January 2010 Archives

We'll share a few of the more fascinating findings here on the YJGM blog once the numbers get crunched. 

While we're thinking about desire, longing, and advertising, here are a few interesting links relating to the psychological and sociological aspects of that greatest of human mysteries:

Regina Barreca, PhD. takes a funny, candid look at the similarities between her desires to be popular and her desire to be a good writer in Crushes, Boys, Longing and Telephones, an entry for her blog Snow White Doesn't Live Here Anymore on Psychology Today.

Dr. Shahid Athar, a leading Sufi social scientist, specializes in poetic and scientifically rigorous explorations of the psychological dimensions of religious longing. His article "Human Longing for Spirituality" in Sufism Journal is willing to ask some big, messy questions in looking at the motivations behind such Sufi luminaries as Rumi and Hafiz.

What are the similarities between desire, longing, and addiction? In Location and Longing: The Nicotine Craving Experience in Virtual Reality, researchers from the University of Texas back up a central concept behind YJGM: people are people, with their whole personalities and constellations of desire, whether online or off. 

One of Nick's most highly recommended books is At The Root of This Longing: Reconciling A Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst by Carol Lee Flinders. Flinders tenderly and aggressively mines the second wave of feminist theory, the spread of Buddhism in America, and the Jung-influenced mythopoetic psychology movement to illustrate the common desires that drive people to wage inner and outer revolutions.

These days, one can't think about the intersection of advertising and psychology without evoking the brilliant AMC series Mad Men. On AMC's Mad Men discussion board, a brilliant and lively conversation about the psychology behind the characters and the campaigns they wage has been going on for several seasons. Also worth a read: Psychology Today asks the tough question why weren't the Mad Men depressed? and finds that it may have simply been a sign of the times. Is longing for consumer goods a symptom of the culture we live in, too?

The Internet is abuzz after Apple announced the release of what it is calling its "most advance technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price": the iPad. Will the iPad finally break open the tablet market in a way that the Amazon Kindle couldn't, or will this be just another Newton? As Psychster Portland currently consists of two tech-savvy and opinionated twentysomething guys who are fascinated by the ways that technology changes the way people communicate with each other, we figured we might as well throw our hat into the ring.

Both Anthony and Nick of Psychster Portland intended to get Barnes and Noble Nook tablets, and watched news of the iPad keenly. "I was absolutely ready, if the iPad was awesome enough, to immediately cancel my order for the Nook and switch over," explained Anthony. "However, I was pretty underwhelmed." Major concerns included the decision not to utilize e-ink, forcing users to read extended works on a backlit screen. "It'd be one thing if I was a commuter, or had to spend a long time on a subway or something," said Nick. "However, I'd probably use it for things like reading on long bus or airplane trips, and in that situation the Nook's e-ink seems like it'd be a more energy-efficient and readable option."

"When would people need an intermediate device between their Smart Phones and their laptops?" Anthony asks. Ashley Lewis, One of the YJGM's all-time best guessers, pointed out that the iPad could have a great use in education and the classroom. Anthony also pointed out that it's a perfect transitional device for PC-minded people to start getting used to a Mac platform - at around $500 with no requirement to jump on the 3G plan, it could convince fence-sitters to jump to the Mac side.

Some experts, though, are already sold. "I think it's cool because it makes mobile computing a lot more user-friendly and accessible for the vast majority of prospective users," explains MJ  Petroni. Petroni, Principal of CauseIt Inc. applies his academic training as a cyborg anthropologist to coaching, consulting, and branding work with small business teams. "What the iPad provides from an interface perspective is the ability to do almost all the normal tasks of mobile computing without without 90% of the clutter associated with other devices," such as a laptop or smart phone.

"Speaking on the design and UI interface, it's fantastic in that it makes technology accessible to people who don't otherwise interact with it. A great example would be people who've put off integrating computers into their everyday life, such as older users and users with limited patience for learning around technology." Petroni also points out that the iPad could be the missing link in technological accessibility for the differently-abled. "This will be a wonderful interface for a friend of mine who recently had a stroke."

The "magic" that Apple posits about its iPad may come from the device's doing away with the final separation between themselves and the interface: the cursor. "Devices like this are fundamentally tactile and experiential," Nick says. "Unlike, say, Google Wave - which is revolutionary conceptually - the iPhone is revolutionary in terms of the physical experience. As opposed to interacting with it via a cursor, you interact with the device using natural movements." Petroni concurs: "People start to relate to it as though they're directly interacting with the data rather than the tool. Because the interface integrates intuitive gestures, layers of translation are removed."

Getting down to brass tacks: will we buy an iPad? "Absolutely!" exclaims Petroni. Nick and Anthony of Psychster Portland are less enthused - "I'd definitely need to touch it first before I'd consider buying one," says Anthony. "Also, you know that the second generation is going to be really astonishing, and will work out a lot of the kinks in the first." Perhaps Christmas 2010 will be the Season of the iPad for the YJGM team!

How long would you say you spend each month engaged with social media websites? If you answered five and a half hours or more, you're in good company. According to data from The Nielsen Company, "global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years."

The rest of the data is equally as stunning. Social networks and blogs are now the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December 2009, distantly followed by online games and instant messaging. 

Twitter is proving to be the dark horse that, while rather far behind the Facebook behemoth, might just catch up enough to give a strong showing. Average time on Twitter increased a jaw-dropping 368% in 2009! Twitter increased its number of unique visitors by 579%, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. 

