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Social Media Addiction: Engage Brain Before Believing

May 23, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 2 Comments
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Previously published in Psychology Today “Positively Media.”

When you see the headlines about social media addiction, take a deep breath. Exhale. I know this sounds radical, but don’t go by the news articles. Find the actual study and read it. Don’t just read the results; see how the researchers define what they are measuring. This is important because 1) sometimes studies just don’t make sense, 2) sometimes things that are only correlated get reported as being a ’cause’, and, 3) the people writing the articles don’t always read the actual studies before they write—even whey they are real journalists.

Psychologists, parents, educators and politicians frequently talk about how important it is to teach kids media literacy so they can critically use, produce and evaluate media. Evidence suggests that this is not a skill that should be reserved for the young.

There has been a little flurry of news articles and blogs recently about social media addiction. First of all, it concerns me that, as a society, we are very cavalier tossing around the concept of ‘addiction.’ Addiction is a serious psychological diagnosis based on specific and seriously life-impairing criteria. (PT Blogger Allen Frances has a good discussion of behavioral addictions as compulsively driven behavior with negative consequences and the problems of getting too loose with clinical diagnoses.) Identifying an addiction of any kind is important.  To my knowledge, however, a college student saying “I’m addicted to Facebook” is not adequate diagnostic criteria for addiction any more than someone saying they are addicted to chocolate or American Idol.

Of course, as a writer, if you can get the word ‘addiction’ in a headline it will draw eyeballs to your copy because it targets people’s fears. (Did it get you to read this?) Since we are all biologically wired to notice danger, especially where kids are concerned, this is a sure-fire way to get someone to read your stuff. I know journalists are all freaking out about the competition from new media. I get the conflict. But this isn’t the time to compromise journalistic standards, it’s the time to shore them up to prove your point about training and objectivity.

One of the recent studies discussed in the reports about social media addiction was an interesting outgrowth of a class assignment in a journalism course, not an empirically designed research project. The web-published results were a thoughtful qualitative analysis by a team headed by University of Maryland professor Dr. Susan Moeller. (An acknowledged limitation is that this is a population of college students particularly interested in and engaged with media.) The homework assignment was to go without media for 24 hours and then write about it.

The results of the analysis of student submissions (along with some notes on methodology) were published online. They included quotes from students that were illustrative of their experience. That is how qualitative studies are done. A quote is not meant to be a common denominator and it is not accompanied by a frequency distribution; it is local color. The report on the website describes how students experienced a new appreciation for how they used media. Some students even used the word ‘addiction’ in their submissions. However, most comments, judging from the data published on the report’s site, were reflective of different types of new media use, the shift in the students’ reliance on new media relative to traditional forms, and the students’ desire to stay connected to friends, family and world events.

The conclusion had nothing to do with addiction, but made important points about the way social media technologies have been integrated into students’ lives, their expectations about frequency of contact, and how that impacts how they relate to the world.  From the site:

The major conclusion of this study is that the portability of all that media stuff has changed students’ relationship not just to news and information, but to family and friends — it has, in other words, caused them to make different and distinctive social, and arguably moral, decisions.  (ICMPA, 2010, ¶3)

The headlines in several news articles reporting on the study focused entirely on social media addiction, extrapolated from student comments not the analysis, and did not mention the profound, albeit conceptual, shifts in behavior and expectations. Thus when various reporters/writers polled experts for their articles, they were asked about the topic of social media addiction, not the other implications of the study. One article had a particularly good quote came from fellow PT blogger and media psychologist Stuart Fischoff, who reasonably and articulately pointed out that,

“All these technologies have potential for terrific use and for terrific abuse…Everyone is a potential addict – they’re just waiting for their drug of choice to come along, whether heroin, running, junk food or social media. All those substances can be streetcars of desire…”

His remarks, evoking some cool imagery and media references, basically said there is potential for addiction for with many behaviors. Exactly.

Fischoff’s great quote got picked up by WiredPRNews.com when they decided to cover the story about the Maryland study, only now the headline said “Study shows social media withdrawal can occur” and starts out, “A recent study suggests individuals may go through withdrawal symptoms from abstaining from social media for long periods.” The writer then cites the Maryland study as the source for Fischoff’s quote. (At least he still got credit for saying it, even if he hadn’t been in the study.) Does this remind anyone of the old “telephone” or “whisper” game?

