The Luck Laboratory

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.

Has the internet and technology killed expat life?

Part of the lag between my recent posts has been my recent move back to the U.S. after a year and a half in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I wanted to be a flaneur in a cheap, hip city that would let me enact my Gertrude Stein dreams while was still young, childless, and relatively untethered to life in the U.S. I was lured by the number of times that I’d read that Buenos Aires was “to the ’00s what Paris was to the ’20s,” envisioning a vibrant cultural scene and the next Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the make. But having just left that so-called expat paradise after a year and a half, I wouldn’t say that the famed “Paris in the ’20s” feeling isn’t in Buenos Aires; in fact, it’s not likely to ever exist again.

For starters, the so-called Lost Generation depended on physical locations to bring expat writers together, such as English-language bookstores, cafés, and periodicals: The Paris Review got its start during Paris’s second wave of expatriates in the 1950s; Shakespeare and Co. was founded in Paris a few decades prior, and published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. There are a few English language bookstores in Buenos Aires, and thanks to tourism boom since the economic crash, many regular bookstores now have English language sections. But compared to the ’20s, current writers and artists have no inherent need to find any such physical community to have their work validated or published. Maya Frost, a U.S. expatriate living in Buenos Aires, has a book forthcoming from Crown on May 19th of this year. While in Buenos Aires, she got her agent because of her blog, and arranged the entire deal—from proposal development to manuscript proofreading—via e-mail. Any writer or artist today only needs the internet to work or network. Literary magazines there have a much smaller potential audience than a literary magazine in the states; as a result, the best work is emailed overseas. At last year’s Buenos Aires Book Fair, one of the few panels featuring expat writers was a writing group that expounded on tips on how to use the internet to further your writing career. There wasn’t a need for a 21st century Shakespeare & Co. before the crash–and there’s no need for one now.

Many expats earn their living by telecommuting; who can afford the good lifestyle if you’re making pesos? While Hemingway earned his living in a similar fashion, by reporting for newspapers, budgets for freelance writers or foreign reporters aren’t what they used to be. So here’s a key difference: lots of expats have computer-based jobs, posing as consultants based in Washington, D.C.; it’s a Thomas Friedman article come alive, but with protagonists who spend more time on Facebook. Because they’re competing with others in Bangalore and NYC, their intensive work cut down on face-time. A recent MIT study showed that the internet is more isolating than TV.

Even if your friends have no need for jobs and enjoy hanging out face-to-face, transportation isn’t what it used to be. In the 1920s, a 4-5 day transoceanic liner was the only way to make the trek from the U.S. to Paris. The subsequent expansion of air travel has turned this process into one that’s comparatively cheap and painless. This relative lack of an initial investment in living in Buenos Aires also makes for an extraordinarily transient population: many rent apartments online—you can have a place lined up before you get there—stay for two months, and leave. Since it still seems like a great deal compared to Europe, study abroad programs are growing like weeds.

And yet, because it’s so easy for anyone to hop in and out, Buenos Aires is suffering from the same real estate problem of many large cities: the most affluent people in the world are buying lofts in Willamsburg, Paris, and Buenos Aires—spending a week in one before moving on—and helping to drive up rents for everyone else. Because of the opportunity for quick transportation and telecommuting, expat communities have sprung up all over; Shanghai, Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta. You can find a website for nearly every international city, each claiming to be an expat hub. But each filled with people who may:
-spend less time abroad, frequently going home for holidays
-can easily work and socialize with other foreigners

Short blog posts = good. For some.

I was cleaning out my Bloglines account of unread articles–I’m convinced that having 22 unread emails, 117 articles pegged for immediate reading and 3,209 unread posts cannot be good for you or your anxiety levels–and came across one on the pros of having shorter blog posts.

