December 2009 Archives

What keeps our hearts beating? Modern science refers to electrical impulses controlled by hormonal activity within the body, and Chinese medicine talks about the energetic force of chi animating us. Cat Power asserts that "it must just be the colors and the kids that keep me alive." However, hyperbole and indie rock aside, what if it is the basic will to live that keeps us alive?

M. Shimizu & B. W. Pelham sought to answer this question with their study "Postponing a date with the Grim Reaper: Ceremonial events and mortality" for the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology. The 2008 study looked at death records for millions of Americans using Social Security Death Index (SSDI) records. They wanted to determine whether people died more often before a major holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's Day) or event (the person's birthday), compared to after the holiday or event.

The researchers found a surprising pattern: folks were more likely to die just after Christmas and Thanksgiving. However, New Year's Day and the person's birthday were also some of the most frequent dates of death observed in the study. Why is this? The answer may lie in the social nature of the holidays. Christmas and Thanksgiving are important social events - the celebrations last all day and often involve a great number of social visits. However, the social component of New Year's Day actually occurs on the night before - New Year's Eve. The researchers coined the term "Ceremonial Finish Lines" to describe the point that the dying reach on New Year's Day and their birthday - basically, the point at which on an inner level it is acknowledged that the desired event is over and that it is an alright time to die.

What does this mean? The researchers assert that the thing that is keeping people alive during these events and abandoning them at the reach of the "ceremonial finish line" is something basic and yet highly mysterious: the will to live. "Taken together, the [...] analyses suggest that the desire to live is the key variable that links ceremonial events to [death]," they assert.

While the study is not without its flaws - for example, it omits the major causal factor that many people eat rich, fatty meals on Christmas and Thanksgiving or drink alcohol on New Year's Eve, which could both increase morbidity - it is tantalizing to consider that the major sustaining factor for life is the will to stay alive. It points toward a poignant possibility: that the meaning we attach to the events of our lives could give us the impetus to sustain ourselves, in a sense to save our own lives, until we get to our desired destination. 

In short - the holidays may be a dark time of year, but you can get yourself through them by focusing on some goals farther out than January. Luckily, this year you have the YJGM Close-Knit Contest to get you through New Year's Day, and some exciting contests that we here at YJGM are about to announce to keep you guessing until the Spring!

Many folks have had the terrible experience of a romantic partner violating their trust. In today's social world, with its expressions online and off, there are far more opportunities for some partners to behave badly. I remember the day that I found out that an ex-boyfriend of mine had cracked my computer's password and scoured my email account looking for incriminating messages. Before that experience, I had never really considered my email that precious; however, the violation of privacy and trust shook me to my core. Sadly for me, the hilarious and important PSA-slash-social-network thatsnotcool.com didn't exist at the time.

The central question that visitors to the site consider and discuss are, unfortunately, timeless and enduring - "when does caring become controlling, and when does affection become obsession?" However, the network primarily concerns itself with the relationships of modern youth, for whom technology and social media play a far more central role socially than past generations. The site's forums are full of stories of boyfriends who use text messaging as a tracking system, girlfriends who break into private email accounts, and frenemies who misuse wall posts to spread rumors. Other visitors - including sociologists and professionals - offer support and suggest strategies for these young people to reclaim their privacy and freedoms in their relationships.

Many of the social media savvy run into the assertion that social media is somehow destroying literature, culture, and communication. One claim in particular comes up quite often: that nothing of real substance can be communicated in such a brief format. However, the brilliant Tali Krakowsky of Creativity Online's On Design blog offers an optimistic and literate view of social networks that brings Shakespeare and Basho into the fray. "If we allow ourselves to look more optimistically into what the brief communication format of social networking could bring," she states, "then Twitter's 140 character question 'What's happening?' might take on a much more poetic and meaningful cultural role."

Krakowsky argues that the poetic forms of both sonnets and haiku follow extremely strict character and line structures - not unlike the 420 characters of a Facebook post. Even more compelling is a comparison of haiku - a Japanese poetic form which was popularized in the West by the writers of the Beat generation - to Twitter's strict character limit. "The brief, simultaneous, immediate nature of haiku offers a spectacular alternative to the morbid perspective on the extermination of language through social networking and new media," Krakowsky cites.

Another example of literature that uses brevity as a stylistic tool is the modern movement of micro-fiction or hyper fiction- complete stories told in significantly less than 300 words, sometimes as short as six words. 

