Spirited Thought

Photo albums used to be the family bible, visually recording the event of people, places and events. It required the acts of photographer, editor and album constructor. It was a labor of reminiscence and duty. As the holder of the photos and the negatives, only they had the artifacts to construct the story. As viewers we enjoy impressions among the context, artifacts of a trip are embedded, mementos of the event. The event of constructing the photo album is all but dead - it too has been abstracted.

The transformation of the photographic world to a digital reality moved the activity of album construction to the computer. Initially people focused on recreating what they had in the real world, the physical photograph. It turned out that it was more expensive per print than traditional means, but the rationale was that someone only printed what they wanted. Enter stage right, the photo editor who traditionally used contact sheets or prints now filtering with computer screens and postage stamp LCDs on cameras. Dramatically reduced, the cost to take pictures results in higher volumes of images for review, the editor continues to filter. Photos, now files, need to be backed up to CD, DVD or external storage. To work with photos beyond the basics requires software of all shapes and sizes that helps make the most of where we have evolved to be. We live in an age of visual abundance, requiring constant editing, leaving the activity of visual story telling to the dedicated few.

Forget not the magic of the Internet! Enter stage right, jogging next to digital cameras, photo-sharing websites. While the photo album continues to be nourished by older generations, the common people are looking to recover the social aspect of their visual record. The current state of the art is Flickr. Heavily edited, socially aware photo sharing, with family, friends and everyone. The construction of the Flickr account requires the same photographer, editor and album constructor, but add to it uploader, annotator, taxonomist, commentator, moderator and more. Image distribution casts a wider net. Instead of just family and friends physically present with the photo album, anyone can browse the gallery and experience a different kind of story, one favorited and commented by the known and unknown. This introduces two pressures. First, who has access to someone’s images what and do they care. Second, these photos are a representation of someone’s impressions and moreover their view – the editing they applied to select a specific set of photos for others to experience. Now that literally everyone sees them, what is it that they intended to say? Filter, filter, filter. Far fewer images are seen and when they are, they lack the context of the human touch that made photo albums something of reverence and reminiscence. Just over the hill, on the other side of the coin, everyone enjoys the endless visual content that the society has constructed, defining the societal view and the visual trend. The slow death of the analog photo album leaves us somewhere different.

Digital photo frames reintroduce the album in a Harry Potter device. Pictures often cycle through allowing the viewer to see more than a single photo. The i-mate Momento 100 is a ten-inch digital photo fame that is wifi-connected and mates with an online service to bring much, much more to photo frames. Any shortcomings are quickly forgotten when someone experiences the magic. Momento Live is the site that mates with the frame allowing the frame’s owner to subscribe to feeds, Flickr or others, and have those photos automatically downloaded and updated on the frame. In addition, the frame has an email address and MMS interface. Send an email with a photo attached and the image graces the frame. The owner is no longer the album creator. People of their own selection enter the mix. Add a Flickr feed generated from a search and view endless images of <insert keywords here> by people you may never know. The Momento points in the direction of recapturing and evolving society’s notions of the photo album, the photo sharing experience. The frame becomes the magical portal into moments experienced by the individual and others, remixed to impress upon the viewer. If only we were able to capture the human touch and replay that. The story is becoming more interesting, but lacks the meaningful connections people create when they share face-to-face.

Send a photo to my Momento!

It is amazing when the comment section of a blog post is longer than the post. The barrier to post is high enough that most people don’t. The comments I refer to are the ones that equal in quality and value of the original, twitter sized posts need not apply. This barrier is true for many online social interactions for at least three reasons:

First, “what’s in it for me?” goes unanswered. What is the incentive to participate? If you write a blog, it might be part of your life interaction model – comment and catalog in your space while linking to the inspiration. If you bookmark, it might be in hopes to remember and revisit. In general, there are relatively few obvious benefits. One answer is to be heard – just remember to have something worth saying.

Second, the efforts of a few benefit many. The vast majority of information is unvisited, untagged, unrated and uncommented. For those who participate, thank you. The time you take to read, understand and evaluate (even if imperfectly), makes finding information easier. That someone takes the time to “touch” something interesting adds value for those who come behind it. The fact that many are willing to join in, leaves well-worn and lasting marks.

Third, contribution takes time. In our information congested, attention sliced, multi-tasked world, taking a moment to contribute back costs too much, especially when considering a well thought out, well-written comment.