I get that the blog post is short. I get that people who read blog posts are probably doing it the way I’m doing it, just skimming a bunch of things in the off-chance that something catches your eye. My problem is that nearly every comment is somewhere between “I lost interest after 500 words” and “…. what?” Seriously, people, are we that inept? The “gosh, that was long” comment seems especially common in articles that seem to attract the type of person you’d associate, albeit in a stereotypical manner, with having a short attention span. Such as those who like to read about video games.

To those who leave lots of ‘I can’t focus’-type comments, I say this: I find it hard to believe that there isn’t one single topic in the world that would hold your attention for longer than 350 words or a minute, especially since you’re taking the time to leave comments. That has to take what, like a minute? At least? Didn’t anyone ever warn you about what happens to people with short attention spans?

Social networking sites: pretty scary effects, when you think about it

Findings from a few recently-published academic papers (email me if you want the specifics):

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, or SNS, can impact self-perception in ways not unlike that of the media influencing celebrities, creating an odd blend of narcissism and insecurity. Publicly displaying of a few areas of one’s life (a theme song and a few photos) are followed by amplified, speedy responses.

But the more reliant you are on this for your self-worth—using it to ‘brand’ yourself or rack up friends, for example—the more likely you are to fall victim to its whims.

Facebook, MySpace, cell phones, instant messaging are great for keeping in touch with people we already know. But because we only transmit a few aspects of ourselves online, and don’t have as many opportunities to reinforce those relationships, bonds we make with other people through technology aren’t as strong.

The size of one’s online social network is different than the number of one’s social ties, and today many teens, especially, seem to be confusing the two. (”But it says that I have 900 friends on the computer!”) Perceived support from significant others is not related to time spent online.

The trick is that while people rely on these venues for keeping in touch with friends, more people rely on those online relationships for support, the lonelier they feel. A glut of online friends can’t act as a buffer for an absence of real-life friends.

How they influence how we present ourselves: one online SNS trap is the drive to befriend as many people as possible. When you can directly compare your number of “friends” to the number of “friends” your favorite band has, a desire “which is underpinned by that hidden aspiration to meet their favourite band,” you lose sense of the actual social dynamics at play.

According to one author, “the distributed nature of on-line friendship networks… appears to reinforce conservatism and homogeneity in how young people express themselves. Our take on this is that if you want a big network you have to appeal to as many people as possible [which] creates a drive towards homogeneity.” So, in order to find our 15 minutes of fame, everyone takes the combination low road/middle ground and ends up looking like Paris Hilton. Because of the misuse of the word ‘friend’ on these sites, everyone runs the risk of blending the idea of fans, acquaintances, and friends.

Can we really become someone else? Yes and no. At the very least, we have to ground the identity of our online selves in our offline selves. While changing the details on one’s profile allows for experimentation of different forms of identity, “On-line communities are if anything more aggressive in challenging people’s identity. For example, when users change their profiles this is often followed by postings from friends offering teasing, mocking or straightforwardly critical remarks about the changes.” In a public forum, what may be intended as a loving tease takes on a different tone. And the size of one’s online network doesn’t have any bearing on the strength of someone’s actual social ties.

More on the Myth of Multitasking

It’s Friday, and for those of you math-savvy enough to do the calculations, it’s late in the afternoon here in Buenos Aires. I haven’t accomplished as much as I’d have liked to this week. Surprise!

Although there’s been a lot written about how much e-mail zaps your attention, I never wanted to think that my activities were included in any of those statistics. I use email for work! For important stuff! So why would it be wasting time or harmful to my productivity at all? I don’t try to write to do research while engaging in any other activity. I do one thing at a time. And yet, my efforts fell short of those of a Zen master. (Or at least someone whose Friday To Do list wasn’t nearly identical to their Monday To Do list.)

Yesterday, I read one study explaining why that makes a lot of sense. I engage in task-switching, not multi-tasking. When given free reign, people who are given two tasks to complete within 10 minutes will spend more time on the easier task, which is done to the detriment of accomplishing the second, more difficult task. So even though you may feel like you’re keeping busy, you’re just doing crap.