Globally, spending time on social networking sites is becoming almost synonymous with spending time on the Internet. However, Nielsen's vision of "global" probably isn't congruent with the average person's definition - it only takes into account data from U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Vast and distinctive demographics of the online world, including all of Africa and virtually all of Asia, are not included in this study.

Even with the caveat of the definition of global, the Nielsen data is backing up a central hypothesis behind YouJustGetMe: when social media aligns with human nature, it is an explosive success. 

Crowdsourcing, or taking tasks like reporting and journalism usually performed by one designated person and outsourcing the task to the public, has become a major facet of the political media landscape. A great example of this effect was Iran's Twitter Revolution, in which Iranian citizens reported updates about violence following an election and kept the world informed about the view from the street. However, crowdsourcing has limits - language and web accessibility being two major factors that can prevent information from being disseminated efficiently or comprehensively. However, a new open-source project is looking to circumvent these limitations, and is changing the way that the world looks at the potential of social media.

Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The central goal of the platform is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. "[The Ushahidi Engine is] extraordinarily impactful because 1) it visually translates data into a cognitively efficient communication form and 2) it's interactive in both directions-you can get information and you can post new," explains Dr. Pamela Rutledge at the Media Psychology Blog. 

In the past, the only people who got to widely broadcast information about their lives were celebrities - after all, going on the Johnny Carson show is a pretty fantastic means of disclosing things about yourself to a wide network of people. However, with the broad-based communication tools of social media available to virtually everyone, is Perez Hilton correct in asserting that in the modern setting everyone will be "famous" to fifteen people?

Michael Stefanone (University of Buffalo) and Chyng-Yang Jang (University of Texas, Arlington) took a hard look at personal bloggers - folks who maintain an online presence analogous to an offline diary on a site like LiveJournal or Blogger. This study was conducted in 2007 - right about the time that the social networking savvy were switching from personal blogs to things like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. Jang and Stefanone set out to discover what personality traits personal bloggers possessed, and what sort of effect the blog had on the offline social networks of the bloggers themselves.

Before we talk about the findings of the research, it's worth it to define a central concept of the study. Social scientists often talk about people's "ego-centric networks" - a fancy name for the cloud of friends and acquaintances that you have, which if diagrammed would have you at the center and lots of lines connecting you to other people in your life. Some of these ties are more tenuous, or "weak" - say, a friend you only talk to occasionally, or don't reveal much about yourself to. Other ties are "strong" - you know a lot about one another, and feel a sense of intimacy with each other. Strong ties, or close relationships, are quite "costly" - they involve a great deal of time, involvement, and risk to develop. You have to expend yourself significantly more to cultivate these relationships!

Let's return to Jang and Stefanone. The researchers identified, fairly unsuprisingly, that folks who maintained personal blogs had personalities with high levels of extraversion and high levels of self-disclosure. However, somewhat less logically, the bloggers were significantly "closer" to larger groups of friends. The bloggers were actually using a very "cost-effective" means of disclosing information about themselves to strong-tie ego-centric networks - in other words, they were actually deepening their existing friendships!

This has a fascinating implication: in this  era, people who are both extraverted and who possess a high level of self-disclosure in their personalities now have access to "cost-saving" tools that enable them to develop and maintain more close friendships than the average person would have in the past. In other words, the average person's circle of friends can be bigger than the average person's circle even twenty years ago! 

Do you have any stories of blogging or social media bringing you closer to your offline friends? Any horror stories? Sound off in our comments!

Sure, people are people, whether online or offline. However, in the offline setting, people have fairly clear ideas of what belongs to them and what does not. Property law is a major facet of most legal systems, and focuses primarily on physical objects; Intellectual property law, on the other hand, has had to sprint to keep up with technical innovations over the last decades. Intellectual property law hasn't even started to crack the tough questions about how much your social network identity belongs to you, or who has the right to utilize it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (right) represents one side of this debate. Zuckerberg recently ran into fierce opposition from media and users alike for doing what many called an online privacy bait-and-switch: notifying Facebook users of privacy setting changes with a pop-up window that automatically changed user settings when the "next" button was hit. He justifies this decision by claiming that full personal transparency is the new "social norm" - that people want to have all their information available for the world.

Others are questioning whether this new "social contract" is really the positive thing that Zuckerberg paints it to be. One such contrarian is the brilliant Jaron Lanier (left), author of You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Released today by Knopf, You Are Not A Gadget argues that the aggressive openness of the Internet, while once revolutionary, is now a force that hurts the creative middle class and prevents real innovation.

The trouble arises from what Lanier describes as a new online social contract. "The basic idea of this contract," Lanier writes , "is that 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."

What do you think? What aspects of your online identity belong to you? Who gets to make the decisions about what goes public? How can creative types own their work and still participate in the "hive mind" of social media? Sound off in the comments!

Want to do something to increase world peace? Sometimes it seems far too lofty a goal, but a group of French researchers found out one way to make folks behave a little more kindly to one another in society. Hint: it's extremely simple, most everyone can do it, and it's free. Give up? Smile at strangers.

What they found was that smiling dramatically increased the likelihood that passerby would stop to help the other participants - by 50%, in fact. Passerby stopped 30% of the time to help people after being smiled at, and only 20% for the dour-faced. The results demonstrated that being smiled at by a stranger significantly improved the likelihood that the person smiled at would later help someone else.