Evolved instincts, hyperstimulation and memes

As social websites become more popular, a growing concern amongst many users is the prevalence of internet memes. Memes can be fun and amusing, and can help foster a sense of community that might otherwise be absent. However, as a community grows larger memes (in the colloquial sense, of imagemacros, in-jokes and subcultural references) can often start to take over the community, slowly crowding out or banishing to the margins more intelligent, educational or thought-provoking content.

Part of the problem is the fact that internet memes often form part of the "lowest common denominator" for the community - while not everyone appreciates a multi-page article on economics or a paper on game theory, almost everyone at least quirks their lips or smiles at even a half-competently executed meme or in-joke that they recognise.

The question is, why are internet memes frequently the lowest common denominator? What is it about them that people appreciate so much, even to the inadvertent exclusion of other content?
I've been thinking about this for some time, and my conclusion is that it's our tribal instincts - just like an attraction to sweet foods and a desire for sex, we have a pronounced and built-in monkey-belong-tribe-feel-good instinct (PDF warning).

This is great and valuable, however like our attraction to sweet things, it's an evolutionarily-beneficial impulse that can run out of control when it's hyper-stimulated.

An evolutionary analogy

We like sweet foods because our ancestors were frequently on the verge of malnourishment or vitamin-deficiency, and the high-energy natural sugars and vitamins in fruit were a great boost for our survival chances. Moreover they were only intermittently available (when various fruits were in season), so it made sense for our instincts to prioritise acquiring these sources of food as we were usually deficient in them and never really had the opportunity to over-indulge to a detrimental degree.


This was fine for millions of years, but then we got smart and learned how to make doughnuts and cream cakes and chocolate bars. We learned how to spin and weave complex sugars and flavour enhancers, so we could make snacks and treats that were even more sugary and sickly-sweet than anything found in nature. We learned to hyperstimulate our natural response to sugar, but while we have a natural evolved defence against not enough sugar ("naturally liking the taste of sweet things"), because there was never a need for it we have no evolved defence against having too much.

The trouble is that our evolved instincts were only concerned with getting as much (rare) natural sugar as they could - they simply aren't evolved do deal with a world where a single dessert on its own can provide half your RDA of calories, so we tend to over-indulge our evolved instincts and binge on sugary and unhealthy foods... leading to an ever-growing increase in obesity, ill-health and the like.

Worse, by hyperstimulating our sense of taste with artificial/refined (and vitamin-free) sugars, we even lose our taste for the beneficial fruit that the instinct was originally evolved to make us eat - fruit tastes bland and boring to many kids raised on fizzy drinks, artificial chocolate and monosodium glutamate, so they reach for junk food in preference.


Similarly, we have an evolved monkey-belong-tribe-feel-good instinct.  This makes perfect sense because with things like kin-selection, mate-availability, altruism, wild animal predation and disease there was undoubtedly a strong evolutionary advantage to being part of a tribe, but the upshot is that we get worried by social ostracism and get a pleasing jolt of reward chemicals in the brain whenever we feel like we belong to a tribe.

This was manifested in many ways - back in the day you used to get literal tribes and inter-village vendettas.  Then as we became more civilised and larger towns developed they exceeded our Dunbar number and instead we began to identify and form tribes along other lines - for example they way people tend to incorporate their church or sports team into their identity (so they're no longer just "Bob Smith" - they're "Bob Smith, Episcopalian Baptist and New York Yankees supporter").

Later on, with mass-media and an ever more intermixed society we needed to find ever quicker, more ad-hoc ways of forming social bonds, so we also began using catchphrases and punchlines from TV and other media as a quick way to establish rapport and form ad-hoc mini-tribes with each other based around a common interest or shared context (a shared TV show or genre of music or other form of entertainment).

Finally, with the internet and social networking we have almost no default shared context - something I post on reddit as a 30-odd year-old straight white guy in Town X in the UK can be answered just as easily by a 17 year-old gay Indian woman in China as it can by someone else in my home-town.

Moreover, due to sensible privacy concerns the persistence and depth of identity is limited - no-one on sites like reddit know any more about you than you choose to post on the internet, so we resort to memes to bridge the gap, establish shared context, and establish tribes based around meme-recognition, and which website(s) and communities we visit.

This is great, but just like the sugar example, with social networks and the effectively free creation, availability and dissemination of memes we've learned to hyperstimulate those group-bonding instincts.

With memes you can always feel like part of a tribe simply by clicking a button, and as a result people do it to excess.  They post irrelevant personal stories to social news sites that 99.99999% of the community have no real interest in, because when people upvote them and comment on these stories they feel like they belong.  Likewise, people upvote then and comment on the stories because it makes them feel like they're part of a tribe.  They've never met the person concerned, they have no relationship to them, and wouldn't even recognise their username ten minutes later, but - just briefly - they feel they have a connection, and get the jolt of social reward stimulus in their brain.

