Psychology and Social Networking

In March, I spent a week trying to live as faithfully as possible in accordance with the philosophy of calming (or conscious or contemplative) computing. At home, I stopped using my Nexus smartphone as a timepiece – I wore a watch instead – to prevent the otherwise inevitable slide from checking the time, or silencing the alarm, into checking my email, my Twitter feed or Wikipedia's List Of Unusual Deaths. After a couple of days, I disabled the Gmail and Twitter apps completely, and stored my phone in my bag while I worked, frequently forgetting it for hours at a time. At work, I shut off the internet in 90-minute slabs using Mac Freedom, the "internet blocking productivity software" championed by such writerly big shots as Zadie Smith and the late Nora Ephron. ("Freedom enforces freedom," its website explains chillingly.) Most mornings, I also managed 10 minutes with ReWire, a concentration-enhancing meditation app for the iPad that plays songs from your music library in short bursts, interrupted by silence; your job is to press a button as fast as you can each time you notice the music has stopped. I also tried to check my email no more than three times a day, and at fixed points: 9.30am, 1.30pm and 5pm.

Disconcerting things began to happen. I'm embarrassed to report that I found myself doing what's referred to, in Pang's book, as "paper-tweeting": scribbling supposedly witty wisecracks in a notebook as a substitute for the urge to share them online. (At least I'd never had a problem with "sleep texting", which, at least according to a few dubious media reports, is now a thing among serious smartphone addicts.) I had a few minor attacks of phantom mobile phone vibrations, aka "ringxiety", which research suggests afflicts at least 70% of us. By far the biggest obstacle to my experiment was the fact that the web and email are simultaneously sources of distraction and a vital tool: it's no use blocking the internet to work when you need the internet for work. Still, the overall result was more calmness and a clear sense that I'd gained purchase on my own mind: I was using it more than it was using me. I could jump online to look something up and then – this is the crucial bit – jump off again. After a few 90-minute stretches of weblessness, for example, I found myself not itching to get back online, but bored by the prospect. I started engaging in highly atypical behaviours, such as going for a walk, instead.

If you've ever felt like beign in the midst of a popularity contest on social media, here's the why ...

So it’s one of the cautionary notes that we've shared in this Human Face of Big Data project, which is about technology that we use for good or bad. Some people think that Facebook is fantastic, other people are very worried about it.  I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don’t think there’s ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us -- who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.