ASHIESHpcFreak
AddicTed to InTerNet !!!
HeLpinG Verbz !!
The online fix
Between sending emails, sorting out your social life, slobbing out watching YouTube and meandering down a crooked and endless path of links, it's possible to while away hours online. Is it possible, though, to be addicted to the Internet? If you've ever watched an entire day go by in front of a screen you may have wondered whether it is. Courtesy of the excellent blog Mind Hacks, we've got some good news and bad news for you on that front. The good news is that Internet addiction doesn't seem to be real, but the bad news is that there are good psychological reasons for why the internet can be so distracting. Here's the lowdown.
In the decade since the Internet went mainstream, there has been a certain amount of worry that people could become addicted to its electronic charms. Media reports tell stories of people who've dropped out or lost their jobs from spending all their time online, and American psychologists have even considered adding 'Internet addiction' to their official list of mental disorders. Fortunately, all that talk doesn't add up to a real condition. A recent roundup of all the studies ever conducted on Internet addiction finds that there's never been any good evidence for its existence.
Part of the problem lies in how some people define an addiction. If you consider yourself addicted to something if you spend lots of time doing it, suffer negative consequences from doing it, but also harm when you don't, then you'd be 'addicted' to lots of things. Like school, for example, or eating. It's true that some people do use the Internet so much that the rest of their lives falls apart, but blaming the Internet for it doesn't work. It's just as easy to spend all your time reading books or building model boats. All those things can certainly eat up your life if you let them, but that's not the same as being addicted.
All the same, the Internet is a great distraction. It’s easy to get away from doing difficult work (like, say, writing an article) by checking email, seeing what friends are up to on Facebook, or watching a video online. That ease is part of the problem. When you’re already working on your computer, the entire rest of the Internet is right there. It takes a mere few clicks to switch between your work and some funny cats. What’s more, online content tends to be short. You probably wouldn’t stop writing to watch an entire episode of a television show – half an hour is a big break to take just on impulse – but what’s the harm in stopping for a few minutes to watch something on YouTube? The cost in effort and time seems to be low, but the benefit of watching the funny cats is huge. You get to watch funny cats!
A classic approach to changing that distracting behaviour might be to change the cost/benefit ratio. If it weren’t so easy to get to the rest of the distracting stuff online, we might get more done. So perhaps someone could design a browser with a ‘work’ mode, where distracting sites were blocked. If you had to go through the trouble of turning off the work mode you probably wouldn’t do it quite so often.
There’s another interesting psychological principle that might be helping distract us, particularly in email checking. Do you ever find yourself checking your email so often it’s almost compulsive? There’s virtually no chance that someone will have emailed you in the time since you last checked it, but still…why not check just in case? It turns out that one of the best ways to train an animal (or, indeed a person – we’re animals too after all) is not to reward it every time it performs a particular action. It’s to reward it randomly when it performs the action. If there’s no way to predict whether it will get a reward or not, there’s no reason to ever stop performing the action. The reward could come at any time. If you think of an email as the reward, you can see why the lure of email checking can be so strong. Most times when you check your email there won’t be anything, but sometimes – at random times – there is! That tickles the reward centres of our brain, and we learn to do it more, in the hope of more rewards.
If someone ever tells you they think you’re addicted to the Internet, now you can reassure them that there’s never been a study that shows it’s possible. The power of the Internet to distract us is built right into the way we use it, though, so it’s good to be aware of that. Sometimes it just takes a really good amount of self-discipline to avoid the tempting distractions the Internet can offer. A good strategy might be to hold out the prospect of a reward once you’ve finished your work. Now that this article’s finished, for example, a bit of email checking and funny cats seems like just the right thing.
What does your email address say about you?
Everyone’s a little bit superficial. Even if we pride ourselves on being unjudgemental, whenever we meet someone we make guesses about their personality, and sometimes from the smallest clues. Neat appearance? We often bet they’ve got tidy lives too. Fidgety? Probably nervous. Researchers have found that we even make those kinds of judgements about people’s screen names and email addresses. But is that fair? Can you really tell what someone’s like from their email?