People post memes incessantly for the same reason - it's the equivalent of someone with no sense of nutrition or dietary self-control compulsively binging on junk food and sugary snacks.  We've learned to hyperstimulate our instincts, but we haven't yet learned the maturity and self-control necessary to do it in moderation.

We're getting there (slowly) with sugar - we've known the basic facts of nutrition for decades, and obesity is an obvious, hard-to-ignore downside, though there are still an astonishing number of people who simply can't or won't moderate themselves and their intake.

However, as online societies or communities we're a long way from even really grasping the problem with the monkey-belong-tribe-feel-good instinct.  Unlike "nutrition" there's no systematic, field of study that really even empirically demonstrates the problems with overstimulating it, and "the intelligence, thoughtfulness and educational quality of content in a community slowly descending into nothing but monkey-hooting and back-slapping" is much harder to point out and demonstrate unambiguously to people who don't already understand the problem than "morbid obesity" is.

Allied to that is the problem that at least morbidly obese people often recognise that they're unhealthy and unattractive, which at least provides some impetus to change their lifestyle.  All too often people who incessantly post memes to every comment thread and derail every conversation into circle-jerking often love the content they're posting, and are hurt and surprised and dismissive of people who try to convince them to moderate their input somewhat.  Like any addict, it's hard to even see (let alone acknowledge) the problem until you hit rock-bottom.

So... there we are.  We've suddenly stumbled on a way to hyperstimulate our monkey-belong-tribe-feel-good instincts to the point we can feel validated and like part of a tribe simply by clicking a button, and like the proverbial lab-rat given the opportunity to self-administer drugs by pressing a lever, once made aware of the opportunity a large section of the population has trouble doing anything but hammering on it just as hard and as fast as they can.

Why did Google release Ingress?

Google recently announced a move into a market that's confused many people - an Alternate Reality Game called Ingress.

It's hardly an obvious move - Google is a Big Data, search and advertising company, not a games manufacturer.  They provide services with mass-appeal that users typically use every day or so, like e-mail (GMail), search (Google search), social networking (Google+), blogging (Blogger) and others, but from the perspective of Google as a business these are - fundamentally - all merely ways to deliver paid advertising to consumers.

An Alternate Reality Game is none of these things - it doesn't have mass appeal (most people still don't fully understand what an ARG even is, let alone play one) and even dedicated ARG players spend most of their lives and leisure time not playing their chosen game.  It lacks mass-appeal, even dedicated players may not use the service from one day to the next, and there's no clear, obviously way to insert advertising into the game in any particularly lucrative way.

So why release it? 

What Google are good at 

As stated above, Google are a Big Data company - they excel at managing, querying and manipulating huge datasets, and at making simple interfaces to this data available to the public.

However, they also excel at another related skill - getting other people to generate the data for them in the first place.

Remember the free automated directory enquiries service that everyone wondered why Google would launch several years ago?  Much confusion was provoked by the choice - "why would they do that?  What's the benefit?  Where's the business model?", people asked.  It seemed mystifying at the time, but Google were cleverly using the service to quickly and effectively build a vast corpus of spoken word queries in a variety of accents, to train the voice-recognition systems that subsequently made it into Google Voice and Android.... and then as soon as it was built, they shut down GOOG-411.

It's worth pausing at this point to reflect on the genius of this move - most commenters were focusing on the (not-inconsiderable) expense of setting up an automated directory-enquiries service.  However Google was playing a much larger game, wherein this cost was trivial compared to the value of building a world-class database of voice-samples to train voice recognition software.  Not only did they gain a vast corpus of sound-samples, but by setting up an interactive service where users were strongly motivated to correct any misinterpretations (in order to obtain accurate results), they also ensured that they had the correct interpretation of each sound sample - neatly removing almost all of the effort from not only collecting but also categorising/interpreting the learning dataset.

The value of this dataset really can't be over-estimated - Google were already capable of indexing and querying all the digitised text data in the world, but they were completely incapable when it came to audio data - spoken-word, recorded audio, video soundtracks and the like.

By developing an acceptable voice-to-text system they made whole rafts of new application and services possible - automatically generated e-mail transcripts of voicemail messages left via Google Voice, auto-transcripts of video media (allowing both closed-caption subtitles and the possibility of text-searching within video media the way it's already possible to search within textual media), permitting reliable voice search and voice control of software and hardware, and many others.

Or for another example, consider ReCAPTCHA (initially created by an independent company, but quickly snapped up by Google), where their free CAPTCHA service also helped them to automatically resolve edge-cases and unrecognised words when production-line digitising books for Google Books (thereby turning analogue, offline text into digitised, searchable text).

Google Image Labeller was another - a small, fun game Google launched that got users to collaboratively tag images, which in turn hugely improved Google's image-search system's accuracy and specificity.