Yet, more of the world is growing up in time when participating is commonplace. Enter stage right: YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter and Facebook. The question is, are we saying something worthy of further thinking? There are certainly professional circles that are interested in mining the social data created, but what is it that we are contributing? This is all, very much, a social experiment without the vague beginnings of a thesis. However, it is the world we live in and for an increasing many, the only world they know.

One of Michael Wesch’s anthropology classes at Kansas State pulled together another three minutes of visual delight expressing the current state of the student.

With an average class size of 115, only 18% of their teachers can recognize them and call them by name. Let us be generous and say a given student has 10 teachers, that means two know them from another. Eighty percent of the time, students are anonymous.

This is good, because they only complete half of the assigned readings 70% of which are irrelevant to their life. You can just feel the low grown from all the humanities majors, especially those from Ivy League schools. Makes you wonder what they missed in the other half of the readings or what it means to be relevant. The good news is that they read! The eight books per semester average seems insignificant to the time and attention devoted to the 2300 web pages and over 1200 FaceBook profiles. I am still stunned that they read! The level of real literacy is astounding. I digress. The interesting part of this is that the books and assigned readings have been hand selected by highly educated people. The web pages and FaceBook profiles are self-selected. With the undisputed fact that we exist in information chaos, the idea that students would skip 50% of the hand-selected literature is amazing. Furthermore, the content of the websites and certainly the sophistication of FaceBook profiles is not quite that of the New York Times – most college reading is, at least it use to be.

Students write 42 pages for class in a semester and over 500 pages of email. Apparently, there are 105 days in a semester at Kansas State, which means a student on average writes one page for class every 2.5 days and in that same amount of time will generate 12 pages in email. Are we asking students to do too much? Certainly, writing for class is harder than writing email, but when they enter the work force, most of the emails, papers and presentations they will give should approximate the level they develop for class work.

At one point in the video a young lady holds up a sign saying that when you total all of the time they spend on things in a day it goes over 24 hours. Brilliant! Soft productivity measures are often captured in “time saved.” Many joke that we save more time than there is in a day by introducing and improving business solutions. In the next scene, a student holds a sign saying they multitask, because they have to. We all do or we cannot competitively produce results. Those 24 hours need to contain the productivity of a much longer day. The busiest among us seem to deprive of sleep, regular meals and personal time to accomplish their goals. The students say they get seven hours of sleep, which is good, because sleep is important for a healthy mind and body. Well-rested people are more productive than their non-stop counterparts are over time – a simple Google search will show you all the ways skimping on sleep hurts. The multitasking skill will come in handy as they cram more than a days activity and get countless hours back from corporate IT to fit it all in.

Generations of students are being built by systems that fail to fully educate. As a society, we communicate academic achievement by single, standardized measures, not more fundamental values around identity, society and global impact for example. We fail to consider the fundamental changes in our children (e.g. read about millennials) as relevant input to evolving education. We alter the standards by which we set and measure expectations by allowing students to proceed with no correction – they too will become teachers, doctors, business-folk and what will they value? If we are what we eat | read | think | express, then what does it mean when your reading and writing is so FaceBook, Twitter and email focused?

Twitter is a centerpiece to techi-discussions where everyone shakes in amazement that such a simple application could become so integral to people’s lives. It is the simplicity, content and medium that supports such phenomenal adoption. More specifically, the interfaces to Twitter are minimal – website, email, feeds, Twitter Tools (extensions to Twitter) and most importantly text messaging. The website supports initial account creation, management, historical archive and message broadcasting, but in truth, like every other website would require a user to show up to participate and benefit. Extending their interface to email offers the few people who have a computer but no mobile phone a way to engage, but it is the text messaging that lets Twitter reach down and touch you in your pocket. There is too much information and yet participating in Twitter only increases it. So, why are we experiencing such compulsion?

Twitter has been described as micro-blogging and it is not a terrible coin. Twitters are character limited training people to marshal life updates into pithy messages. If one made a valuation of a blog post that journals a person’s day-to-day activity, the value in any given twitter is at most proportionally as small. However, considered in the context of the same person’s daily twitters and an individual’s understanding is enhanced. Consider one person’s twitters in their twitter-network cocktail and the twitter-log takes on additional meaning, meaning only understood by the receiver. Throw into the mental mix that one person does not necessarily need to know another in order to follow them – supporting fantastical senses of potentially very distant individuals.

