Puppies & Iraq

I just saw Page One, a documentary about the New York Times, which raised some interesting (if oft repeated) questions about journalism that come along with the financial instability of the industry: is there something about a traditional media outlet like the NYTimes that is superior to the various information disseminating alternatives (news aggregation sites, twitter, Facebook, Huffpo, Daily Kos, Gawker, etc.) and, if so, what is it? What is it about the New York Times (or the medium of newspapers in general) that would be missed if it was gone?

Bernard Berelson asked a similar question in a study of newspaper readers who were deprived of their daily newspaper due to a workers' strike in 1945. The reasons people liked (or perhaps even needed) the paper back then - social prestige, as an escape or diversion, as a welcome routine or ritual, to gather information about public affairs - are all met by various other websites and applications, some of which seem to be "better" - that is, more satisfying to the user - at one or all of these things than any newspaper is.

I want to pick apart this idea of that which is "more satisfying" to the user, or what it means to say that they "want" something. The mantra of producers in the free market, no matter what they're selling, is that they must give the people what they want. Nick Denton of Gawker has a cameo in Page One in which he talks about his "big board", the one that provides Gawker writers with instant feedback about how many hits (and thus, how many dollars) their stories are generating. Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune media company, voiced a similar opinion: those in the information dissemination business should give people what they want. Ideally, you make enough money to do "puppies and Iraq" - something that people want and something that people should want. To do anything else is, to use Zell's phrase, "journalistic arrogance".

Certainly, a large number of people are "satisfied" with the information they get from people like Denton and Zell. But Denton and Zell, like any businessmen, can only measure satisfaction in certain ways: money, or eyeballs on ads. There are other, often long-term social, costs paid when people get what they supposedly want. When news is market driven, the public interest suffers. So goes the argument of many cultural theorists. But who are they to say what the public interest is? Why do we need ivory tower theorists to save the masses from themselves?

Maybe that elitist - the one who would rather read a story about Iraq than look at puppies - is not in an ivory tower but inside of all of us, along with an inner hedonist (that's the one that would rather look at puppies all day). There are many ways to measure what people like, want, need, or prefer. I'm not talking about measuring happiness as opposed to money spent/earned. I'm considering what happens when we're asked to pay for certain things (bundled vs. individually sold goods) at certain times (in advance of the moment of consumption vs. immediately before the moment of consumption). There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that those two variables, along with many others situational variables external to the individual, alter selection patterns of individuals. Want, or need, or preference does not merely emanate from individuals. When we take this into account, we recognize that a shift in the times at which individuals access options and the way those options are bundled together end up altering what we choose. We click on links to videos of adorable puppies instead of links to stories about Iraq because they're links (right in front of us, immediate) and because they've already been paid for (every internet site is bundled together, and usually bundled together with telephone and 200 channels of television). If it wasn't like that, if we had to make a decision at the beginning of the year about whether we "wanted" to spend all year watching puppy videos or reading about Iraq...well, I guess not that many people would want to spend all year reading about Iraq. But I reckon that many people would want, would choose some combination of puppies and Iraq if they had to choose ahead of time. The internet is a combination of what we want and what we should want, and so is the NYTimes, but they represent a different balance between those two things. The Times is 100 parts puppies, 400 parts Iraq. The internet is 10000000000 parts puppies, 100000000 Iraq (or something to that effect. When you change how things are sold, you may not change what people want, as many theorists claim, but you do change how we measure what people want.

Maybe we never have to defer to a theorist to tell us what we should be reading or watching in order to be a better citizen. Maybe we just need to tweak our media choice environment so that it gives the inner elitist a fighting chance against the inner hedonist.

Restricted Access

As I passed by a University of Michigan librarian unlucky enough to have her computer screen visible to passers-by and saw that she was on Facebook, I thought about the rights of employers to restrict the internet use of their employees. I believe there have been mixed results from studies of whether or not allowing employees unfettered access to the internet hurts or helps productivity. I can't recall the source, but somewhere I recall reading that workers who take short breaks every hour to do some leisure web browsing are more productive than those who do not take those breaks.

In any case, let's assume that businesses want to restrict their employees use of the internet for leisure purposes in order to boost productivity. I'm sure many employers block ESPN, YouTube, Facebook, maybe anything that's classified as having adult content using some sort of Net Nanny. But what if the employer wanted to really restrict their employees internet use? What if they thought that it would be better for their employees to, say, read the complete works of William Shakespeare or learn about particle physics than to be on Farmville for an hour or two a day? Somewhat less benignly, what if they wanted their employees to only read or watch materials that showed their company and product in a positive light, or endorsed a particular kind of lifestyle? Could they restrict their employees access to, say, one or two sites like this? Are they within their rights to restrict their employees in this manner?