So how does this relate to Ingress?

At a guess, it's about getting Google good data for footpath routes to compete with Nokia's recently announced turn-by-turn navigation for pedestrians.Google maps/navigation are great for driving directions, but pretty terrible for walking - they typically just tell you to follow the nearest road, which can lead you on annoyingly roundabout, unattractive or even unnecessarily dangerous routes in many areas.

Many hints about the new game are dropped in this All Things D article.  Note how Ingress is specifically geared around pedestrians:

Users can generate virtual energy needed to play the game by... travelling walking paths, like a real-world version of Pac-Man. Then they spend the energy going on missions around the world to “portals,” which are virtually associated with public art, libraries and other widely accessible places... Outdoor physical activity is a big component of this, though driving between locations isn’t banned

I.e., it's very, very much about walking places... while carrying a GPS-enabled mobile device with a camera and accelerometer and wi-fi and mobile data connection built into it... while running their app that can report whatever it wants back to their servers and has to for you to be able to play the game (i.e., no privacy concerns, as would be the case if they started aggressively tracking and recording the movement of every mobile Google Maps user).

Players walk around footpaths and pedestrian routes that Google Maps currently doesn't cover well, and then as a reward they get to... walk around art installations, libraries and other large, pedestrian-only public areas that Google Streetview cars can't get to.  All the time the game client is reporting back to Google their position, speed and the like, so Google gets to build a massive database of popular pedestrian-accessible areas and common routes between and around them.  It's genius.

Based on this I also predicted that Google Ingress would also encourage users to take geotagged photos of these various locations in the game as mission objectives.  After all, if you've just managed to convince thousands or millions of people to build you a massive GPS-tagged pedestrian-accessible location and route database essentially for free, you'd have to be pretty stupid not to also get them to take geotagged photos and similar media for you while they do it.

I also argued that the game probably records wi-fi SSIDs and a whole bunch of other useful datapoints, too... both proven correct with further investigation in this reddit thread.

Google are very good at manipulating vast datasets, and if anything they're even better at finding inventive and mutually-beneficial ways to convince large numbers of people to voluntarily build those datasets for them.

In short, whatever the plot of Ingress is about, the point of it is to quickly and cheaply build an unrivalled corpus of pedestrian-accessible routes, locations and journey-times for the next generation of foot-enabled Google Maps and Navigation apps, or I'll eat my hat.

Postscript

This idea seems to have gained some traction since I first advanced it on reddit - within a day or two it was all over the social web, suspiciously similar ideas (usually with exactly the same examples) popped up without attribution on half-a-dozen SEO and spammy unattributed-aggregation blogs, passing reference was made to the idea in a FastCompany article about Niantic Labs, and it was even featured (and cited!) on Forbes' technology blog.

We are living in the future: A rant

Fairly frequently listening to people talk or post in online discussions, you run across an attitude you could sum up as

Come on! It's 2000-and-whatever and we don't even have flying cars/hoverboards/whatever yet!

In response, a rant. Profanity is for emphatic purposes only - I assure you the tone of this piece is "cheerfully outraged".

---

Seriously? Seriously? Are you fucking shitting me?

I'm carrying in my pocket a device smaller than my hand which can record audio, video and static images in high quality, and share them with anyone else in the world. It allows me to speak to people on the other side of the planet instantaneously, receives messages from space that prevent me ever getting lost, anywhere, and can reliably guide me to places I haven't even been before (even showing me a picture of the building, so I know what I'm looking for).

It provides wireless, practically-instantaneous access to the sum total of knowledge we have as a species (as well as all the LOLcats and boobies I could ever want to see), allows me to remotely control computers and devices around me, and can provide an "alternate reality" layer allowing me to peer into any one of hundreds of geographically-relevant virtual worlds that underlies the real one, so I can find businesses, read reviews or find invisible notes people have left attached to locations in the real world.

I can play games on it - in fact, I can emulate entire games systems from my youth at full speed, in software, on a device smaller than one of the controllers of the original console system.

And that's just my fucking phone, right now, today.

Leaving aside mobile computing, and the web, and computers that for $500 can read your fucking mind, looking forward you've got massive advances in genetics, the entire field of proteomics just opening up, private spaceflight (including affordable holidays in space reasonably projected within my lifetime), and that's not to mention practical holography, industrial and consumer nanotech and neuroprosthetics allowing you to extend or augment your own body, mind or consciousness in hitherto-unimagined ways.

Your problem is not that the exciting things still haven't arrived yet - it's that you're so neck fucking deep in exciting things that you've become jaded and stopped even noticing them. We live - to quote Paul Simon - in an age of miracles and wonders, but you're so used to them that they've stopped impressing you.

