There was a limit, for hundreds of thousands of years, on how much you could get done in personal connections. I can only meet so many people in a day, I can only take so many phone calls. But with Facebook, with Twitter, with Yelp, and social media in general, your ability to communicate with people is greatly increased. It’s more efficient, more effective, and definitely much more scalable.

What’s interesting is how this parallels what Robin Dunbar has famously argued about the origin of human language. When primates started living together in large societies, it became paramount to know who your friends and enemies were. This was accomplished by grooming–literally touching and pruning those who were your friends, and watching who was grooming others. Dunbar argues that language emerged as a more scalable version of grooming.[1] You can talk to a lot of people at once, and you can hear about the state of other relationships without having to be there to witness the “grooming event”.

I’m fascinated with the idea that social media is allowing a similar revolution in scale. So we have three stages:

Grooming

Relationships maintained by real-world touching. Other relationships must be physically observed. (E.g. see the descriptions of baboon life in A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky)

Speech

Relationships maintained by conversation. Other relationships can be heard about from others. (E.g. see all human literature.)

Social Media

Relationships are maintained by light weight online interactions such as texts, likes, tweets, etc. (E.g. see the device that’s currently in your pocket.)

Of course, it could be that new technology only seems to allow such a revelation in scale. Harvard’s Sherri Turkle argues in her book and her NY Times article [2] that online relationships are mostly illusory.

And even if these promises of more relationships are true, is that what’s good for us?

[1] The internet is for gossip

[2] Sheri Turkle, The Flight From Conversation

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. (Civilization and its Discontents, page 24)

I’ve been thinking lately about how we have employed technology against each of these.

To protect us from suffering caused by the outside world, we have our oldest and most developed technologies. Houses keep us dry, clothes keep us warm, roads to make it easier to travel, fences to keep out wild animals, air conditioners keep us cool, and on and on.

Suffering caused by our bodies was next. Most obviously, farming technology relieved the bodily pain of hunger. More recently, medicine can now prevent or cure many diseases. We have anesthetics against pain, dentistry to save our teeth, alka-seltzer for upset stomachs, arthroscopic surgery for faster recoveries, and so much more. There’s a good chance that you wouldn’t be alive today without modern medice!

Suffering from interpersonal relations is the lastest target for technology. Taking a broad definition of “technology,” you could say that language was the first social technology. Scientist Robin Dunbar has argued (as I’ve discussed before) that language developed as a more efficient way than than physically grooming of sealing bonds within a group.

Domesticated pets are also a form of relationship technology. Who hasn’t felt less alone when comforted by the family cat or dog?

Letter-writing was early relationship-tech that allowed relationships to exist over longer distances– and even with people you had never met. Later, the telephone relieved the suffering of not knowing about a far-away loved one. And just in the last decadesocial networks and texting have, especially for young people, radically changed relationships again.

More interesting is that social technology removes potential suffering by removing risk. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle recounts an interview with a teenager:

A text, [the teenager] argues, is better than a call because in a call “there is a lot less boundness to the person.” By this she means that in a call, she could learn too much or say too much, and things could get “out of control.” A call has insufficient boundaries. She admits that “later in life I’m going to need to talk to people on the phone. But not now.” When texting, she feels at a reassuring distance. (Turkle, Sherry (2011). Alone Together p. 190.)

That’s a subject for another post. But for now I enjoy looking at the world of technology through the lens of “What suffering is this technology designed to reduce?”

See also: Happiness and the Rise of Prosthetic Gods

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

Inspired by an email exchange with the inimitable Moritz Stefaner, last December I set up a small script on my laptop to snap a picture of me every half hour. This expanded to also taking a screenshot, a record of what application I was running, and then my current location. Throw in a few visualisation scripts, and it’s a real project! I’ve called this LifeSlice. Skip ahead for a link to download and try it yourself.

Here’s a a visualization of how I’ve spent my online time the last few months. Each day is a horizontal row, with a column for each hour. Midnight is on the far left, noon in the middle, and 11pm on the far right. Today is at the top, with December 2011 at the bottom.