Blog-trolling a last weekend I remember running across Matt Hatem’s reflection on the social sixth sense. He actually ends up meeting a friend that he might not have otherwise through Twitter. Interestingly, Matt’s very real social connection enhances his relationship with Twitter. Regularly, Twitter is a simple way to keep up with his network virtually. He is left to construct what one buddy is up to based on what he knows of them and what the message said. In his example, though, Matt bridged the relationship into the real world, which is far richer and now forever part of how Matt understands Twitter – it connects him with people he knows – virtually and in the flesh.

Matt also points off to Clive Thompson’s Wired article How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense. Clive offers similar anecdotal support that small messages understood cumulatively have meaning, meaning that changes what we understand about the people we know. The fact that these messages show up on a mobile phone – a intimate device – offers urgency of interruption and often a visually simple rolling log of what is what in the network. The mobile phone has become an ambient device that creates more socially aware people, in some cases, actually getting them away from tiny keyboards and meeting up close enough to touch.

Chris Chase, a neuropsychology professor back in college, enjoyed introducing concepts with the notion that humans are more alike than they are different. It is a useful foundation for deciding what is important to study, fundamentals that apply to everyone or the anomalies, certainly not unimportant, just narrow. And yet, humans are fascinated with differences and in particular our faces and our bodies.

Slavko Milekic, the chair of my undergraduate thesis on child friendly interfaces, evolved the face flipbook into kid-friendly touch-screen interfaces. Earlier on, in a self-study project I implemented the more traditional version of a face flipbook, allowing someone to switch parts of faces but in a more literal representation to the kid books I grew up with.

Reminder: There are too many examples of literal expression in virtual spaces that fail. It amazes me that we tend to not take on the larger challenges of inventing something new instead of replicating what we know.

Slavko introduced gesture and touch based interactions to the traditional computing environment enabling object switching, size shape and position. Certainly one of his successful creations was that of assembly of faces out of a variety of common objects like vegetables. Even at a young age, even when working with vegetables - something often seen as a challenge for children - we are fascinated with the construction of human form.

Move to the more taboo example of human nudity in art or even pornography. There are books dedicated to human genitals – again, the differences. Even when considering the world of fantasy and identity, nudity and pornography depict other people doing things that you yourself could do, by yourself, with others you know and increasingly others you do not know. So why that fascination, if not for the differences. What is it like to see an attractive someone with a certain set of features? It is all about the distinguishing marks, regardless of it being labeled art or smut.

My recent move back to New York City, more specifically Brooklyn, reminded me of the diversity I missed. A great Walt Whitman quote on a Barnes & Noble ad in my subway car read,

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

That must be what outgoing is, talking to the diversity around you instead of just observing. But, in fact, almost no one speaks to strangers – we even teach our children not to. However, everyone has the pleasure of enjoying diversity visually at fire hose volume in New York City and for me on my morning commute on the F train.

Professor Chase is still right, we are more alike than we are different and while we are consumed by those curious differences, I posit that our fascination exists because our distinguishing marks appear on a relatively common canvas.

Yesterday morning while catching up on some email a Photojojo email from July 20 featured The Simpsonizer. My results were pretty good. Interestingly enough, I find this two dimensional avatar more accessible than my Second Life me, Vienna Lamourfou. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the couple of times venturing as Vienna I ended up immobilized in a teleport.

Given a set of Simpsonized friends, could our FaceBook, Twitter and IM chats have a little more character? What kind of cartoon might that be like? How about our interactions taking the form of a printed comic? How might it change our experiences and memories of what we are doing in virtual spaces?

The human relationship with music is an interesting one. For all of its meaning in my life, it is not something I consider a passion. I have always admired friends who are musicians or loved and immersed themselves in music. One of the projects my team has worked on over the last twelve months is an internal media library, a corporate youtube if you will. The parts that have me engaged are the social interactions and the implications of leaving tracks in online spaces.

I was listening to Regina Spektor, Lucinda Williams and Rickie Lee Jones this morning. The first I heard about from my mom, the latter two from CBS Sunday Morning. Both cases were high-touch interactions, my listening to the direct recommendation by sources I trust. Finding the music on iTunes to buy and then transfer to my iPod is actually a subtly intimate affair. I have to remember the artists, find them in the iTunes store, identify the album, part with my money and then transfer to my device so I can experience the music. iPods are inherently personal. They offer custom engraved messages letting the world know mine is mine. They communicate through an 1/8th inch jack and often into ear bud speakers directly into my head. That is the bridge from the artist’s inspiration to my brain. Now the music has access to my innermost ticking.