People like you bitch about the lack of flying cars, blind to the fact that we already have them, but most people are far too stupid, incompetent and distractable to drive safely in two dimensions, on the ground, where there's no risk of a collision causing even survivors to drop hundreds of metres out of the sky and pancake themselves on whatever's beneath them.

You complain about hover-boards, but miss the fact that we live in a society with unprecedented access to information and communication, where anyone can teach themselves practically anything to a high level for free on the internet, this increased access to information and unfettered, geographically-omnipresent, low-barrier-to-entry many:many communication means we're slap-bang in the middle of the biggest social revolution since the fucking printing press (possibly since language), and the public discourse is extending itself outwards and refining itself inwards as we gradually - and for the first time ever - begin to form a truly global consciousness and discourse. Cognition at the whole-species level, if you will.

And people like you bitch about the lack of a floating fucking plank? O_o

We are alive at the single most exciting time in the entire history of the world - not only is technology progressing faster than ever before in human history, but it's also taking less and less time before it's commoditised and even the relatively poor start to feel the benefits.

Put simply, we are living in the future.

How can you possibly be so bored of it already? ಠ_ಠ

There are fewer conspiracies than theorists think, but you should still listen carefully to them

Being online for the last 15 years, and having a strong (if sceptical) fascination with conspiracy theories I've run into quite a few over the years.

Many are clearly and obviously ridiculous on the face of them, while others somehow suddenly turn from "ridiculous paranoid fantasy" into "boring history" in the public consciousness - usually (and oddly) without ever passing through the stage of "important and shocking revelation" in-between.

Obviously these days (after years of the X Files and similar cultural touchstones) "conspiracy theory" is a loaded and negative label, and most people instinctively disregard anything described as such. However, I think this is somewhat unfair - there are more conspiracies out there than people typically realise, and they've often played a much larger role in shaping the world than most people give them credit for, even starting wars, bringing down presidents and contributing to the maiming or deaths of hundreds of innocent citizens.

In addition to the "obviously idiotic" and the "obvious-with-hindsight", I believe there is a class of conspiracy theories which - while incomplete and mis-attributed - still conceal a nugget of truth and worthwhile insight, as long as you disregard their more fanciful claims.

As an example, with the rise in filtering systems and various countries' attempts to filter the net, the meme is gaining strength that these are simply cynical excuses by authoritarian governments to restrict their citizens' freedom, and censor the public discourse.

These concerns are persuasive in that they recognise the problems with such systems - that once in place they only tend to ratchet tighter, and that people will accept any amount of change as long as it's introduced in small enough increments. However, systems like censorship (and by extension even really huge conspiracy theories like the idea of the so-called New World Order - an internationalist/globalist conspiracy to dissolve national boundaries and unite the world under one global government) wouldn't necessarily even require a conscious conspiracy.

These trends (if they exist) aren't some Machiavellian super-conspiracy implemented by a smoky room full of the rich and powerful - they're simply the emergent behaviour of lots and lots of different people, all following their own, parochial agendas, who find themselves (often quite unconsciously, or inadvertently) all pushing society in a similar direction.

Returning to net censorship, what happens is that one short-sighted government puts a filtering system in place to filter out "unambiguously evil" content like child pornography, and then later on that mechanism is inherited by later governments, who have their own ideas about what's considered ban-worthy.

Successive governments only encroach on freedom a tiny bit from the previous government, but every time someone complains you get people shouting down dissenters on the grounds "it's only a trivial change, so why are you getting so bent out of shape about it?", or the ever-popular "Yeah, but X is evil - how can you not want X filtered out?" (where X is "terrorism", "hate speech", "child pornography" or the current bête noire.

The other important part of this process is that it's a ratchet effect. Almost no government - short of massive upheaval like a revolution or regime-change - is going to ease off on the filtering, because firstly there's no political capital in doing so, and secondly it would make them look soft on terrorism/paedophilia/whatever the current reason is.

So you have a mechanism where controls ratchet ever-tighter, it's practically impossible to ever loosen them short of a major social upheaval, each step is such a tiny one that people can't emotionally appreciate the importance of resisting it, and anyone who does resist is easily dismissed as reacting disproportionately, or being actively in favour of terrorists, or paedophilia, or whatever the excuse du jour is for "just tightening restrictions a little bit, just this once".

Importantly, and this can't be said enough, this doesn't even require a Machiavellian conspiracy or a particularly authoritarian government behind it - it can happen simply by lots of honest but short-sighted people of good conscience just doing what they think is for the greatest good... but if allowed to run unchecked (and as previously indicated, it's hard to check it without looking like a lunatic or conspiracy theorist) it still ends up in a more restrictive, less free, more authoritarian state in the end.

Project this trend far enough ahead (a few decades is usually enough, although sometimes as little as one will do) and you can quite easily get from an open, successful democratic society to an authoritarian police-state with no large or jarring social upheavals required.

