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Retouched photos, changed impressions
I’ve been reacquainting myself with Photoshop lately, that great application that lets you and Fox News do creepy things like this (a manipulated photo of a reporter at the New York Times) 
and it begs to be said: it’s so easy to manipulate a photo. I, who am unable to draw a straight line with a ruler, could have made Jacques Steinberg look even uglier; hell, with Adobe’s infamous “charisma filter,” you can give Obama the impression of being quite similar to Rush Limbaugh.
I have a few photographer friends, and they’re constantly tweaking their photos, post-production, aiming for aesthetic excellence. Some of these revisions are technical, like changing the color levels to more clearly see a face, or cropping out unwanted scenery. But how much of a photo do you have to change to bend the truth? After the New York Times got wind that Edgar Martins, a Portuguese photojournalist they’d hired to document halted construction projects, had digitally altered the photos, they took them down. You can still see his unnatural love of symmetry here, here and here; there’s a great discussion of it all on Metafilter.
I applaud the New York Times for its decision, but can’t help but wonder about all of the photos that fall through the cracks: journalists are notorious watchdogs of other journalists, but rarely do any trained eyes with a public format scrutinize visual media in such a way; when they do, we find out about Reese Witherspoon’s changing face, not photos of everyday events. But why would anyone accept a photograph that’s been altered at all, and why does that seem so much less heinous than altered quotes or statistics?
Ubiquitous photos and videos have made people demand them (it’s the “I call BS unless you give me photos” syndrome), but most people don’t seem to realize how easy it is to alter them. And how quickly we form first impressions: we only need to see a face for 100 milliseconds before drawing a conclusion about it, and our first impressions are overgeneralized, even though we know we shouldn’t. Is there any hope for us at all?
The secret
Can’t hurt to share this website, since so much entrepreneurial advice I read could be boiled down to that.
Want to be happy? Invest in experiences, not things
How can we maximize our happiness this summer? As Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich have demonstrated in numerous studies, including “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question” (pdf available here), experiences provide people with more happiness than things.
“The things we own deteriorate over time, and we habituate to them quickly,” Van Boven told me last year. Later, we’re not left with the initial rush we get from driving out of the lot of the BMW dealership, but with the reality of its poor mileage, obsessing over its care, getting the transmission replaced, and worrying about it getting stolen. Memories from the end, thanks to a cognitive quirk known as recency effect, are especially prone to standing out.
What makes experiences so much better–or why should you go on vacation instead of getting a new car? For one, memories of static events “age like fine wine,” and are later open to positive reinterpretation.
Large events like trips can change lives; moments are a meaningful part of our identity. We tend to reminisce about our trips in Tahiti, not expensive watches.
Most importantly, experiences contribute to relationships, and quality of our relationships is the number one predictor of happiness. Goods we buy can isolate us. Having a car means you never get to meet anyone on the bus; having your own exercise bike means you never meet anyone at the gym or the park. Special memories are made of moments. A flat screen TV in itself is no good; inviting friends over and having a party for the game is what makes it great. You don’t bond over clothes, you bond over browsing for clothes with a friend, or going to someone’s house to borrow something.
It’s true that there’s gray area; some goods, like a bicycle, you get to have experiences. If the goal is to ride your bike rather than show it off, any bike will do. In the example above, a cheap fishing pole would do just as nicely. The key is getting to the lake in the first place.
Anxious about money this summer? You need a vacation more than ever
Recently, the State Department altered its estimate of how many passports it will be issuing in 2009; in December, fiscal year 2009 seemed poised to grant 17 million passports. Now, it’ll be lucky to hit 12 million. A recent poll conducted by Allstate found that this year, nearly half of all Americans are reducing their travel plans.
In hard times, the first thing to go is actually the most important: a vacation. Though traveling has long been seen as a frivolous venture ripe with classist guilt, it’s been proven to decrease stress levels, act as a buffer against illness, increase sense of self-efficacy, and change perspectives.
A 2007 study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (”The Recovery Experience Questionnaire”) found that of the four classifications that the researchers used to quantify recovery from burn-out—psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery, and control—psychological detachment from work “might be the most relevant recovery experience.”