There is plenty of work done on the impact of music on the human being – playing classical to babies in the womb to Tibetan singing bowls. Listening to music is intimate in that we construct relationships both with those who share and we share it with but also the artist, the words and sounds that resonate with us. We time code life with it and connect with other people through gifts and gifting. In addition, we are now annotating it with ratings, tagging, comments and play lists.

I am a believer that we are both the creator and observer of our own reality. What does it mean then if you have an overpowering psychological condition like severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar or obsessive compulsive disorder? The belief can still stand, but it is fair to say that the chemistry and construction of the brain and body got a little too creative, or maybe not creative enough.

I have experienced through reading, administering developmental and behavioral experiments in college and, best of all, life, a variety of people with their demons. In every case, even when they were labeled with the same words, the demons were different and more importantly, the people were different. I start listening as if I know nothing, because for any given person it might be different and who am I to put my baggage on them.

For all the desire to master the brain through therapy and psychopharmacology, everyone is a unique case that we flounder to understand, the most talented among us saving our fellow man. Add to that my general feeling that we all have demons, even the most blessed and hopefully you get a sense that I am not against medication. I am, however, against what is a growing trend of medicating without answering why we are suddenly in the position of having to do so at such an alarming rate. A recent New York Times article, Proof Is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young, by Gardiner Harris, pulled together some great research on medicating children.

Antidepressants are commonly paired with stimulants, but antidepressant use has declined over the last year after the F.D.A. warning about suicide risk. In their place, physicians are prescribing combinations that include antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs, according to Medco. From 2001 to 2005, the use of antipsychotic drugs in children and teenagers grew 73 percent, Medco found. Among girls, antipsychotic use more than doubled.

As with almost anything worth thinking about, there is plenty of complexity below the surface. This article is about how we medicate our children, apparently 1.6 million of them with 280K under 10 years old. To be counted, they needed to be prescribed two psychiatric drugs.

More than 500,000 were prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs. More than 160,000 got at least four medications together, the analysis found.

Harris tells us that some studies show adults benefiting from two drug cocktails specifically around depression, OCD, and the mania associated with bipolar. As with any study, others show no conclusions of import.

The use of two-medicine combinations in children is on much shakier ground. Even for single drugs, the effectiveness of some psychiatric medications in younger patients is questionable: most trials of antidepressants in depressed children, for instance, fail to show any beneficial effect. But hardly any studies have examined the safety or the effectiveness of medicine combinations in children. A 2003 review in The American Journal of Psychiatry found only six controlled trials of two-drug combinations. Four of the six failed to show any benefit; in a fifth, the improvement was offset by greater side effects.

If the evidence for two-drug combinations is minimal, for three-drug combinations it is nonexistent, several top experts said.

As members of one of the most developed societies, it is safe to say even the adults are struggling to make sense of their world, even the non-medicated. We have data showing that since 2001 we have begun heavily medicating our children in ways our best psychiatrists are unable to rationalize. If the reality we create in our minds, arguably the only reality that exists, is unnecessarily affected by doping, what is the affect on our ability to construct a different one?

For some, medication brings them closer to center, often with side affects, but more desirable than being consumed with self-destruction. I have heard that relative to their un-medicated state, some drugs slow things down too much or keep people in a fuzz. I think it is probably worth it if you suddenly have the opportunity to ponder the world of your design - for all you know you might be living in someone else’s.

For those of us who are challenged with loved ones who need medication, may we have the wisdom to withhold our own discomfort and psychological effects, so that medicating is done, not for us, but for you. As for the overly medicated children among us, may we not screw you up to the point where you can no longer consider what is real.

For my birthday, I received a new book that I had been eyeing, Happiness by Richard Layard. I am about a quarter through it and while I am not so hip to his writing style, I am enchanted by the information presented. You see, Layard is actually an economist that worked with a variety of others – psychologists, philosophers, sociologists etc. Just as you get through the initial premise you begin to think, “yeah, but how about this other aspect, you cannot discount that?!” and then he answers you before the chapter is over. You feel smart until you realize that Layard has done his home work and you, well I, get giddy being the student.