This reminds me of a quote by Thomas L. Goodale, in his essay, “Is There Enough Time?”

“Time scarcity or famine and the sense that there is never enough time leaves us anxious if not neurotic. We over focus on the present, press to accomplish an endless series of short-term tasks, and sense a lack of control. We seem to have a whole culture suffering from anxiety disorders… we are obsessive about planning, often in detail, and compulsive about executing the plans, although there is little extension into the future.”

There’s a key distinction between what’s important and what’s urgent. What’s urgent are the things right in front of your face that beep and have reduced us all to Pavlov’s dogs. What’s important are the things that, if you zoom out and can look at what you’re doing with a little detachment and distance, are really going to matter in the long run.

An author I interviewed this week told me that although she cherishes her faith and truly believes it, she still has to remind herself what’s important when she forgets, or when her beliefs are tested. Although I know what activities are important to me right now, they’re the more difficult and demanding ones that are easy to forget or ignore when something easier comes along. It’s easy to have your beliefs or priorities tested when it seems like everyone else in the world is shouting something different in your ear, telling you to pay attention to something else, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter.

Visualization makes it easy for everyone

I did an article on music recommendation a while back, and have been reading a lot about the subject lately for another article. One thing that always bothered me about looking at someone’s listening history–a list of songs they’ve listened to, and how many times they’ve listed to each one–is that you have no idea about the timing.

LastGraph, creates timelines and nice graphs that chart your listening trajectory. This way, you can see musical obsessions that have come and gone. Even though two people might have Cut Copy on their list, one might have just discovered them while another person stopped listening to them a year ago.

Here’s what I’ve been listening to for the past two months:

Compare that to the chart:

Yes, much better!

Anyway, apparently I’m really lazy busy studying Spanish lately, because I’ve been fairly obsessed with graphs and charts. Maybe a visual culture is making me dumb in some ways, but if it can convey better information in less time, I don’t see what the problem is. My favorite site is Wordle, which takes any chunk of text you have and converts it into a tag cloud; the more frequently a word appears, the larger it is. (They do you the favor of removing common words, like articles.) Here’s what my book proposal looks like thus far:

Lastly, there’s a public art project that draws heavily on visualization that I’m quite fond of, called We Feel Fine. It’s amazing how a few words can make you feel less lonely.

The internet makes us stupid, forgetful, impatient—and we make the internet that way

The Phoenix New Times recently reprinted an article I wrote on the effect of having too much music on how we actually listen to it. Because this is the fourth time that the article has been reprinted (original here)–and it’s still sparking random comments on random music blogs–it seems safe to say that the influence of the abundance provided by filesharing, digital storage and the internet is something that many others are thinking about.

You don’t have to be a fellow download addict to be affected by the web, from a behavioral standpoint. This great article in the new issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, looks at the internet’s potential to contribute overall, more lasting changes in cognition, most notably a severely debilitated attention span. In the spirit of futurists, I’d like to present a list of behavioral predictions that I will blame the internet:

1.) A total lack of patience

2.) A lack of an attention span. (Said now to average at 400 words before we get the urge to move on.)

3.) Increased tendency to link ‘it’s on Google’ with ‘it exists.’ I was at dinner last week with a group of friends, when one said, for no reason, “I’m the only person in the world with my name” She proceeded to discuss how her first, middle and last names were a random mix of ethnicities. I didn’t ask her if she’d checked the birth records of every country to get her information. I didn’t mention that typing my full name into Google will yield no results, and yet–as both my mother and that very friend can attest to–I do in fact exist.

