Looking Back on the Start of our Lives Online

I've been blogging for about 10 years as of last month. I started the blog during my first semester of graduate school at the University of Texas. Now, ten years later, I'm in my first semester as an Assistant Professor. I've used the blog as a way to catalog ideas related to my work and passion: understanding media use, in particular new/digital media use. I like to think that I've been able to refine my thinking on this topic through this blog. If nothing else, the blog serves as a record the evolution of my thinking. It allows me (or anyone else) to travel back in time and see how I thought.

While we're on the subject of travelling back in time (as a nostalgist, this is subject to which I obsessively return), I'd like to go back even further, about 20 years ago, to the time when I first started using the Internet. Recently, I was prompted by a question: "what was it like to use the Internet in the 90's". I took this to mean, "what did it feel like?" Here are some thoughts:

The big difference between the online experience then and the online experience now, one that many young people today wouldn't think about, is the way in which search engines changes things. In the mid-90's, you had to either hear about a specific website from a friend, a magazine, or TV (though no one in mainstream media really cared about the internet, so it was mostly through friends). Then you had to type the specific web address into the Netscape Navigator browser address bar. Good search engines (and the explosion of worthwhile websites in the late 90's) changed the online experience from hopping around a small series of content islands to something that feels like moving through one's everyday offline life. You went from hearing about a particular website (the way you would hear about a particular book or movie) to just thinking of something, anything, typing it into a search engine, and finding it.

Reflecting on the changes wrought by search engines made me think about a similar big change in media choice that affected what it felt like to use the medium: the remote control. Both search engines and remote controls came along at a time when the number of available options exploded (in websites, or in cable television channels). They made the explosion of options manageable. The feeling of the media use experience changed in both cases, from a consideration of several options (akin to being in a store or a library and making a selection) to moving through a landscape, observing things around you and reacting to them, and at the same time, conjuring or creating a world from thin air, thinking of something and having it appear in front of you.

We are different selves in those situations (this is an idea that I keep coming back to: the ways in which our environment brings out different selves). In the first, we are a chooser. But in the second situation, there are a few selves that could be brought out or summoned. In the second situation, we are potentially a react-er, but also a creator, an unrestricted curious, creative impulse. We are also, potentially, an unrestricted Id, acting on inner impulses for immediate gratification, reacting not to the outer landscape but to subtle shifts in our moods or thoughts.

One of my big questions: How do you foster curiosity and creativity and downplay reactivity and the impulse for immediate gratification? The answer, I think, lies in manipulating (perhaps a kinder word would be "customizing") the choice environment, and we've only begun to do this, and not in a systematic manner. And that is what I want to do with my research. 

Hardwiring and Software

At last week's symposium on media choice here at Drexel, the term "hardwired" came up a few times. This term pops up a lot these days in discussions of cognition and I wonder whether its use obfuscates as much as it explains.

The particular context in which it was used last week related to news: how and why certain people attend to certain news sources. People, so the argument went, are hardwired to seek out arguments and evidence with which they agree, and when they do happen to encounter counter-attitudinal arguments and evidence (i.e., stuff with which they don't agree), they are hardwired to interpret it as biased. When used in this context, what does "hardwired" really mean?

Hardwired reactions to stimuli in our environment are automatic and, as the metaphor would suggest, more-or-less permanent. Hardwired cognition/behavior are the products of adaptive processes that occurred over thousands of generations. We are born with these reactions; we don't need to be taught. Our startle reflexes, our orientation to faces, and our fear of spiders are all hardwired. Then there are reactions that are learned and, through repetition and conditioning, become automatic. It's easy to just lump both of these kinds of reactions together because they both involve automatic, quick processing of information without any voluntary control. But the hardwired reactions, I think, are harder to change than the automatic learned reactions because they have been around longer.