I have little sympathy for employees demanding the right to surf the net at work. When you are at work, you're supposed to be working. Yes, there are the studies that say that these little breaks can boost productivity, but I don't think there's any research on whether certain kinds of restricted internet surfing is just as good at this. So the employee defense of "a bit of cyberslacking makes me more productive" wouldn't necessarily contradict an employer's right to limit their internet use how they see fit.

Its like having the ultimate captive audience. Sure, you could choose not to watch any of the content we make available to you, but then you'd have to do work (ugh!). Options that might have been unappealing at home suddenly seem interesting. Regarding the scenarios listed above, I'd have some faith that employees would forego any ham-handed attempts to brainwash them into loving the company they work for (opting to actually work instead of watching or reading poorly made, pro-corporate content) but (assuming a certain kind of intellectual curiosity) might actually respond to reading Shakespeare or learning particle physics. It wouldn't have to be Shakespeare, of course. Whatever the employer thought it would be enriching to know could be substituted.

Research on persuasion suggests that convincing someone to do or buy something they didn't already have some inclination to do or buy is extremely difficult if not impossible. If you restricted my access at work to Fox News, I wouldn't suddenly become a right-wing ideologue. I'd get back to work, or daydream, or talk to a coworker. But if its something you've been meaning to do, perhaps the work setting is the proper restrictive environment, providing that unappealing alternative, that would finally get you to read that classic you've been meaning to read.

The Ethical Issues of Analyzing Time, Desire, and Self-Control

My tentative dissertation project (becoming less tentative as my defense date draws closer) has to do with time, desire, and self-control. One basic premise of the project is that each of us has short-term desires and long-term desires, and that these desires are often in conflict with one another. We might say that "part of us" wants to eat that chocolate cake or spend time on our favorite leisure website, and another "part of us" wants to eat less fat and carbs and spend more time working on projects, exercising, or volunteering. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem that controversial.

Through parents/caregivers and the education system, most people learn at an early age the consequences of too-frequently indulging their short-term desires. The more immediate, painful, and affective the negative consequence, the easier it is to convince yourself to refrain from future indulgence. Even before our parents/caregivers, evolution gave us in-born, visceral reactions to things that are good for us in the long run (eating nutritious berries = yummy!) and things that are bad for us in the long run (eating poisonous berries = vomit). But evolution doesn't provide the fine tuning, and in a fast-changing, complex environment, our consequence estimations need outside assistance. A different kind of convincing-of-the-short-term-self needs to happen when the feedback isn't visceral and immediate.

People have been smoking tobacco for roughly 5000-7000 years, but it wasn't until the last hundred years that large numbers of people knew that it hastened their death. Of course, most ancient smokers died from other ailments when the lifespan wasn't long enough for them to die of lung cancer. Once it became long enough, and once scientists had found a connection between smoking and cancer, a large number of people who would've enjoyed smoking in the short-term stopped or cut down (or at least felt guilty) because they had been informed by some trusted "other" that doing so would bring about long-term benefits. This isn't just self-control. Its informed self-control.

In some ways, this is the role of culture in general: to produce informed self-control (Freud's super-ego). We've all got the easy behavioral imperatives figured out: don't eat stuff that makes you puke; avoid situations that evoke terror. Rules exist because some of us (or all of us under some circumstances) may be inclined to behave in ways that are prohibited by those rules. Rules are not so much "made to be broken" as made to correct what was "broken" about our perceptions of consequences. For better or worse, this has become the domain of doctors: first physicians and perhaps now psychologists and psychiatrists. They make rules based on observations of seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. They are experts in consequences. Did psychologists, educators, or scientists aspire to the role of rule-maker? Probably not, but they're a necessary bi-product of a complex world in which our finite senses can't keep track of the many connections between actions and consequences. To believe otherwise is to succumb to nostalgia for a by-gone world.

Things get messy when we get personal about our analysis of time, desire, and self-control: media use (my area of research) and, even more personal, marriage and sex. There have been some terrific articles and commentary about marriage and fidelity in the wake of Anthony Weiner's virtual infidelity and NY's passing of a gay marriage law. A defining characteristic of marriage is the pledge of individuals to stick together. Its an attempt of the long-term-thinking self to override the future short-term-thinking selves so that the long-term self can benefit. But who is informing that long-term-thinking self? What is their evidence? What is their agenda?