This is exactly why it's so vitally important to never, ever grant any additional powers to any government unless they're absolutely unarguably necessary, and even then grant them for a limited span of time, and never, ever renew them unless there's a proven requirement to do so (ie, never renew because it's the default position to keep the law on the books, as was arguably the case with the PATRIOT Act renewal in 2005/2006).

Plenty of people instinctively recognise themes and trends like these, but a common cognitive illusion called an overactive sense of external agency (PDF warning) causes them to mistake simple but counter-intuitive emergent behaviour for a conscious, intentional conspiracy. This makes them easy to dismiss as paranoid or crazy, and makes it easy for others to dismiss both them and any legitimate trend they've identified (an example of the Association Fallacy, also known as damning by association).

Clearly I'm not suggesting that all (or even most) conspiracy theories are realistic, accurate or plausible. However, if you run across one it's always worth making an effort to separate out the What and the How from the Who and the Why, and seeing if the processes and effects it describes have any validity on their own.

If someone tells you that a concerted cabal of international bankers and financiers are attempting to bring together and integrate the disparate economies of the world, dissolving national sovereignty and bring the world to heel under one world government made up of shape-changing lizards, you can safely laugh at the lizards.

However, shorn of its intentional (and sensationalist) nature, there is a distinct trend towards economic and political integration in international politics, the advent of the internet and international trade deals have inadvertently acted to make national boundaries progressively more porous, and increasing geopolitical integration necessarily reduces national sovereignty somewhat.

When you put it like that it's boring and mundane, but wild-eyed, crazy-haired conspiracy theorists have been pointing out the What of it since the 70s or 80s, and - vaccinated against listening by their kook-like presentation and the cultural stereotype of the "crazy conspiracy theorist" - most of us still aren't even consciously aware it's going on.

I find that extremely interesting, although I ascribe to it no particular group, agenda or intent.

Internet memes are not without purpose

Internet Memes get a lot of stick - they're usually considered mildly amusing at best, and sterile, content-free, mindless, bovine group-think at worst. However, both these assessments are incomplete - they fall into the trap of judging memes as "good" or "bad", instead of asking "why they are" at all.

Memes aren't just jokes - they're the way we form bonds and generate shared context in distributed virtual communities, just like "living near" and "saying hello every day" were the ways we formed context and social bonds in physical, centralised communities like villages, and "chatting around the water-cooler" and "bitching about the boss" are ways we form social bonds and shared context at work.

Part of the problem in society is that as we centralise in huge cities with too many people we don't know we lose the feeling of belonging to a distinct community, which is why city life can be so isolating for some, and others fulfil the need elsewhere (churches, sports teams, hobby/interest clubs, etc).

The only difference between this and the kind of people who make up the core of communities like reddit, Fark or 4chan is that instead of physically going somewhere to interact with other community-members, we're geographically separated and typically a lot more diverse in terms of outlook, age, race, physical appearance and interests.

This means that - for a community to form - we require shared context and some way of differentiating between people "in the community" and those out of it. This is where memes, references and in-jokes come it... and it's also why we have terms like "redditor" or "digger", instead of "people who read reddit" or "people who read Digg".

You can even compare different kinds of communities, and memes seem overwhelmingly to arise where other, more traditional forms of shared-context-building are unavailable or inapplicable:

• At one extreme, memes rarely arise in traditional physical communities - it's pretty rare where a village - say - gives birth to catchphrases or memes, because the community already has plenty of shared context from living in the same region, sharing the same culture and language, sharing largely the same core beliefs and seeing each other regularly.
• TV shows pioneered the way, where catchphrases and quotes (though typically only a few per show) could be used to find and bond with like-minded individuals when we encountered them, even though we didn't necessarily live near them, or see them regularly.
• Moving online, sites like Facebook are still largely clustered around groups of people who have some real-world relationship, and though people occasionally make use of imported memes from other communities for the purpose of humour, for this reason these sites still rarely give birth to new memes.
• More frequently, memes arise from forums (fora?) or social news sites like Slashdot, reddit and Digg. These are sites with a strictly limited ability to share context - their communities are culturally, socially and intellectually extraordinarily diverse, and stories are posted (and disappear beneath later submissions) so fast that there's no guarantee that any two individuals will have seen the same news or read the same content from one day to the next. Practically all that these sites offer in the way of shared-context-building is the ability to recognise the usernames of other users when they post, which - with the sheer number of users - is a wildly inadequate method to generate strong social bonds.
• Most clearly of all, 4chan is a website which is prolific in the generation of new memes - indeed, many memes which users of other sites assume originated there in fact originated on 4chan. 4chan is also unusual in that it does not enforce uniqueness of username, but instead assigns a deeply unmemorable number as the only guarantee that a given "Bob Smith" is the same as a "Bob Smith" whose comments you remember reading previously. In fact, 4chan even allows completely anonymous posting, and in 4chan's most famous meme-originating boards (/b/ and others) the overwhelming majority of posters post anonymously. This means that users are literally bereft of any way to reliably recognise each other or establish a sense of community, and they're simultaneously the most prolific creators of internet memes.