On the way into New York City, on an early train, I started scribbling some thoughts on the back of an old business card. They apply to more than just happiness and obviously resonate with my current outlook.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This came out of a section where Layard presents how over time people have become wealthier while happiness has stayed constant. He presents a series of examples where people show that wealth relative to others is more important than absolute increase in wealth – it is all about where people perceive they are in relation to others. Given the opportunity to have more relative to others, people elect that over an increase in wealth and no upward mobility.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This seems to be all that matters and all that is important in so many circumstances – politics, relationships and commercials to name a few. Everything is impression management and very often, the altruistic among us (that includes me) feel like there should be some kernel of purity worth worshiping beyond the manufactured experience. Relating this to the field of user experience design, all that matters is what users think.

What people experience is not our reality it is theirs. We do not get to decide, which really refocuses the importance of other related elements. Very often technology gets a lot of focus when, for the most part, a user rarely interacts with it – even more so when on the web. What server, middleware or backend is employed, the user has no idea or cares. As technologists, we use technology as a way of expressing ourselves, but fail when all we see is a technical problem. In the end, all that matters is what people think, in which case, as technologists we need to be far more sensitive to how we create delightful experiences. Extend that to any relationship.

Every day, we have the opportunity to create life-long memories, even more so if we pay attention to how people experience us. Who doesn’t want to be that impactful?

Neuropsychology could have easily been my first profession. My fascination for the brain and appreciation for how little and much we know of it has always captivated my logical and imaginative thought.

I just finished the book, Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, where Gerald Edelman, M.D., Ph. D. covers an impressive amount of information refuting that consciousness is solely metaphysical. While anyone can argue there is mystery to the brain, Edelman’s work is persuasive – there are neurological constructs which give rise to consciousness.

Quale (IPA [ ˈkwɑːle]) is the way something feels, an experienced conscious moment. The definition’s subtly fails to describe the complex recipe that comprises a feeling –

sensory input, consequences of motor activity, imagery, emotions, fleeting memories, bodily sensations and a peripheral fringe. (p. 61)

Our experience, being conscious of being conscious naturally contains all of these things all of the time. It would be trivializing to say it is like a movie where only audio and visual aspects are perceived. Qualia consider the past, the current and the possible future, all at the same moment, all the time, becoming part of the categorized catalog of discriminated conscious states influencing future qualia.

In order to fully understand the data set that is flowing throughout the brain, we would actually need to be that body, that brain. The information outside of that context can only be imagined. An example used was, “what would it be like to be a bat?” illustrating the complexity – it would actually be easier to understand what it would be like to be another human, but is quite literally, impossible.

Recently on CBS Sunday Morning, Mo Rocca questioned if as we live longer and medical technology continues to deliver higher quality transplant and artificial replacement, will you still be you? Assuming that the replacement of an organ is successful, the brain would read the new organ as part of new quale. What happens to the qualia associated with the failed organ? Does the brain simply treat those discriminations as part of a phantom part of a quale – similar to the sensation some people experience when losing a limb, or, is some of the data lost forever? Does the new organ have the ability to read the data stream as part of the body and brain? Does the replacement organ, know something that the failing organ did not?

So, Mo, I think the answer is yes, probably, you will still be you, but a different you.

I heard today that hugs over twenty seconds create more trust. A little research shows that oxytocin [ok-si-toh-suhn] is at the heart of this thinking – a neurotransmitter in the brain expressed in women during labor, breastfeeding and when males or females orgasm.

Zack Lynch, someone who seems to be well regarded, highlights the research of Paul Zak and Ahlam Fakhar which shows that increases in oxytocin and estrogen affects country wide levels of trust. Lynch summarizes the findings ending with “trusting people are happier.” Dr. John Schinnerer, added that Shelly Taylor’s research links oxytocin as the foundation for the difference in innate reaction to fear when comparing males and females. Taylor et al. conclude:

It is now well-established that both animals and humans show health benefits from social contact (e.g., House, Umberson, & Landis, 1988). Positive physical contact in the form of touching, hugging, cuddling, and the like is known to release oxytocin which, in turn, has anti-stress properties. The present analysis suggests some mechanisms whereby social support may provide health protection … accompanying relaxation. As such, oxytocin may confer health benefits (cf. Ryff & Singer, 1998).

Dr. Schinnerer gives us the winning quote:

…oxytocin can be produced via hugs longer than 20 seconds which creates more trust in women.

Simple lesson of the day, hug more and hug longer.