This leaves us with an uncomfortable reality: those who can demonstrate the negative long-term consequences of things you know are pleasurable in the short-term and you think are not harmful in the long-term are telling you what to do, and people tend to not like being told what to do. For good reasons, too. Those in positions of power abuse it for their own gain. If I own stock in a cookie company, I'll fund research and coverage of research suggesting that another indulgence is particularly harmful, leading people away from that indulgence and toward cookies. Similarly, certain relationship experts might promote a certain view of monogamy because they benefit from its success in the marketplace of ideas, not because its any more accurate at predicting negative consequences than any other theory. The same might be said of a media effects researcher. Those who reject the findings of so-called experts analyzing this complex causal world can simply blame another aspect of that complex world that isn't under their control, freeing their short-term selves from blame. If people who aren't in long-term, monogamous relationships aren't happy, its not because they couldn't exert the self-control recommended by experts; its because they're being judged by an unfair, retrograde society intent on maintaining a certain kind of social order. If people who play lots of violent video games are more aggressive, then its because you measured "aggression" wrong or its due to some variable the researchers didn't control for. Basically, this leaves everybody believing what they want to believe, deferring to no one, and assessing consequences based on personal experience and the limited experience of those around them.

Since I don't want this entry (or anything else I write) to be an empty exercise in hand-wringing, I'll suggest some priorities for research and reporting on research.

We'll have to move from a proscription paradigm to an explanation paradigm, one that is supported by replicable empirical evidence. It is best to demonstrate how to find the links between short-term behavior and long-term consequences, to let people "see for themselves" as much as you can. Our society has become more complex, making it difficult to see the connections. Much of the study of the world, in science and the humanities, has become equally complex: full of impenetrable jargon and statistics. We've got to make explanations clearer, better educate ourselves so that we have some basic fluency in these languages, and support an education system that helps students understand how to find connections for themselves. Yes, we live in an extremely complex world, but the good news is that we've just scratched the surface of how technology can be used to explain concepts, patterns, and connections to large numbers of people in a customizable, individualized way, for free. Behavioral scientists and theorists might be at the forefront of finding patterns in behavior across time, but they can't maintain the trust of the public unless the public can see for themselves.

Not only can the public see for themselves, but maybe they can do the restricting themselves, too. We've all got a conscience. We just don't have the societal restrictions to assist it, and physically/temporally proximate temptation makes it harder to listen to that voice. We're not all tempted by the same thing, so the restrictions really shouldn't be one size fits all. If people can design their own restrictions, you avoid the possibilities of reactance and the totalitarian manipulation of taste that inspires it.

So, I'd like to run an outside-the-lab experiment to provide evidence that supports my dissertation hypothesis, but I'd also like people to be able to try the experiment on themselves, to plug in their own individual variables.

The Pecker at the Party: Immediate gratification, social media, and social situations

Imagine you are at a cocktail party. Most individuals are talking to one another while some are pecking at their smartphones. One of the guests at the party confronts a “phone-pecker”, explaining that she finds this behavior to be rude and cannot understand why the individual is engaging in what appears to be “anti-social” behavior at a party. The “phone pecker” retorts, claiming that he is actually being quite social, just with people who do not happen to be in the room at that moment. He is looking at photos of friends on Facebook, answering emails and sending text messages, reading tweets. How, he asks, is his socializing any different (or inferior) to the socializing that is happening at the cocktail party?

This situation - in which an apparently solitary individual stares at a screen and pecks at the screen or a keyboard or, in some cases, talks to the screen - is increasingly common. More social interaction is mediated - taking place via text messages, emails, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) - and more people are concerned about the implications of this for individuals and society. The cocktail party guest’s identification of this behavior as “rude” suggests a breach of etiquette, but the perception of these acts as rude may only be a symptom of some people’s failure to understand how the technology is being used. Such a failure might be a result of the rapid diffusion of the technology and the predictable failure of social mores to evolve at a similar rate. Older generations lamenting the corrupting influence of new technologies is likely as old as technology itself. Once the technology is sufficiently common, such complaints are seen as the mark of a curmudgeon rather than a legitimate qualm. So the fact that this is seen as rude fails to distinguish between a public act that is simply new and will eventually be harmless and no longer seen as rude and an act that is, in some way, harmful to the social fabric and will always be seen as rude or aberrant.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that the phone-pecker may not be being social at all. He may be scanning his Facebook feed (the equivalent of looking at other guests at a party while not conversing with them) or checking sports scores. Given the size and orientation of networked mobile devices and the expectation of privacy that is associated with the use of such devices, it is difficult for observers to be able to tell the difference between social interaction on mobile devices and non-social behavior.

Let us assume the phone-pecker is interacting with others via the mobile device. Are there really no differences between the nature of heavily mediated person-to-person relationships (that is, those that take place chiefly via text message, email, Skype, and Facebook) and those that are not as heavily mediated?