Why is getting away from work so important? Because, as science has proven since 1986, as anecdotes have shown since the advent of the family getaway, and as stated in the very definition, a vacation forces us to spend lots of time with non-work areas of our life. Other life domains such as family and leisure life gain salience; if iPhones can be turned off momentarily, we begin to realize that our cubicles and nameplates may not be everything. And many of the small joys or transcendent experiences of a vacation often revolve around small things experienced anew: walks in nature, lots of unstressed time to play, leisurely card games, going to sleep without setting the alarm. “A Vacation from Work,” by John W. Lounsbury and Linda L. Hoopes (download here), puts it best: “Life satisfaction… showed a significant increase after a vacation.”
Do you seem likeable? Just look at your Facebook page
Via the World of Psychology, I just came across a study published in this month’s Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “On being liked on the web and in the “real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior.” (Download here.)
The key finding was that participants rated as more likable in the flesh also tended to be rated as more likable based on their Facebook page. Video-recordings of the face-to-face contacts suggested it was participants who were more non-verbally expressive (through facial expression and tone of voice) who tended to be rated as more likable.
Similarly, participants with more expressive Facebook pages — for example having more photos available to view — tended to be judged as more likable.
Since this test was only conducted on 37 college students, it’s good sense to take the results with a “grain of salt,” according to PsychCentral’s World of Psychology, where I found the study. But there’s good reason for WoP’s apparent defensiveness: the title of their response, Your Facebook Page is a Mirror Reflection of How Well Liked You Are, doesn’t accurately relay one of the study’s main themes of impression management.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows someone with a ‘high degree of webpage expressivity’ whose apparent warmth is offset by other personality traits. As I’ve written about before with regards to dating websites, people are experience goods, meaning they’re impossible to judge on something as static as a Facebook page. Your impression of someone is different than how you’d actually get along, since we vary in differing situations, change over time, and other people’s personalities bring out differing aspects of our own.
People who displayed cues to social expressivity on their personal webpages also displayed nonverbal cues to social expressivity during the face-to-face interaction. Likewise, people who disclosed a lot of information about themselves on personal webpages also disclosed a great deal of information about themselves during the face-to-face interaction.
Of the study’s many unanswered questions, I’m most curious about what effect age has to do with this perception about high expressivity. It’s funny how non-digital natives see openness in person as a positive trait, but on the web, call it exhibitionism, obviously related to whether you think the internet is showing an extension of yourself, or that your web presence is something else entirely.
How to avoid the weisure lifestyle: deem yourself important enough for a break
I just read a new article on CNN.com that expounds on the increasingly intertwined lives of work and leisure, creating a so-called ‘weisure’ lifestyle. This is all a part of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s new book, Elsewhere, USA, in which he, according to the NY Times review, “shows himself to be a much more acute observer than analyst in his book on techno-distraction.” I’m going to ignore the atrocious decision to call the spillage of work into your everyday life ‘weisure’ because NYU is my alma mater. (But seriously, it’s hideous.)
Oriel Sullivan has done a lot of great work in this field, with studies like Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal Market Economy, and Busyness, Status Distinction and Consumption Strategies of the Income Rich, Time Poor. He’s shown that as income increases, time pressure increases: someone who makes $50 an hour feels much more pressure when he’s not working to maximize that “down time,” experiences more fragmented leisure time, and is more likely to take his work with him. Someone who’s making $9 as a data entry clerk, however, doesn’t have the same problems leaving their job when they clock out.
So, in the new ‘always-connected’ global economy, as income and disposable income increases, leisure time decreases. Oversimplification of the day: on one end, you have a lot of people with dusty yachts, and on the other, you have people with a lot of free time who can’t afford health insurance, who are often perceived as being lazy. A perceived lack of time, in a way, is the new marker of status, one in which people want to be seen as one who can’t take an hour off, lest the world crumble beneath them.