4.) Mistaking what’s on the internet with what’s going on in the real world. I know this may sound deluded, but with an entire generation used to getting their news online and seeing little use for newspapers and the like, drawing clear distinctions between sources becomes difficult when The Economist, Wikipedia, and The Obama File are a few links apart. We have the illusion that because we can see photos, we know for sure what’s happening in Asia. When the prevailing attitude of the Digital Native generation is: if it’s important, somebody will put it online. That’s not true, because, partially, of:

5.) The increased reliance on numbers to explain the world. When you are given the illusion of being able to quantify your friends, your popularity, your ranking on Amazon.com (a common obsession for writers), you start to live in a CSI-like “but is that really the case?” kind of world.

Businesses live in this world too. At a newspaper I used to work for, the web editor noticed the number of the paper’s hits decreasing and asked his boss for advice. (Over time, fewer hits means being able to charge less for ads and a crippling loss of revenue.) The corporate web editor, who oversaw the websites of several known newspapers in the U.S., crunched a few numbers and came up with a sure-fire slideshow to feature on the site: a series asking local strippers what they think of the locals who were, at the time, running for office–photos obviously included.

Sadly, I am not making this up. So why don’t newspapers have more thoughtful, subtle, hard-hitting stories? Because even if they don’t admit to it, people would rather read stories about strippers yapping up local politics. Even though you or the majority of people might not admit to it, web traffic numbers don’t lie.  I told that anecdote to a well-known researcher, who pined, “It’s also all about fear since fear sells and keeps people coming back for more.  Fear and sex.  Since when did that become news? How I long for another Edward Murrow.”

Sadly, she’s wrong. It’s easy to romanticize that if there were someone with a glut of ethics in a powerful position in the media, we’d be surrounded by better stories, but that’s not the case. Even if they put out a quality product, very few people would read it. People who disagreed with it wouldn’t believe it, and would go back to Fox News or something else that affirmed their pre-existing ideas. They would search out brain candy to feed their short attention span. The cycle would continue.

Instant messaging means fewer distractions

According to Newswise, a study recently published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by researchers at Ohio State University and UC Irvine “found that workers who used instant messaging on the job reported less interruption than colleagues who did not.” The report goes on to say that using instant messaging was often used for short information queries that otherwise would have been handled in a lengthier, more time-consuming email, in a phone call, or in a–gasp! the horror!–face-to-face talk. People are also using IM to schedule meetings instead of just dropping in. Because it’s also “more socially acceptable” to not answer instant messages, they offer the user an opportunity to tailor the conversation or interaction to his needs. You don’t have to talk to someone just because someone else wants to talk to you.

Granted, this has always been the case. When I was young, I remember my mother letting the answering machine take calls because she was too busy after working and going to  school to have a 5-minute conversation, half of which would be to say “sorry! so tired!” and arrange another phone call.

If emails are like letters without stamps–at best–instant messages are shaping up to be like emails with even less authority. I find it very hard to take anything transmitted over IM with any seriousness or gravity. You don’t know who’s at the other person’s computer, who’s writing it, or what any of them are doing.  There’s no authority to them unless, of course, you’re the person sending the message who really has something to say. I don’t think that IM in themselves are causing few distractions. I think that they’re just another way to annoy us, and therefore helping us to build up yet another layer of noise to ignore.

There’s a difference between important and urgent information that often gets confused. Just because something has to be done soon-ish (you need a pen, you lost your umbrella, there are dirty dishes) doesn’t automatically make it of utmost importance to someone’s overall goals. The major goals we have in life don’t distract us. People gossiping do. People, able to reach out to whomever and for whatever reason, fearing loneliness, contact each other just because. Not because they have anything to say, but just because they have a minute to spare or a tiny, potentially original thought came to mind.

Save those thoughts. Store them. Make a few of those into a larger, more interesting thought, and then give me a call when you have something important to say. And don’t feel bad if other people don’t call you all the time. As Joan Didion would attest to, you already have better things to worry about: “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves–there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

Obama and Clinton on the internets: case studies

Like a blind man with a selective magnifying glass, the internet amplifies whatever we happen to upload, leading to things like the MySpace-driven suicide of Megan Meier or the long-term haunting of those college days. But when it’s your job to have the largest presence possible, where do you start?