You can see from this trend that memes are a distinct method of community-building, almost unknown in human history, which has largely evolved in the last few decades in response to the increasing isolation of modern life, with its lack of traditional ways to build shared context or easily encounter familiar individuals.

When you get right down to it we're social monkeys, who are usually happiest in a tribe of one kind or another. Due to lifestyle and technology how we form and maintain those tribes is changing, even in the last a few years, and if we can resist the temptation to dismissively complain about this emergent behaviour it can teach us a lot - both about ourselves and about the new kinds of communities we are forming.

Your Kids Aren't Lazy; They're Just Smarter Than You

There's a recurring theme in the media, and in conversations with members of older generations, and it goes something like this:

"Kids these days have no concentration span. They're always Twittering or texting or instant messaging, and they're always playing these loud, flashy computer games instead of settling down to listen to the radio or read a good book. Computer games and the internet are ruining our kids minds! Won't someone think of the children?"

Oddly enough, these criticisms are often associated with complaints that "kids will spend all hours of the day on the bloody internet or playing these damned games, instead of going outside and climbing trees or riding their bikes", although nobody seems to see the inherent contradiction there.

In a nutshell it's this: surely if these kids really had poor attention spans they'd get bored of the game in short order and move onto something else? And if they lacked the ability for delayed gratification how would they manage to spend hours unlocking every achievement in Soul Calibur or grinding for loot on World of Warcraft?

I've been thinking for a while that much of the perceived "reduction in attention span" is merely kids getting bored with an activity that has inadequate input bandwidth to satisfy them.

For example, my grandparents could sit and listen to the radio with their eyes shut for hours on end, but the pathetically slow drip... drip... drip of information through the radio would rapidly drive me to distraction. Even my parents have trouble doing this - they usually listen to the radio while also doing other things, like household chores or driving.

Likewise, my parents can sit and watch TV for hours on end, but even this eventually bores me - being forced into passively watching and waiting for programmes to get to the point or adverts to finish leaves my brain with too much spare capacity - I either start to over-analyse the content of the show and get annoyed by the perceived agenda, or I start to get fidgety and end up picking up a book or going and doing something more engaging.

Conversely I can browse the web, program or play computer games for hours on end, and observation of most younger people will bear out that this is the norm, rather than the exception. The problem here is clearly not attention-span, or I'd rapidly get bored of surfing or gaming just as I get bored of the radio or TV.

The problem here is that with radio and TV the rate information comes to me is slower, and is determined by an external source - the broadcaster.

Conversely, when I'm playing a game or surfing the web the information-flow is limited only by my ability to absorb it. Result: my attention is fully engaged, I don't get fidgety or bored, and I'm happy indefinitely.

Books are another telling case: personally I love reading, and most "short attention span" kids I know who have a good reading-speed can still sit and read books (surely the least instantly-gratifying and most boring-looking of all media) indefinitely. Their reading-speed matches or exceeds their information-absorption rate, so they're happy.

On the other hand, even "normal" kids I know who have a slow reading-speed get bored and restless after only minutes of reading - even though their information-absorption rate is low, it's still higher than their reading-speed can provide, so they get bored.

I've noticed this in my grandparents, parents and myself, and I'm just past 30. I'd be frankly gob-smacked if this didn't apply to kids who'd only grown up in a world of globally-networked computers, millions of channels, the web at their fingertips and ever-increasing amounts of data to sift through.

It also raises questions about the sudden and questionable upsurge in diagnoses of low-grade ADHD and related disorders in young people over the last few years. Although in the more serious cases these are undoubtedly very real disorders, it's entirely possible that at the lower end much of what the older generation (and psycho-pharmaceuticals industry) perceive as pathological behaviour is simply plain old frustrated boredom in minds adapted to faster and better information-processing than they're capable of.

In summary, I suspect this phenomenon has little to do with "short attention spans", and everything to do with old media (still largely aimed at the older generations) appearing frustratingly slow and boring to ever-more-agile minds raised in our ever-more-information-rich society.

If this is true, this phenomenon could actually be a good thing - our brains are getting faster and better at information-processing, so things which seemed fun to our slower, less-capable ancestors now seem un-stimulating, or no better than momentary diversions.

However, generations who found crocheting or games of "tag" or charades the most amazingly fun experience in their lives now have to watch kids try their cherished childhood hobbies before discarding them as boring, trivial or simplistic.