I’m reading Alain de Botton’s brilliant new book on the topic, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in which he summarizes the shift that occurred when work evolved past a necesary evil, and became something that could give us inherent meaning, overlapping with our passions and preferred leisure activities. The downside of this can be a little thing called burnout, when people don’t see the benefits of downtime. Maybe I’m missing something, but why do we say, ‘I am important and can’t stop working.’ Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, ‘I am so important that I am going to take some time off, because my genius must rest, and you will all have to deal with it’?
How to increase your luck: start today
Finally! It’s been a few days a week since I finally bought karlastarr.net, in anticipation for my new project. This is very blatantly inspired by various things I was reading last week, more or less simultaneously: Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and John Mayer’s Twitter page. I pray that this is the only time in history those things have been combined in any fashion. (In the past few weeks, I’ve also: listened to everything of David Sedaris’s, including The SantaLand Diaries, finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and been thinking about life in general. I’m deep like that rethinking everything I know because of an impending birthday.)
Here’s the gist of what I want to know:
- How much of luck is truly random?
- Are some people are consistently luckier than others? Can’t we learn from them?
- How can we use or manipulate the laws of probability and randomness in our everyday lives?
- Can I increase my own luck? How?
There’s not as much written on luck as there is on, say, happiness, largely because of the very definition itself:
“the force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities” (Cambridge International Dictionary of English)
I usually define it as probability interpreted personally, an unexpected or unforeseen beneficial occurrence; the kind of thing you can’t plan, which seems outside of your control. (Notice that the pushy American in me is already looking to manipulate this.)
New website! Same beloved Karla Starr
This new website is something I’ve needed for a long time. Why, you ask, when it pains you to know that you won’t be able to visit every website in existence before you die? Well, my old website wasn’t quite doing the trick; even my cat knows that .net is the new .com. (’.tv’ was the new thing, but now that Tuvalu, the island country whose internet domain is .tv is sinking, we’ve had to look elsewhere.)
Secondly, this isn’t just a domain change but a career change. The “country blues artist” period in my career, when I was content to grab a leopard print v-neck and go hang out by the creek with a tallboy for a few hours, is going the way of Tuvalu. Not it takes more than crap rock and song titles like “Dreamin ‘Bout Her Again,” songs that “[leave] an ailing heart comforted by a warm blanket” for me to be creatively fulfilled.
Writing–like calligraphy, film developing, or pony-training–is a stable, ages-old profession. Why not give this whole writing thing a spin while also trying my hand at displaying my other interests like design, photography, and the occasional hit of gratitude?
Managing time and finishing things when you can’t focus
I’ve read a few recent articles on attention and concentration, timed to the release of Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt. The NY Times piece in particular, I feel, does a good job of exploring the difference betwen the urgent (checking your email) and the important (finishing that book). In short, it’s tricky because our brains are hardwired to respond to the urgent; more often than not we’re left scratching our heads at the end of the day, tired and wondering exactly what we accomplished that day that’s making us so tired.
“People get caught up in what happens to grab their attention,” says Leaf Van Boven of Cornell University, whose world-renowned psychology studies examine how our actions affect our happiness. “That is, what happens to call for their consumption in the moment, and they tend not to think very purposefully or mindfully in the decisions that they make. People are very adept at identifying the kind of experiences in line with their overall life goals. The challenge is really to be mindful of making decisions and consuming in a way that reflects underlying values.”
One key for me, I’ve discovered, is to make sure this doesn’t happen by removing all possible distractions. Not just through external means of turning off the internet, blocking addictive websites or turning off your phone, but with internal reinforcers:
- Having a clearly stated goal or task at hand that is to be accomplished in the time you’re sitting down (”finish this chapter” works better on a To Do list than “get my Master’s”)
- Write it down on a piece of paper in front of you alongside the related, overall goal, eg: ’study these words = become fluent in Mandarin’
- Giving yourself a sense of urgency by imposing a deadline
- Rather than waiting for the right time, allotting time in which you are to do nothing else
- Whenever you are tempted to check the score or interrupt yourself, just look on your sheet of paper: remember that every innocent Twitter update can turn into a lost 45 minutes online, which are preventing you from reaching your overall goal