Barack Obama, famously, began as a community organizer in Chicago, rallying people towards a common cause people s background as a community organizer seems to spill over into his increased reliance on social media. He created myBarackObama, his own social networking site; used techniques to excite people about little tasks like ‘enlist 5 friends!’; he used the hell out of YouTube. It’s an example of how the Long Tail, personified, can lead to a grassroots supported campaign raking in millions of dollars. By engaging his supporters in social media, they’re more likely to pass along the info, giving him free advertising each time the meme is repeated within someone’s social circle. He also used technology to microtarget and look at the best ways to connect with people: voters in Maryland got text messages to remind them to vote after his team concluded that that’s what would reach them. Chris Hughes, Obama’s online technology coordinator, is one of Facebook’s co-founders.

By contrast, Clinton’s website looks more like a news site with a little area for buying t-shirts. Many voters were confused when, during her Town Hall meeting, their online questions seemed to disappear into the ether. Though it was supposed to have created a feeling of transparency, it ran like any other Town Hall meeting with the opportunity to email questions.

People want transparency. Usually, being tech savvy doesn’t made a big dent in the voting booth. In fact, for a few presidential cycles, the candidate who created the most online buzz didn’t win the primary: McCain in 2000, Dean in 2004; even Ron Paul’s candidacy was short-lived despite a strong online presence. The difference during this election seems to be the critical mass: using this technology is no longer a niche phenomenon; instead of just middle schoolers, mothers are some of the fastest adopters of SNS, text messages, and mobile games.

So how exactly does technology influence voter behavior? Voter motivation is nearly impossible to quantify, we already have scads of evidence from communication and psychology about reinforcement and social circles. Because of the seemingly limitless amount of info that 20-somethings or people with desk jobs are exposed to, it’s impossible to tune the election out, especially when it’s being reinforced by friends tens of times a day. Having the meme repeated daily by your network—instead of a top-down advertisement—is much stronger advertising. The only one that really works today.

Citizen journalism will put me out of work

An abundance of recording devices and channels to publish information, massive distrust in the mainstream media, an increased desire for transparency and scrutiny in politics and elections following the debacle of Florida in 2000: this year created the perfect storm for a breakthrough in citizen journalism. (Apparently, it’s being defined as “journalism by people who aren’t getting paid.” Which is not much different than “journalism by professional journalists.”) But unlike the music industry, which is fighting tooth and nail to protect its revenue streams by suing downloaders and taking music videos off of YouTube, many mainstream media outlets are embracing the idea of citizen journalism as a means to invite amateurs into the conversation.

In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of their website. It’s being compared to YouTube for its ability to rate, discuss, and embed videos elsewhere. Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News, and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine. The Huffington Report has Off the Bus, which was credited for breaking Barack Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” gate after one of its reporters uploaded the audio file onto the site. GroundReport lets users upload media, and pays them via Paypal at the end of each month based on incoming traffic. YouTube recently launched Citizen News and hired a News Manager, who will be sifting through the videos and highlighting a select few. Even one of Buenos Aires’ top dailies, La Nacion, has its own built-in site, Soy Corresponsal.

My point? It’s big.

Consensus says that the new wave of internet-based programs, Web3.0, is going to create filters for the glut of information that Web2.0 created; these sites and programs are clear evidence of that. But are they ways to empower citizens, or just a means to invite people to create free content? How will the editors decide, and how will they be able to tell who’s telling a story because of personal interest? And what will the uneasy marriage of mainstream media and grassroots activism look like?

Will this be a way to cut through the noise, or just another layer of it?

One thing that comes to mind is the public’s widespread lack of trust regarding the mainstream media. As we all know from the most recent example of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, calculated agendas lurk behind the words of institutions we really want to believe. By contrast, citizen journalism’s naiveté can carry an adorable glut of transparency. But will we still believe it when corporations are still deciding which stories get told?