Another recently quoted report was published online by Retrevo Gadgetology, entitled “Is Social Media a New Addiction?” This is a marketing report by a consumer electronics marketplace. As an academic piece, it has some serious methodological issues, such as in how the questions are structured, particularly if you are drawing conclusions about addiction. (None of the criteria for diagnosing addiction were included in the survey.)

That wasn’t Retrevo’s intention and, to their credit, if you read the actual report you see they responsibly qualify their remarks, are conversational and speculative about their conclusion, and do not declare outright an epidemic of social media addiction as the headline might imply:

We’re not qualified to declare a societal, social media crisis but when almost half of social media users say they check FaceBook or Twitter sometime during the night or when they first wake up, you have to wonder if these people aren’t suffering from some sort of addiction to social media. From this study, it also appears that social media may have begun to replace more conventional sources for news with many social media users saying tweets trump TVs for that morning cup of news. (Retrevo, 2010, ¶7)

For marketers, the take-away here is the shift from TVs to social media for late-breaking news. However, by the time the study got to Media Post, it is labeled “Social Addiction” and reports that the study concludes that social media can be habit forming. Not very useful to marketers nor helpful to society at large.

We live in a world where information abounds.  Information is no longer the purview of the privileged few, but neither is having an opinion.  This is a tremendous freedom and opportunity.  With it comes responsibility.  There is no way to maintain freedom and have someone else vet all the material you read.  You have to do it yourself.  Think of it like defensive driving.  This is a big onus, but in my mind a price worth paying.

However, we can’t be lazy or blinded by what we  believe instead of engaging our gray matter.  If we blithely forward ‘facts’ based on our innate biases and “it seems right to me” conclusions, pull the most sensational quotes to use as headlines, and, as consumers, believe what we see rather than thinking critically and reading original sources, then we will not be able to identify the real issues we need to tackle nor will we be able to see our way to the positive potential these tools can bring.

As Fischoff said in his quote, there is no shortage of things to be addicted to.  Social media is just one of many.  But just because something is new and having a profound impact on how people behave doesn’t by definition mean that it is bad or harmful.  Believe it or not, there is actual research that talks about the postive side of social media, too, but they don’t make very good headlines.

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ICMPA (2010). A Day Without Media. Research Project, University of Maryland, Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. Retrieved May 20, 2010 http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/

Retrevo (2010). Is Social Media a New Addiction? Retrevo Studies. Retrieved May 20, 2010 http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2010/03/social-media-new-addiction%3F

Filed Under: Cognition, Education, Emerging Technologies, Social Media & Networks

Social Media: The Media We Love to Hate

May 22, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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Published Previously on Psychology Today “Positively Media”

What is the media we love to hate? Right now, it’s social media. As a society, we hate pretty much anything new or that we don’t understand. I’m sure the mass media execs and video game developers are beside themselves with glee to see so much attention on reports of social media addiction and controversy surrounding Facebook’s privacy issues. Yesterday’s devil-child is eager to jump on the bandwagon and skewer the next guy.

Social Media is an easy target. Not only is it new, it’s acceptance varies widely by age.  The enthusiastic adoption of social media technologies and tools by young people worries older people who don’t really get it. The digital immigrants are not willing to trust the judgment of digital natives; just like most generational belief schisms. You can just hear the collective digital immigrant response: “That isn’t the way I did it.” That point of view leaves only two alternatives: There’s either something wrong with the people who are doing something differently or there’s something wrong with our own worldview. Surely it can’t be that!

When people process information that challenges their view of the world, many lose the ability to think critically. They seek cognitive consonance and comfort. When things fit with their beliefs, they jump right on board.  Some recent studies have received media coverage that highlights how social media is addicting. (I will discuss some of this coverage in my next post.)  When you read stuff like that, do you find the studies in question and read them or are do you say to yourself,  “See, I KNEW all this media stuff kids do is bad for them.” Just like dime novels, comic books, short skirts, Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll. The rap on Socrates was that he was corrupting youth, too. It’s a wonder any of us survived!

New media is not a crisis. It is a fact of life. Get used to it. Don’t make the mistake of the Bergen County, New Jersey middle school principal who must have destroyed a great deal of his social capital with his middle school population when he emailed the entire parent body saying: “There is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!”

I urge all of you parents and caring adults out there to learn about new technologies so that you can make judgments that are contextually relevant and so that you can provide guidelines that make sense to kids in THEIR world, not yours.  That is, in fact, where they have to live.  In their world, if you don’t know how to use technology you are at a severe disadvantage–and not just socially.  The 21st century skills that our kids will need include technological and media literacy and I mean that in the broadest sense.  Media literacy today is not just the ability to think critically about content.  It is the ability to think critically about use and production in a networked society.