It's therefore understandable that they find it a lot more comforting to automatically decide there's something wrong with kids today (a refrain that echoes down through the generations)... rather than realise that their own brains are by comparison so poor at information-processing that activities that were stimulating to them as children are just too simple for kids these days.

So piracy is killing the music and movie industries?

The MPAA and RIAA (and their various non-USA equivalents) are famous for claiming that piracy (tapes, DVDs, digital downloads, etc) are "killing the [music/movie] industry".

Apart from the fact that these industry bodies (with a strong vested interest) have been claiming this ever since the introduction of 8-track tapes in the 1960s (and yet still the MPAA/RIAA lurch onward, living hand-to-mouth in their luxury penthouses, and somehow barely scraping by with continuing exponential growth ever since they first started making these claims), there's another problem with their claim:

The very day our culture stops producing popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art I will agree that "something needs to be done", about the expectation of free access, and would support instituting some sort of internet-wide micropayments system.

In fact, scratch "stops producing", and replace it with "noticeably slows production of". In fact, screw it all; scratch even that and instead substitute "stops continually increasing production of popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art".

Until then, commentary like this is simply worrying the sky will fall because you don't have the wit or imagination to develop new business models not based around repressive monopolies and artificial scarcity.

We had music as a species for long before we had trade bodies like the MPAA and RIAA around, and we'll have music long afterwards, too. The only difference is that in those times there wasn't an enormous, fat, unnecessary middle-man sat square between the artist and the audience, raking in cash hand over fist from both sides.^[1]

If newspapers start to die because they can't afford to give away their on-line content for free then they'll stop doing it, people's expectations will change, and they'll start paying for subscriptions.

Although I hate to sound like a (big-L) Libertarian, the market will sort this one out just fine if left to its own devices.

Claims that "music/movies" or "news" will die are really worries about the deaths of "the RIAA/MPAA" or "some news organs unable to adapt to the changing conditions".

Obviously, however, the thought that bloated dinosaurs who refuse to adapt to the technological advancement of our species might go extinct doesn't really bother people.

Hansom cab drivers were pretty pissed off at the idea of the motor-car, but they didn't form industry bodies and try to ban cars or trains. And now - a hundred or more years a later - aren't we really fucking glad they didn't?

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Footnotes

[1] And although we didn't have movies for anything like as long, ever-cheaper video recording equipment, the increasing popularity of sites like Youtube and the ability of even basic modern desktop computers to create high-quality special effects shows that even high-quality movies aren't out of reach of the talented amateur.

Your opinion is worthless

This is a slightly self-indulgent post, relating to website and forum discussions, rather than a generally-applicable epiphanette. Nevertheless, I think it's an important point, and one which far too few people understand...

I find when browsing internet discussion forums, when someone with a controversial or non-mainstream opinions posts and gets voted down I frequently run across run across comments similar to the following:

I find I get downmodded a lot because I'm a person willing to speak my mind. That makes a lot of the insecure people here (of which there are many!) uncomfortable, and to try and counter that they downmod my posts.

Straight to it: although sometimes the commenter has a point (people get very attached to their ideas, and can react irrationally when they're threatened), general attitudes like this always make me uncomfortable, because they smack of self-delusion and comfort-beliefs.

Everyone has some element of this in their thinking, but it's rarely justified. As an experiment, consider the following:

Aside from your own clearly-biased personal opinion of your posts, what evidence do you have that your thoughts or beliefs are generally:

1. Insightful
2. Interesting
3. Well-expressed, or
4. Correct?

Secondly, how many people - even really stupid, boring people - do you think get up in the morning, look in the mirror and think "shit man, I'm a really windy, boring, unoriginal fucker", and then spend a lot of time expressing their opinions to others?

Most people think what they have to say is insightful, interesting, adequately-expressed and correct, or they wouldn't bother posting it.

Now, this idea is correct in that some people vote down anything which contradicts the prevailing wisdom, but people also vote down things which are wrong, stupid, ridiculous or badly-expressed.

Conversely, I know from repeated personal experience that in many communities a well-written, well-argued, non-whingey post which counters the prevailing wisdom frequently still gets a high score, sometimes because of its contrary position.

I know when I post all I have to go on is my own opinion of my posts, which (as we've established) is almost laughably unreliable. Instead, the votes my posts get serve as a useful barometer of how much my opinion of a well-written, well-argued post compares with the general opinion.

It's terribly flattering to think of oneself as a persecuted martyr, but it also usually requires a lot of egotism and a willing blindness to statistics.

To quote the great Carl Sagan:

They laughed at Galileo... but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

Given a poster's personal opinion is biased to the point it's worthless, and given there are many more clowns in the world than misunderstood geniuses, on what basis do people claim to be downmodded for the content of their opinions, rather than for their worth, or the reliability of the arguments they use to support them?