So let's assume that the aforementioned tendencies relating to news are, indeed, truly hardwired. None of us had to learn to seek out evidence we agree with and to view evidence that we don't agree with as biased. These information processing strategies evolved over many generations. Perhaps they're extensions of our need to preserve a stable sense of self or a coherent picture of our environment and where the rewards and threats lie or our social standing within a group of allies. This leaves us with a few important (and oft ignored) questions about our hardwired reactions to our information environment.

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be "rewired"? Not easily, if at all. I don't think you could condition folks to seek out counter-attitudinal news and expect them to pass this tendency on to their offspring through their genes (which is what I take "rewired" to mean).

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be overridden? Yes. Actually, I think this happens all the time. All of civilization, it's been said, is a kind of imposition on many of our hardwired reactions to stimuli, an attempt to override and otherwise control (i.e., repress) reactions that would be destructive in the long run to large numbers of people trying to live together (i.e., society). The repression of impulses is so ordinary that we forget the many ways the contours of society keeps them in check, through laws, rules, social mores, and restricted availability.

How strong is a hardwired predisposition? Put another way: how hard would it be to override a hardwired reaction to stimuli? This is another case in which the question of magnitude (what I like to call the "how much" question) is ignored, and I think it's ignored strategically. If you ignore the fact that some hardwired reactions are far easier to overcome than others, you could say that an inborn impulse that is not that hard to control is just like another inborn impulse that is almost impossible to control - they're both "hardwired". If it's somehow to your advantage to say that some behavior is unchangeable (say, if you're defending ideologically polarizing news coverage because it caters to our hardwired orientation toward information), you'll note how it's hardwired and leave it at that.

Just how hard is it to change behavior that is hardwired depends on the behavior, maybe on when it evolved and what's at stake (i.e., how great the reward or punishment for behaving in ways inconsistent with the predisposition). You can get most people to overcome their hardwired desire for sweets easier than you can get them to overcome their hardwired desire for sexual gratification or desire for novel stimuli or inclination toward competition or cooperation. Hardwired reactions or behaviors vary in the extent to which they are capable of being overridden. It is possible to know how hard it is to change a particular hardwired behavior through experimentation.

What the heck does this have to do with software?

The design of software affects what types of information are available to us in certain places at certain times. There are various reasons we're averse to the idea of restricting availability of information in any way. Information is speech, and speech should be free. More information and more freedom to choose just seem like inherently good things. But really, our access to information is restricted, in some sense, all the time. We see a fraction of all available information, if only because we can only process so much information and the amount to which we have access via the Internet has grown exponentially. The fraction of the total news information to which we pay attention is determined primarily by the aforementioned hardwired reactions to stimuli and software that makes certain information available to us based on our prior impulsive behavior (i.e., what we click on without thinking too deeply about it). Perhaps our hardwired reactions to stimuli determine our news consumption behavior not because they're all that hard to change, but because nothing bothered to stand in their way.

Here's some good news: experimenting with information environments is actually much easier than experimenting with our environment in general (i.e., the one we walk around in everyday). Simply installing browser extensions can remove ads from our information environment or restrict access to whatever websites we choose. Algorithms can recommend counter-attitudinal news stories. Installing a "Respect" button on comments sections, next to the "Like" and "Recommend" buttons, can increase the likelihood of exposure to counter-attitudinal messages.

You can't get rid of those hardwired impulses to seek out information we agree with. But can you override them? I don't think we've explored that question fully yet.

The discussion of hardwiring gets at an important underlying issue: how fixed are any of our characteristics? It's an emotionally loaded question. There's a lot at stake. But it's exciting to be able to explore the possibilities of changing ourselves and our hardwired impulses by changing our software.