But the real issue is that kids use technology differently than their parents do. First of all, kids can still see the screen and keys on their mobile devices without their glasses so it’s easier for them. They also think about the whole process of connection and communication differently. They aren’t thinking of Facebook or texting as a replacement for some other means of communication. They aren’t angsting over the qualitative differences between voice, face to face, or text. It is just how they communicate. They didn’t have to unlearn some other behavior to learn this one. And keep in mind that just about the time you adjust to Facebook, they’ll be off and running on the next thing. They aren’t in this for the tools. They’re in it for the social connection.

Filed Under: Cognition, Culture & Society, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , ,

AR for Business Cards: Barcode Becomes iCode

May 21, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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I love augmented reality (AR)*. I love the unseen potential and the mind warp of converging realities. While I readily confess to being a tech-nerd, I am not particularly well-versed at the really technical end that drives all this new technology.

I have been trying to figure out an easy way to get AR onto my business card.  (Easy means something that I can do myself.)  I’d love to have an icon allows me to appear like Princess Leia; a mini-me talking away earnestly about how much I love the psychology of media experience and why that’s important.  However, so far I haven’t found that capability without either spending money or getting more education.  There are people doing some interesting things in this area.  I tried VisualCard but I couldn’t get it to work.  Stickybits is also cool, but I didn’t really want to take the chance of someone adding files to my barcode. (I know sharing is good and part of the social media experience, but I’m not ready to relinquish control of my business card.)

Now, however,  I have a new favorite experiment thanks to the folks at 3GVision and the free smartphone app called i-nigma. The mobile barcode generator at barcodelink.net allows you to create a barcode (duh) from a web link of your choice. It works with a website, but it also works with a linked file like a YouTube video. Using the barcode reader i-nigma, I can trigger the link from my cell phone.

Check it out. Here’s the barcode for my blog on Psychology Today.  Or maybe I should say iCode?

The barcode triggers a link to the website on Internet-connected phone. It is fully navigable using phone's browser.

barcodelink.netI can think of all kinds of swell things to do with this beyond to embedding live information into your business card.  As long as the url doesn’t change, the content can be updated.  Fore example, I can see teachers using it to engage students in a topic or provide homework updates in a James Bondian kind of way.  I can see therapists creating carry-along cards for their clients to provide on-demand video support for things like phobias, anxiety and depression.

A barcode on a business card may not seems like it really counts as AR.  The website stays in the phone and does not hover deliciously over the card through the lens of the iPhone or Blackberry.  But it’s another indicator of the tectonic shift happening in information delivery.

This may not be the only way for a mere mortal on a shoestring budget to get started using AR on a business card, so if you know of other solutions, I’d love to hear!

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* My last post describes AR and some of the current and potential applications.

Filed Under: Psychology Tagged With: , ,

Augmented Reality: Real Life with Toppings

May 19, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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Published previously on Positively Media Blog on Psychology Today.

Care to try on a dress, take your picture in a virtual Mardi Gras mask, or figure out what size box you need to ship a package—from your computer? You can with augmented reality (AR). There is a virtual dressing room at Tobi.com* virtual city visits on Hotel.com and a shipping box simulator at USPS. Tissot Watches made headlines this week with a display in London where you can virtually try on out the styles and features of their entire watch line. Pretty fun.

Don’t want to be house bound? You can take AR to the streets and use a smartphone to find a subway stop, locate a nearby restaurant AND read the recent reviews, or get information about a landmark.

AR is interactive, instantaneous, very cool, and coming your way soon. By superimposing digital information (text, pictures, audio, or visuals) onto what we currently think of as ‘real life,’ AR merges 3-D environments in real time.

Think of AR as a halfway house between virtual reality and plain old reality. Virtual reality provides a complete synthetic environment, like in the virtual world of Second Life or built-out areas of Google earth, like this example of Virtual Rome.

AR, on the other hand, adds to reality, like toppings on ice cream. In AR, virtual and real objects coexist in the same space. If you are a football fan, you’re already an old hand at this. The down lines and field markers that move with the plays are done with AR.

Don’t dismiss the recent emergence of Augmented Reality applications as marketing gimmicks or Hollywood fad. AR doesn’t just sell magazines, toys, and restaurant meals.