Claiming you're being downvoted simply because your opinions run counter to the prevailing wisdom, rather than simply because you're self-important or wrong requires you to not only assume you're vastly more intelligent or educated than the average person, but also that most people voting you down are doing so because of a deficiency in their psychology, rather than your own.

When all the objective evidence you have is that a lot of other people disagree with you, it's terribly tempting to believe you're a misunderstood intellectual martyr like Galileo.

The trouble with this, of course, is that while paradigm-shifting geniuses like Galileo only come along a few times a generation, we're knee-deep in idiots, and the tide is rising.

There are literally thousands of times more idiots than geniuses, so claiming you must be a genius on the basis you were voted down doesn't mean you're a genius - it means not only are you overwhelmingly likely to be a self-important idiot, but you're also bad at maths.

Act appropriately.

Lifecycle of a meme

A recent discussion on reddit prompted me to sketch out the stages of an internet meme's lifecycle.

Lest there be any confusion, I'm talking here about internet memes - LOLcats, Soviet Russia jokes and the like, not about memes in the more general sense of the word.

As far as I can see, all memes go through this lifecycle:

1. Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny even when you do.
2. Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme is usually either utterly baffling or hilarious, depending on whether or not you're an insider in that social group.
3. Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.
4. Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.
5. Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

The web is not a sheet of paper

Print-turned-web designers:

1. Learn the medium you're working in. A five minute video of even the best print advert makes for a lousy TV advert. Likewise, techniques and habits refined by years of print design are often sub-optimal or flatly counter-productive when applied to the web.
2. For the love of god, give up on pixel-perfect positioning and learn to appreciate flow layout. Sure, it makes design harder... but if you think designing flow layouts is hard, think about the poor schmuck developers who have to implement the damn things. And if you think flow layouts are ugly, let's see how good your precious pixel-perfect design works when I do something freakishly unusual like resize my browser window.
3. Print pages are Things To Look At. Web sites are Things To Use. Prioritising aesthetics over usability or functionality is like putting a car steering wheel in the middle of the dashboard. Sure it looks nicer, but it makes the whole product useless. Incidentally, I swear if I get one more design through with a "button" image specified but no "pressed button" image (or "link" style but no "active/hover/visited link" style) I will personally bite off your head and defecate into your body-cavity. You have been warned.
4. Conventions are not boring - conventions are your friend. Putting light-switches near doors is a convention. Sure, putting them square in the middle of the ceiling is innovative, but then so is cheesegrating your knees (hey - do you know anyone who's done it?). Innovative means "nobody else is doing it". Accept the possibility that nobody else is doing it because it's a fucking stupid idea.
5. I don't want to "explore the interface". I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how "fun" this is for your users.

PANT, pant, pant... pant... ahem.

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Originally via reddit.

On The Decentralisation of News Media

What you hear informs your world-view.

When everyone consumed the same (mass-)media, everyone had a fairly consistent (if sometimes wrong) world-view. It wasn't always correct, but at least everyone was on the same page and talking the same language.

Now aggregators, social news sites and predictive "you might also like" functionality has made it ever-easier to only see things you agree with, and to never even be aware of events and attitudes you don't.

This gradually, subconsciously leads you to believe that "everyone" thinks the way you do (so anyone who disagrees is obviously a kook and can be ignored), and to confuse "commonly-held beliefs in your particular subculture" with "proven, empirical facts" (or if you prefer, just "commonly-held beliefs for the entire population" ;-).

(I believe that this on its own is a major cause for the worsening "culture war" in the US, as well as the rise of tacky smear-based campaigning and staggering bitchiness of modern politics.)

This situation was always a possibility (witness the people who only ever watch Fox News, for example), but at least by deliberately limiting themselves to only one source it was obvious (often even to themselves) these people were closed-minded and willingly ignorant.

They might only watch one channel and forswear all other viewpoints, but the majority of people knew what they were doing and why it was dumb... at some level even them.

Now, with the advent of the internet and the massive decentralisation of news, discussion and rhetoric, hundreds of blogs and publishing outfits have sprung up for each mindset, niche political leaning, sexual preference, subculture... you name it.

This means that it's entirely possible to only read tens or hundreds of different sources... and yet still only really hear what you want to hear.

And yet, because you're reading so many different, unconnected sources the agenda they're pushing looks even more reasonable and widely-believed than when it could be easily written off by others as the agenda of just one channel, or just one new-corporation owner.

So although in this brave new world of millions of dissenting and conflicting voices the truth can be found more easily than in the monolithic, old world of Big Media... it's also made the truth harder to spot when you do find it, and it's made the bullshit look a lot more widely-supported and convincing than ever before.

I'm still not sure what to do about this state of affairs - I'm working on a few ideas which might help in the long run, but it's a serious problem that in the short term leads to social paralysis and all the he-said-she-said unconstructive, name-calling bitchiness of the politics of the last few years.