Rechargeable Value

In trying to think through how I will have media users rate the immediate gratification value of their media selections in scheduled and un-scheduled choice environments, I've run across some artifacts that make it difficult to re-schedule certain media experiences in people's lives and still have them be enjoyable or valuable to them. For instance, if you insist that people only send text messages between 3 and 5 PM each day, they may not get much value out of text messaging at those times because the motivation to send those messages was time sensitive. They needed to re-schedule an appointment or make arrangements for dinner that evening. I think we tend to over-estimate the time sensitivity of the value of such communiques (including online chatting). Would you really feel deprived if you had to wait a few hours before learning that someone cared for you or want to make plans for the next day, or learning a bit about how someone's day went? Probably not, but we've gotten so used to having the ability to message whenever we'd like and we don't see a reason to change.

So, there's at least the perception that the value (in terms of enjoyment and utility) of messaging is affect by time in this way. Other mediated experience can be time shifted without losing enjoyment or utility. People are fine with planning to Skype at certain times and would be fine with switching the time if needed. People are fine with shifting a TV show to fit their schedules. They'd probably like to watch it as soon as possible because they're anxious to find out what happens next and they'd like a dose of the pleasure brought on by the show as soon as possible. If I had a choice between the next Batman film coming out tomorrow and having to wait a year to see it, I would choose to see it tomorrow. I might even pay a bit more to do so. But if I had to wait an extra few hours or even a few days to see it, it wouldn't change the value of the experience. I'm sure I would still enjoy it.

There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, some non-interactive media experiences whose value are somehow contingent on the timing of the experience. News and sports seem to decline in value over time after their live broadcast in a way that other types of content do not. For some reason, live-ness (or, to use a grocery metaphor, freshness) matters. Of course, a classic game might still be fun to watch on ESPN classic years later and old news might be fascinating to some, but for the most part, "yesterday's news" isn't very enjoyable or useful.

I had an interesting experience when I deprived myself of a few kinds of media experiences that I partake in a lot: NPR, Facebook, and Reddit. I was away on vacation for a few days and just didn't have time to check any of these (that is what one does with these sources: they check on them). I then experienced more pleasure than usual when I checked these at the end of the vacation. It was as if their value had been recharged since the last time I checked on them. Many interesting bits of news about my friends and about the world had accrued since I had last checked in. When I'm in my normal media habit, I check on these things regularly, getting some utility and enjoyment, but then quickly exhaust their value, having used up the best parts, having to wait until people in my Facebook feed post interesting things, until Talk of the Nation has another media-related offering, or until enough interesting/funny things are posted on Reddit. When I check on them often, their values are quickly exhausted, but when I don't check on them for a bit, their value accrues and lasts longer.

This isn't quite how the value of traditional current events news works, I think. I wasn't adamant about going back and finding exactly what had happened in Washington or Libya while I was off the grid. An even more obvious example would be weather reports: I'm not going to go back and read weather reports for Ann Arbor for the days I was out of town. If there's some sort of commentary about the events, like I'd find in Slate, NYTimes, the New Yorker, or Grantland, then the pieces hold their value. The less commentary, the shorter the "expiration date" for the experience.

People check Facebook many times throughout the day because they can, because its there. Each time you check it, you can only go so long before you've read all the good stuff and you're making due with the dregs. The same goes for any continuously updating site: blogs, Twitter, online newspapers, etc. If it weren't, if you had to check it between 3 and 5 each day, you might be able to read longer and enjoy it more, not having to make due with the dregs. You're dealing with a fully charged-up experience. You might even say that this is true for email accounts: if they're accounts you typically get pleasurable emails in, then you'll have more of a chance of getting that pleasure of an inbox full of pleasurable messages if you wait longer to check your email. If you only get messages that you consider to be unpleasant, then the longer you wait, the more unpleasant the moment of checking will be. The trouble is that its too hard to resist the not-fully-recharged version because its always accessible.

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.

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.

Discipline & Privacy

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to showcase some of my ideas on networked media, selection habits, and immediate gratification (which is shaping up to be my dissertation topic) in front of some esteemed colleagues from the psych department here at UMich. The great part about giving talks like this is that it can get you to look at a problem you've been staring at for way too long in a new way.