Virtual information is visible on a camera phone

Combining real and virtual objects can enhance our experience of the real world. Providing information overlays on real life facilitates all kinds of things—even things more important than shopping, like medical research and training, brain-behavior relationships, astronaut training, and even, dare I say it, education. Recent examples are a fourth-grade class in San Diego that used AR to learn about botany and the Getty Museum’s exhibit that lets you virtually explore 17th Century Augsberg Cabinet without paying for gas and parking.

AR also has great potential for therapeutic applications like treating phobias, PTSD, and anxiety. (Check out the AR cockroaches used to treat bug phobias, which is kind of creepy, but looks pretty effective.

The real revolution is just beginning. AR technology will continue to become simultaneously more sophisticated, accessible and inexpensive. Since Ivan Sutherland’s first augmented reality system in 1968, researchers have tried to figure out how to make AR more portable and practical. Where once you had to essentially wear a computer on your head, the AR experience is now fits in your back pocket. Thanks in part to the availability of open source mobile platforms, developers have created a flood of fun and/or useful apps for mobile devices like iPhones and Droids as well as computers. Check out AR browsers like Layar http://www.layar.com/ to see how it works.

Ivan Sunderland, 1969, First Augmented Reality System

The simple tool of a camera and Internet-equipped phone or computer opens the door to a wealth of information that can be triggered directly in the environment, whether it’s operating instructions and nutritional contents to the location of books in a library. Many AR applications use an icon or “glif” attached to the real environment to trigger a digital file. The Hitlab video shows some great examples, too. Another fun one is GE’s Smart Grid. With the addition of GPS technologies, AR can provide navigation tools, such as hiking maps, identifying landmarks, and local flora and fauna. It’s a science or history teacher’s dream.

Hitlab Overview of AR

But these uses are just the start and barely touch the surface of the potential of AR applications to provide socially useful, relevant, and meaningful content.

I see AR as having tremendous social potential. As the financial and technical hurdles to produce content continues to drop, the ability of people to make and distribute content will move off YouTube and out into the world—the whole world. As a cultural bridge, AR can not only link past structures and history with present, but allows communities to have a voice and share experiences, narratives, music, and art with neighbors and visitors everywhere. As an educational aid, AR can help close the digital divide by making more learning materials, information and resources available to all learners. AR can also provide on-demand scaffolding experiences to support and reinforce active learning, self-efficacy, and create a collaborative learning environment. AR can also increase knowledge transfer, retention and the motivation to learn because not only does it place content in context, it is fun! This is why in Imagined Communities programs, we integrate AR into a design-based and interactive learning platform.

AR brings whole new meaning to “media literacy.” The ability to use information technologies improves individual well-being because access to information supports empowerment and autonomy(BCS, 2010) . These attributes spur economic growth and civic engagement. Bringing digital content into a real environment can support personal agency and increase accountability, especially compared to the anonymity of the web. There will most certainly be issues to work out, as with all new technologies. But AR will change many things profoundly and, I believe, for the better.

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BCS. (2010). The Information Divide: Can IT Make You ‘Happier’? (pp. 1-16): Chartered Institute for IT.

*The Tobi.com virtual dressing room is based on AR technology called Fashionista developed by Zugara http://www.zugara.com/.

Sunderland photo from Doppler, C. (n.d.). History of Mobile Augmented Reality. 2010. Retrieved May 23, 2010   https://www.icg.tugraz.at/~daniel/HistoryOfMobileAR/

Filed Under: Psychology Tagged With: , ,

Cognitive Broadband: When Visual Information Enhances Cognition

March 24, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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It would be no surprise to the Max Wertheimer and the other Gestalt psychologists that visual displays can deliver complex information so effectively.  I think of it as “cognitive broadband.” Journalist LaToya Egwuekwe created a progressive data display of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment numbers that delivers a powerful message. (See “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,”)  So powerful, in fact that it went viral from YouTube to CNN.  (The orginal site has  more impact than the YouTube version embedded below.)

Beyond the implications of the unemployment numbers, however staggering and moving, there is an underlying and very important message about education in the 21st Century.  I’m on board with all the STEM initiatives (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) but the missing ingredient in this push is synthesis.  As people either celebrate or lament, we have no shortage of data.  Finding out stuff is no longer a scarce resource.  Making sense of it all is.  The ability to think visually and spatially–not just linearly–is essential to understanding a world where facts are more plentiful than problems and where innovation is necessary for solutions and creating growth.  We are conditioned to accepting the process of education as the successful accumulation of facts.  Facts by themselves have no meaning until they are synthesized into a narrative. When was the last time a  BLS numbers release made it to YouTube?

Filed Under: Cognition, Psychology Tagged With: ,
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