For all those who scoff at the literary possibilities of stories told in so few characters - or in a Tweet, for that matter - YouJustGetMe presents the winner of a Flash Fiction contest that has been traveling anonymously around the Internet for a few years. It perfectly illustrates that sometimes seventeen words is all you need:

The World's Shortest Horror Story: The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

How diverse is the social media world? While some consider the relative anonymity of the online setting to be a great equalizer, we here at YouJustGetMe have published significant research indicating that people are people whether online or off. The Facebook Data Team was intrigued by the question of the ethnic diversity of their network, and has published a study asking "How Diverse Is Facebook?"

The study extrapolated race by looking at last names of Facebook users online at a given moment and comparing it to data from the US Census Bureau and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. 

The Facebook Data team posits that by using the statistical technique known as mixture-modeling -  put in extremely simple terms, a mathematical model for estimating the density of a population through a statistical equation - that their study is able to accurately gauge the ethnic backgrounds of its users. "We imagine that people come from a population with unknown racial/ethnic proportions," explains the Data Team. "Individuals then get assigned names based on their race/ethnicity. Under this assumption, determining the ethnic makeup of Facebook becomes a problem of back-solving each individual's ethnicity using only their revealed name. By allowing the Facebook population to be different from the Census population, and for each name to inform our interpretation of every other name, this technique allows us to more accurately estimate the expected number of Facebook users of a given race or ethnicity at any given time."

Many of the criticisms that have been raised in the post's comments are worth taking note for researchers and casual users alike. The study has been criticized for being wholly United States-centric - and while Americans are strongly represented in Facebook users, they may be unusually diverse in comparison with other cultures. 

Another criticism leveled against the study hinges on their choice of ethnic identifiers. Notably absent from the categories is an option for Middle Eastern or Arabian - a sizable minority in the US and an important racial classification worldwide. This is due to the US Census Bureau's race and ethnic classifications, which groups people of Middle Eastern descent in the "White" category. 

What do you think? It's exciting to see other folks engaged in research in the same vein as YouJustGetMe, but what caveats should be applied to that research? Sound off in the comments!

We here at YouJustGetMe are firm believers that people are people, online and off. However, when you're Facebooking in your pajamas or Tweeting from the bathroom (ew!) it's easy to forget that the other people in your social network are real too. 

Social media and design blog Noupe decided to nip this trend in the bud by publishing their Ten Commandments of Social Media. While the rules aren't exactly written on stone tablets, the first two in particular are worth a reminder.

The first commandment: Thou shall not be a narcissist. "Social media is not all about you," explains Noupe. "It's about people. It's about being social, hence the name. Take the time to engage others in conversation. Don't simply sign on and post something about yourself and leave." They propose that you follow a 1 to 3 ratio - for everyone one post that you make about yourself, you should post three more that engage people in conversation. Even clicking "like" on a few of your friend's posts helps to enhance the experience of social media for everyone.

The second commandment: Thou shalt listen to what others are saying. "Actively participating in conversation helps build relationships and listening is the most important part." Noupe suggests that you consider using a program like TweetDeck or a web-based interface like Brizzly to get a clearer visual of conversations. 

To see the full tablet of commandments - including such pithy reminders as Thou shalt say something of substance and the easily-forgotten Thou shalt not be a friend whore - check out Noupe.

Are you a cat person or a dog person? People tend to have some strong opinions along the cat/dog divide - as far as what that means about human personalities, the jury of researchers are out. However, YouJustGetMe stumbled across some interesting research that indicates what a YouJustGetMe for Cats might look like.

The New York Times Well Blog is reaffirming the very premise that YouJustGetMe is based on: people's online profiles reflect the realities of their personalities.

Dr. Sam Gosling of the University of Texas, an advisor to YJGM, conducted his research through Facebook and a similar German website. The Times reports:

"...When University of Texas researchers began studying [the online social network] friends, they expected that users also would exaggerate accomplishments and offer an enhanced version of themselves. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically gave an accurate and realistic impression of the user's real-life personality."

The author Tara Parker Pope goes on to explain that the researchers used the same Big 5 personality type model that you see here on YJGM, and that the researcher's findings indicate that the Facebook pages were especially well-suited for identifying traits of extraversion. 

Time even got in on the fray with their own post about Dr. Gosling's research, which promptly went viral and trended like crazy all over Twitter. So... guess we're on to something, aren't we?