Guest Boost! Blogger Ulrike Langer on social media and SXSW.
Ulrike is a media innovation journalist who just returned from the SXSW Interactive conference and sent us this report.
The “Marshmallow Experiment” is a famous psychological test from the 60’s where young children are left alone in a room with a marshmallow on a plate. The children are told they will receive two marshmallows as a reward if they can resist eating the first one for a few minutes. Not surprisingly, the research found most four or five-year olds will eat the single marshmallow. Some children, however, are able to overcome their desire for instant gratification. According to a long-term study, those self-disciplined children tend to cope better in adult life.
The daily marshmallow challenge
Today, it is not only the youngest among us who face this challenge; we all do, every day, all day long. The marshmallow on the plate is the smartphone in your pocket. And even though we’re adults, we often don’t think about how much time we spend updating our Facebook status or checking to see if we got another 20 likes for a cool photo we posted yesterday. We tend not to think about the inherent tradeoff between social media activities and more taxing, less fun pursuits that will yield greater benefit in the long-run.
At the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin last week, the phenomenon was addressed in a panel titled “Tech My Mind: The Age of Instant Gratification.”
The enemy within
According the panelists, if we resist ‘the marshmallow’ by remaining logged out of Facebook or leaving our phone in our pocket when it is ringing, vibrating or pinging, we have to fight against powerful chemical opponents. The neurotransmitters dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin—which all are otherwise known as ‘temptation’—flood our brain with short-term rewards.
Andrew Yee, the Online Program Administrator at Biola University in California, knows something about outwitting these opponents. He is responsible for ensuring educational software at Biola offers rewarding experiences. When potentially boring learning materials are instead designed like video games with levels, points and challenges to make them more fun, this is called gamification.
Yee knows that immediate rewards and constant self-affirmation can be quite addictive. That’s why we feel the need to check that our standing in social networks hasn’t decreased in terms of how many likes, comments, favs and retweets we are getting. If our tally gets too low, we need to refuel by adding new funny pictures and witty tweets.
Birds of a feather feel good together
Erika Gronek, Director of the New Media program at Arizona State University says this is why we tend to digitally befriend the people who confirm our world view. This, however, is not an entirely new phenomenon. We have always tended to be selective in choosing our friends, whether we know them from school, from work or from the Internet. We’ve always preferred to be surrounded by people we share interests and values with. But now, in the social media era, this old phenomenon is called “filter bubble” and regarded as a new trend.
Of course, we should all try not to constrain our horizons but socializing with naysayers or people who challenge our beliefs can be exhausting. A bigger problem, to my mind, was raised by Yee and life coach Julie Barrios. Barrios helps stressed-out coders and tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley look beyond short-term goals (more clicks! more hype! more sales!) and not lose sight of their long-term purpose in life.
A return to love
News sites, Barrios said, tend to promote superficial distraction rather than help their users focus on a story. We all know these kind of sites. They are full of “Click here” banners, “Like us on Facebook” buttons, and “This could be interesting too” lists. All to ensure that we click and like and fav and feed our hunger for short-term rewards in the form of dopamine. And by falling into this trap, we don’t even notice how much more satisfying it is to be totally immersed in a topic, to focus on a good story to the last sentence and to really love it instead of just liking it on Facebook.
During the panel at SXSW, I couldn’t help but think about a beautifully written essay by Robin Sloan. It is called “Fish” and is available as a free app. I have read it at least 10 times since it was published. Sit back, take 15 minutes, and read it to the very end. I am sure that some of you will love “Fish”, not only like it.
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