I’ve clearly been spending a lot of time in front of my computer! The numbers in the far-right column count up how many hours I was in front of the computer that day. Even the two week gap at the end of March isn’t true — that’s when my system got corrupted and I had to restore from a 2-week old backup. My own personal evidence that screens are winning out.

Here is a horizontal version of the report with small maps for each week showing places where I went online. You can see these were the weeks when I went from Colorado to San Francisco. In this version, each day is a column, and each hour is a row with midnight at the top.

You can also also try a live demo here. Press “enter” to toggle between the face pictures and screenshots of what I was working on. (I think I’ve edited out anything embarrassing…)

Here I am presenting it at the first ever Berkeley Quantified Self meetup.

(Thanks to Phil von Stade for the pictures, and the invitation.)

Added later: presenting at QS San Francisco!

What does it mean?

For one thing, it was a smack in my face to see just how much time I am spending in front of my laptop. True, it is where I make money, and in many ways it is every much an instrument like a piano is to a pianist. But then I see how much is just time-wasting sites and, moreover, the spaced-out zombie info-junkie look on my face while I grazed the internet. Seeing the patterns have not triggered a radical transformation, but I am reminded every hour by pulse of the green webcam light to be mindful of what I’m doing. Sometimes I’ll notice it’s nearly the top of the hour and don’t want to get “caught” on a stupid site, so I get back to work–or better, get out to play!

Try it yourself

LifeSlice is still very much in beta, but it seems to work. Right now it’s Mac-only, but it wouldn’t take much for someone to port it to Windows.

The project home is at wanderingstan.com/lifeslice.

Normal users, just download from here.
(Developers can get the whole shebang from GitHub.)

After downloading and unzipping, double click on the “INSTALL.command” file and you should be off and running. Contact me with any problems or questions.

And next…

I’m also playing around with recording my mood in front of the computer. How often do I have that spaced-out zombie face? To that end I’ve been working on a project to log how often I smile. More on that in a later post.

(Opening quote from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.)

[Excerpted from Civilization and its Discontents, pages 37-39. Slightly edited.]

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.

Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements;

by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limit of visibility set by the structure of his retina.

In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory.

Earliest Recording of Human Voice (Earliest Recording of Human Voice, 1860)

With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale.

Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.

These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth … these things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every–or of almost every–fairy-tale wish.

… Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. … Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself …

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. … Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more.

But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.

Powerful stuff, eh? The woman in that final image is sporting the recently-announced Google Glasses, so you can have the internet with you and in your face (literally) every waking moment. Talk about an extension to one’s memory! What would he have said about that?!

All of Freud’s books are now in the public domain. Here is a Low-res scan of Civilization and its Discontents is available. A pdf version is here.

See Also: All Posts Tagged Lettering

On Facebook

The pace of life is increasing; people are working more and relaxing less than they did 50 years ago. At least that’s the impression I got from the popular media. But as a social psychologist, I wanted to see the data. As it turns out, there is very little evidence that people are now working more and relaxing less than they did in earlier decades. In fact, some of the best studies suggest just the opposite. So, why do people report feeling so pressed for time?

A beautiful explanation for this puzzling phenomenon was recently offered by Sanford DeVoe, at the University of Toronto and Jeffrey Pfeffer, at Stanford. They argue that as time becomes worth more money, time is seen as scarcer. Scarcity and value are perceived as conjoined twins; when a resource—from diamonds to drinking water—is scarce, it is more valuable, and vice versa. So, when our time becomes more valuable, we feel like we have less of it. Indeed, surveys from around the world have shown that people with higher incomes report feeling more pressed for time.

…

Over the past 50 years, feelings of time pressure have risen dramatically in North America, despite the fact that weekly hours of work have stayed fairly level and weekly hours of leisure have climbed. This apparent paradox may be explained, in no small part, by the fact that incomes have increased substantially during the same period. This causal effect may also help to explain why people walk faster in wealthy cities like Tokyo and Toronto than in cities like Nairobi and Jakarta.