Older individuals often marvel at the sheer number of texts that teenagers send in a day. Half of all American teens send over 50 texts per day, according to Pew, 2010. Some teens send hundreds per day. This number is not shocking if one considers the text messages to be similar in purpose and content to turn-taking conversations. Teens engaged in long turn-taking conversations on land-line telephones and, before that, in person. The length of statements in such conversations was and is likely to be short, no more than the 150 characters allowed by most SMS (i.e. texting) services. So the length of individual statements and the frequency of text messaging and social media use, while initially seeming alarmingly different, do not to differ significantly from other existing forms (mediated or not) of communication.

What about the people participating in the interaction? There has been fear surrounding social media and one-to-one technology (dating back to the introduction of the telephone) that remote communication devices would facilitate relationships between vulnerable populations (e.g. children) and those seeking to take advantage of these populations (e.g. sexual predators, advertisers, etc.). Though there have been instances of such behavior, the bulk of mediated social interaction (on Facebook and text messaging, if not on Twitter, which, in any case, operates more like a micro-broadcast medium like blogging and less like a rapid interaction application) is still between parties that are acquainted with one another from non-mediated social worlds like school, work, and get-togethers in real world locations like bars and parties. In other words, the people on the other end of the phone-pecker’s pecks are likely to be similar, in terms of their connections to the phone-pecker, to the other cocktail party goers. So it seems, again, that what initially appeared to be different may not be that different at all.

But there's another possible area of difference: the nature of the relationship. The maintenance of relationships, like any other endeavor, is comprised of acts that are immediately enjoyable but do not pay long-term or collective dividends (being able to complain about work to a friend, flirting with a married co-worker, playing a game of basketball with a friend) and other acts that are not immediately enjoyable but do pay off in the long run (changing a diaper, attending a boring work meeting, discussing a difficult topic with a spouse). This isn’t to say there aren’t many (if not most) social interactions that are both immediately gratifying AND help foster long-term gains for the self and others (great sex, great parties, enjoyable collaborative work), but that some relationship maintenance, like many other things in life, is not immediately gratifying but pays off in the long run. An overindulgence in immediately enjoyable social interactions and a failure to engage in any other kind of social interactions may lead to shorter-duration relationships as individuals more frequently (and accurately) accuse one another of being selfish. A failure to think about one’s long-term goals in relationships goes hand in hand with being self-centered or selfish.

Throughout most of human history, our relationships were constrained: by the surveillance and judgment of others, by geography, by class, by time. The proliferation of networked communication devices allows us to (at least partially) remove these constraints. For some, this is a good thing: relationships hindered by repressive regimes are allowed to flourish online. For others, I think it is not. These constraints often kept immediately gratifying interactions at a distance, forcing us to talk with co-workers about work when we would rather be flirting with our partners, to talk with our parents when we would rather be talking with our long-time friends, conversing with our long-time friends when we’d rather be talking to someone new and exciting, talking to our spouses when we’d rather be flirting with a co-worker. They were shaped by the randomness of geographic distribution, by the history of institutions developed by those in power, and in these cases, circumvention of such constraints is, ultimate, a good thing. But either by accident or by design, those constraints kept us from indulging our every social whim.

Again, this isn’t to say that individuals without networked communication technology did not indulge in selfish interactions not in their or anyone else’s best long-term interest. However, when you make immediately gratifying options more easily accessible, you make them more likely to be chosen, particularly by those low in self-control. Why would the choice of whom to interact with and what to converse about be any different than any other decision (in which the temporal and spatial proximity of temptations make them more likely to be chosen)?

To return to the phone-pecker, it is possible that he simply prefers talking to someone who is not at the party. The pecker was invited to the party because of an assumed mutual interest in interacting with those at the party, but given his inattention to other party goers, he cannot count on this assumption lasting very long. He uses technology to develop and nurture several intense, mutually beneficial relationships with co-workers (frequently answering work emails), romantic partners, and close friends (frequently texting at parties), but ignores those very same people at other times so that he can communicate remotely with others. When spending time with his romantic partner, he frequently converses with friends through text and answers email, neglecting his relationship with his partner. When spending time at work, he frequently blows off work to flirt with his partner. It isn’t that he ignores certain people, but that, given the choice between one conversation and another, he chooses the more immediately interesting conversation.

By doing this, he may be training himself to become intolerant of social situations that are not immediately gratifying, becoming accustomed to the immediately gratifying interactions provided by networked communication devices. At a party, this is relatively harmless, though he might find himself invited to fewer parties in the future. But if he bows out of important discussions/ arguments with his partner before they can be resolved, if he pays more attention to work emails and less attention to his children, if he talks to his partner more than his co-workers about work, or flirts more to his sexy co-worker than he talks to his partner about their finances, eventually, his relationships with all parties will suffer through lack of attention.