers of social media and retention rates
• proven plans of conducting a social media or classic PR campaign
• potential downfalls or negative areas
• the average attention span of my target audience
• getting to the point in the least amount of text
• idea generation and retention

Format for final presentation:

The format for the final presentation will be in the format of a written research report but heavily supplemented with various types of media. This means that it hopefully won’t be such a sea of text that the reader gets easily bored but not distracted by the graphics at the same time.  Because of the media heavy nature of this project, I am planning on having it hosted either on this blog or on my personal website. That way, the hyperlinks, images, and possibly video can be easily accessed. How much multimedia I include will depend on how my research goes and how I can communicate the research I have discovered.

Milestones, bold red are major milestones:

• Wednesday October 14 – finish reading the articles provided by Dr. V about PR
• Wednesday October 21 – finish finding and begin sorting through all of my research links on my Delicious account, tagged tech621_research
• Wednesday October 28 – review of literature due in class
• Week of November 9 – first draft should at least be started and if this is going onto an actual website, the website needs to be established during this time
• Wednesday November 18 – first draft due
• Wednesday December 2 – second draft due
• Tuesday December 15 – panic, soil myself, and pull an all-night writing session
• Wednesday December 16 – Final draft due
• Thursday December 17 – -recover from hangover from celebrating the night before