Her full essay is here. She goes into more detail of a clever study that found that people felt more time pressure when they merely perceived themselves as being wealthy.

This explanation rings true to me. When I was younger, I could get lost in an art project or book for days and not feel like there was anything better that I should be doing. But now that I think of all the projects I could and should be doing, I get stressed just thinking about it. People I could be meeting, projects I could be starting, investments I should be considering, blog posts that I should be writing.

Maybe convincing yourself that your time isn’t so valuable is a good way to relax. Or rather, remembering that feeling un-hurried is more valuable than anything you could be doing with your time.

GNIP is doing well, and they’re doing in in a way that goes against normal internet wisdom. They are selling tweets.

A random Joe, somewhere in the world, sends out a little tweet like, “Enjoying a tasty burger with the gang at McDs.”

Does this interest you? Probably not. It’s the classic “Who cares?” criticism of Twitter. But the fact is that everyone has at least a few people for whom the smallest tweet matters. If you were part of “The gang” of Joe’s, you would take a little pleasure and interest knowing that he mentioned you. In science-speak, this is the “social grooming” that takes place in all human relations, similar to how apes will groom each other by off picking lice. (See all of Robin Dunbar’s work.) But if you’re not in Joe’s circle, this tweet boring drivel.

The genius of GNIP (and other emerging companies) is that when you take enough of these tweets together, you can find gold. Twitter supports lots of these little social grooming and social signaling messages, and then GNIP can roll them up and sell the aggregate data to a whole new class of interested parties.

The Wall Street Journal reports how Hedge Funds now use data from GNIP to directly influence trades. Enough people tweeting about their hamburger meal can be important information for beef futures, the performance of McDonalds, and a hundred other small signals that aren’t so obvious.

This calls to mind the classic essay by George Dyson about his visit to Google. His hosts explained, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, … we are scanning them to be read by an AI.” In the same way, these tweets are now a signal back into “the machine” that more and more directly effects the world.

These are fascinating times.

It was generally assumed that human’s started talking in order to share information. Factual information. Stuff like, “I saw a bear, don’t go over there.” or “Let me show you how to make this new thing that I call ‘Fire’”.

Primatologist Robin Dunbar challenged this notion[1] by asserting that gossip was the primary use case of language; the “killer app”, so to say. If you’re living in a social group with a lot of members, the most useful information you can exchange is about those other members. Knowledge of bears and fires takes a backseat to knowledge of enemies and lovers. Non-human primates share this information by grooming each other. We humans do it by gossiping. In his research, he found that “two thirds of conversation time is devoted to social topics, most of which can be given the generic label gossip.“

Note that he’s using “gossip” in a wide sense; including assurances of friendship, “catching up” on  people’s lives.

Similarly, the web was originally conceived as a place where scientists could exchange scholarly papers. And it was that way, at first. But the arcane worlds of usenet and IRC, geeks were already gossiping away by the 80′s. And now, with the rise of the “Social” buzzword, you the volume of gossip online is coming to match the volume offline in speech. Americans now spend 23% of all internet time on social networks. And if you count the time that people spend texting and the non-business emails, it’s clear the total gossip-usage of the internet is much higher.

Social networks are the natural evolution of talking. No wonder no one calls anymore!

[1] Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective, R. I. M. Dunbar

The tech world is a lot like politics these days.

After a holiday season where much time was spent removing truly evil malware (I’m looking at you, bastards at Win 7 “Antispyware” 2012),  I felt my net-politics shifting rightward. Gulp! Am I getting tech fascist sympathies?

In the human sphere, you understand that people living in unchecked violence and terror would turn to a strong dictator who promises security and order. This was the case made by Muammar Gaddafi when he warned that the country would descend into chaos without him. Dictators promises order, control, and safety.

App Stores promise the same thing. And let’s be honest; they do deliver. If my sister had an iPad, I wouldn’t have wasted a day running system scans and ultimately reinstalling everything. Centralized control keeps the bad guys out, and a bad guy that sneaks in can be instantly eliminated with the flip of a switch.