Something Ed O'Brien said prompted me to return to the issue of privacy. Research suggests that we keep our immediate desires (or inner hedonist, if you will) in check in various ways: by making a habit of things that we don't like doing but know will help us in the long term, by taking temptations out of our immediate grasp, by having reminders of what will happen to us if we fail to curb our immediate desires, or by exercising good ol' fashioned self control. There's also another thing that prevents our inner hedonists from taking over: public censure, or the judgment of others. We don't fill our faces with chocolate cake, fritter away our time on leisure pursuits instead of working, cheat on our husbands/wives, or buy boatloads of porn for various reasons, but one of them is likely that we will be looked down upon by others. We will be publicly embarrassed. But what if you could do all of those things in private, taking the punishment or barrier of public censure and embarrassment out of the equation?

I posit that new media allows us to do just that. We can do so many things that we would have been judged for without being judged because we can do them in private. In many cases, this is good. We can pursue our true passions without repressing who we really are for fear of some sort of cultural judgment. But in other cases, the selves that are being repressed by public scrutiny are just our inner hedonists. The inner hedonist is just one aspect of a self, an aspect that has been kept in check by public scrutiny for probably all of human history in one way or another. Give that aspect of the self space to do whatever it wants and you're going to get behavior that does not reflect what you consider to be "your self." You will get behavior that reflects one aspect of your self.

Here's the counter-intuitive part of this. Most people think our privacy is being eroded by networked media, that more and more of our lives are on display. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, though that information is out there and it is attainable, we must look at who is attaining it, how its being used, the extent to which we know about those things, and the extent to which that feeds back to alter our behavior. I would submit that most of the information about our online habits either sits unused, is used in some sense that ultimately doesn't embarrass us or punish us directly or indirectly (used to show us various kinds of ads), and thus does not alter our patterns of behavior. Its all fine and well to quote Orwell and come up with possible future scenarios in which our data is used by others to alter our desirous behavior, but I haven't encountered any evidence that indicates that has happened or is happening.

Here's the second problem. We never had the opportunity to do so many things that we can do now with networked media. Doing any number of things that feel good in the moment but are frowned upon by society (be it cheating on your wife/husband, learning how to build a bomb, trading bigoted jokes, etc.) were just too logistically difficult to pursue. It would be too much of a pain in the ass to find the right people or goods to carry those things off, and you had to sneak around to do them. These are just much, much easier to do now with networked media. We didn't do those things partly b/c we would not have had privacy when we did them and thus we would have been punished for doing them. Now, we can use the privacy that we should expect (privacy regarding our bank statements, voting behavior, private conversations with family members) to cloak the privacy that we never had (privacy regarding things that we know we shouldn't do but do anyway, not because they don't line up with the current public's social mores, but because they conflict with our own long-term goals). Online privacy is expected to cover a wider range of activities, some of them fine and some of them not so fine, than old school offline privacy. Is privacy eroded by these technologies? The technology allows it to be eroded, but I don't see that happening.

So if the eyes of the public can't keep your inner hedonist in check, then who can? Your inner disciplinarian, of course! And various kinds of technologies (like the program Freedom, or the Me timer or time tracking software for firefox) can do something that has never been done before with such efficiency and to such an extent: it can put your self at one point in time (the self that sits there not in direct proximity to temptation, well aware of what it should do) and allow it to exert power over your self at another time (the self that is surrounded by temptation and requires the discipline of some outside force to prevent it form acting). Think of it as a more nuanced, self-imposed chastity belt.

The most important difference is that we need to realize that the inner hedonist was always being kept in check, but that he was being kept in check by forces (i.e. the public, the government, mom, dad, etc.) that didn't always have our best interests at heart and had their own incentives for altering our behavior. We've found ways around them, but are we really any better off with our inner hedonists running the show? Now we can discipline our inner hedonist while preserving our autonomy and privacy. That's a big deal, and that's what I'll most likely be studying for the next couple of years.