I bet Gaddafi wished that his police were so efficient!

And therein lies the rub. Who’s to say what a threat is? Once the central authority has brought peace and safety by eliminating the original bad guys, it’s only a natural progression that they re-define “bad guys” to include all threats to their central power. And extract as much tax as possible for access to their market.

Anti-central-control is the “tech libertarian” view, to which I would like to subscribe. But after some days in the trenches of average users, I am more sympathetic centralized control.

The question is: can the tech world find a balance between App store totalitarianism and malware-infested libertarian anarchy? What does tech democracy look like?

As per my old thesis project, I think tech needs a trust overhaul. But for now, it’s interesting to watch the pendulum of tech swing rightward.

Remote Support: Logmein

If you do nothing else for your family’s computer this holiday, install Logmein. The wonderful program allows you to work on their computer (including seeing what’s on their screen) from anywhere in the world. Even from Germany I could walk my parents in Colorado through sharing a photo of Facebook, or install software updates on my sister’s laptop. (Previously I recommended Microsoft Sharedview, but it requires a complicated dance of logins, invitations, and access codes that was overwhelming to people.)

Anti-Virus: Microsoft Security Essentials

For years I used Avira but in the last months the nag screens became unbearable, popping up every day and with the “close” button hidden by visual tricks. I switched my family to Microsoft Home Security Essentials and have been pleased so far. Be sure to do a full system scan once you’ve installed it, especially if they had no antivirus before.

Broswer: Firefox or Chrome

I’ve kept my family on Firefox even as I’ve moved to Google Chrome, but may move them in this year.

Remove all the bookmarks bar and replace with one’s that make sense for your famliy member. Change the name of each bookmark because the defaults are really long. My standard set is this:

• Search: Google.
• Email: Gmail (see below) or whatever web email service (if any) they use.
• Wikipedia: Wikipedia
• Maps: Google Maps, with default location set to their home.
• News: Google News, with local news set to their city.
• Weather: Weather Underground, with location set to their city.
• Dictionary: Wordnik, new online dictionary that I worked at. It’s better than the boring dictionary.com in that it also contains slang and unusual words. E.g. my Mom used to learn about “gamification.”
• Facebook, if they use it.
• Radio: Pandora. Ask your family member for a few songs or bands they like, and watch as they are amazed at the music that Pandora delivers. (You’ll have to create an account for your friend to save their stations.) My Mom loves listening to Jimmy Reeves.
• Their bank, local library, and other sites that they might enjoy. My mom loves the OneAcross crossword helper, for example.

Older people can be overwhelmed by the advertising of many sites. Install Adblock Plus add-on to save them from advertising overload.

My parents had a problem with accidentally pressing “F11″ and making Firefox go fullscreen. (F11 is directly above the Backspace key on their keyboard.) Using the Keyconfig add-on you can disable (and add) keyboard functions to solve problems like this.

Photos: Picasa

You’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who have a digital camera but never figured out how to get the pictures onto their computer! I did a lot of research on this one, as my Dad has scanned 10,000+ photos and needs to manage them. (More here) The best free solution has been Picasa from Google. Of course, only install this if they don’t have any image program, or are unhappy with what they are currently using. I find many people are using crappy software that shipped with some product they bought. My Dad, for example, was using a absolutely hideous program from HP that had installed itself with his scanner.

• If they have been using a different program, or have downloaded images scattered around, move them all to their “My Pictures” folder.
• Have Picasa then scan only their “My Pictures” folder. Otherwise it will find all sorts of random crap from other programs.
• Remove the “Blog This” button unless they are a blogger. (Right-click on the button area to configure this.)
• If your friend uses Gmail, configure the “Email Image” button to work with their Gmail account. If they use a web email other than Gmail, configure Picasa to remove the “Email Image” button.
• If your friend uses Facebook, install the Facebook Uploader button and connect it with their Facebook account. Very important: Once you have installed the Facebook App, you must do a few extra steps: In Facebook, click on “Applications” in the bottom left, then “Edit Applications”. Change the “Show” option to “Authorized”. Find the “Picasa” application and click “Edit Settings”. Grant the application “Extra Permissions” so that your friend won’t be confused by having a 2nd step where they have to approve uploaded images within Facebook.)
• Show them how to print an image using the “Print” button at the bottom.

Digital Camera Setup : Eye-fi

My parents could never get the hang of plugging their camera in the computer, or ejecting SD cards. This problem was solved nicely with the ingenius Eye-fi card. You’ll have to set it up for them, but once working, this little card will automatically transfer photos to their computer using their wifi connection. Watch their eyes glow in amazement as a photo appears in Picasa mere seconds after they take a picture. As an added bonus, photos are automatically geo-tagged.

Telephony & Chat: Skype

I’m not a fan of the new version, and who knows what Microsoft will do since they bought it, but Skype remains the safest video chat solution. It gets through most strange firewall situations, and isn’t tied to a specific email provider like Google Talk or Yahoo Video. And at least in my family, it’s what most people already have. Many tech-support sessions consist of a simultaneous Skype call and Logmein remote-control session. This works great, as I can explain what I’m doing while working on their computer in real-time.

• You’ll have to create an account for your friend. Be sure to give them the login details in case they need it someday.
• Add as friends any people that you know your friend might want to call.
• Add a picture to their profile, if you can find one. People like that.
• To reduce spam for your friend, change the settings to only accept chats or calls from people in their contact list.
• Configure Skype to login automatically and to launch with Windows.
• Configure Skype to use their webcam for video and for the microphone.
• Restart the computer and try making a call to make sure that all the default settings are correct.
• In all browsers, remove the stupid Skype add-on that is added by default. Sheesh.

Backup: Mozy

This one isn’t free, but Mozy is something that you should encourage them is worth the $5/month. I honestly haven’t used others, but hear good things about Carbonite. You should also setup a local backup using the built-in Windows Backup. If they don’t already have one, go out and buy an external drive to backup to. Storage is cheap these days.

Office: OpenOffice

If they haven’t bought Microsoft Office, they certainly don’t buy it. But of course, they are bound to need to read (and sometimes create) files in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint formats. OpenOffice does a not-great but passable job. As a side note, Gmail has gotten really good at displaying Microsoft document attachements without the user needing any software at all.

• Important: Change the default saving format to the Microsoft formats. (Yes, we all should support open formats. But believe me, you don’t want to try and explain this to not technical friends. Like it or not, Word and Excel are the de-facto standards.) Go to “Preferences->Load/Save->General”. For each “Document Type” (Text Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation) change the “Always save as” option to “Microsoft XXXXX 97/2000/XP”.
• Java will be installed as part of this process. Be sure you do NOT get tricked into installing the Yahoo toolbar as part of this. (See Todd’s jihad against toolbars.)

Fun: Google Earth

While maybe not as strictly “useful” as other applications, Google Earth is downright impressive and people, especially older non-technical people, find it to be amazing. Furthermore, your friend can use it to Geotag images in Picasa if they later feel ambitious.

Final System Cleanup

If they’ve been using their system for a while and haven’t had a good tech support person, you’ll have lots of garbage to clean up.

• Uninstall Java. Lately it has become a nuisance, wanting to update all the time and always trying to slip in the Yahoo browser bar.
• Remove all shortcuts from the desktop except for Firefox, Picasa, Skype, Google Earth, and programs that your friend specifically mentions using.
• Check the “Launch at Startup” folder to see what crap may be set to automatically launch. Remove anything that your friend doesn’t actually use.
• Clean out any toolbars from Internet Explorer and Firefox.
• Remove links to Internet Explorer from the desktop and start menu. Rename the Firefox shortcut to something like “Web Browser – Firefox”
• Remove unused programs from taskbar (Windows 7) or the “Start” menu (XP, Vista)
• Remove unnecesary icons from the system tray.

Playing tech support for a friend or family member is a noble and often thankless task. Good on you for taking it on — it’s a holiday gift that will last the whole year through. If you have other suggestions or ideas, please leave them in the comments.