A team at the University of Leipzig in Germany wanted to find out. Almost 600 teenagers gave them their email addresses, which then went to a group of people to get their first impressions. These judges imagined what they thought the person was like in real life – based only on their email address – and gave them a rating on six different personality traits.
Underscore your personality
Even though they each did their judging separately, the judges came up with pretty similar guesses as each other. People tended to think that anyone with a Hotmail address was more extroverted – they were more likely to enjoy being the centre of attention. The same went for people that had funny email addresses. If you had an address that was boastful or a bit sexy, the judges guessed you probably thought a lot of yourself. People even had ideas about how many underscores were in an address – more made you look like you liked variety and were open to new experiences. When all the rating was over the researchers were surprised to find how consistent the judges’ answers were. Even in something as small as an email address, it looked like people shared the same stereotypes about what they meant.
The first impression test
Were those stereotypes correct? Well, there was a way to find out. Each person who put in an email address had also taken a personality test that rated the very same things the judges had been asked to rate. So when a judge thought that someone was likely to enjoy new things, the researchers could go back to their test and see if it was true. In the end it turned out that there was a kernel of truth in the judges’ predictions. They weren’t always right, but the judges did get a few handles on people’s personalities just from their email addresses.
Having a creative email address really does mean you’re probably more open to new things. Remember those underscores, the ones that people thought made you look like you liked variety? They were right about that too. That personality trait – called ‘openness’ – was what the judges were best at spotting. They were also good at telling what someone thought of themselves. If your email name is ‘thefascinatingking’ you probably are really that boastful in real life, but if it’s ‘shyguy’ you’re more likely to be a bit neurotic.
Fooled you!
Sometimes the judges all agreed on something that turned out to be completely wrong. The judges all thought they could tell when someone would be the life of the party – like if they had a funny address, or if they used Hotmail – but the personality tests showed there weren’t any factors in an email address that tell you reliably whether that’s true. That enjoyment of being around people, called ‘extroversion’, was the only trait the experiment looked at that email addresses couldn’t tell you anything about.
It’s maybe not surprising that certain traits of email addresses say something about your personality – after all, if you choose a name rather than use your real one, that’s kind of the point. The thing is, when even subtle choices like what email service you use affect how people see you, it shows just how much we all rely on figuring out what a new acquaintance is like. Lots of tiny little clues, from dress sense to address sense, add up to our first impression of someone.
The recipe for spam
It just keeps piling up. No matter how much email spam you get rid of, more of its slimy chunks always find their way to your inbox. Even though it’s so common, it’s a little mysterious. Who sends it? Does anyone actually buy the stuff in spam messages? What’s the best way to keep spam from oozing into your email? Much like both the processed meat and the Monty Python sketch from which it takes its name, the world of spam is weird.
Spam-spewing zombies
Depending on your point of view, spam could be sent by just a few rogues or millions of zombies. Even though Spamhaus, a charity devoted to tracking spam, estimates that more than 90% of all the emails sent in the world are spam, amounting to billions every day, there are probably only around 200 people responsible for it. That’s a tiny number of people for such a huge glut of emails. Those few people don’t send out all those messages themselves though, and that’s where an army of zombies comes in.
The few spam kingpins need lots of others to do the work, so a lot of spam actually gets sent by regular people all around the world, completely unaware they’re doing it. Their computers spew out spam on the sly because of little programs called malware running on their machines. Often malware comes tucked into attachments on other spam emails, into downloads on peer-to-peer networks, or even as part of a website. It secretly installs itself and gets to work in the background, turning someone’s friendly computer into a zombie under its control, using their internet connection to send out thousands of spam emails with its owner none the wiser.
The maths of being dumb
Ever read through a spam email advert? They might be lots of things – saucy, badly spelled, offensive, even criminal – but tempting probably isn’t one of them. If they’re so bad then why does spam exist at all? Isn’t the point of adverts to make people buy things? Get ready for this: it turns out that spam actually works. Not many people fall for spam, but not many have to. Because it’s free for the spammers to send their zombie-powered emails, even if fewer than one in a million people is head-slappingly brainless enough to click on a spam advert for an expensive designer watch, the spammer still makes money. When you’re sending out billions of emails every day those few people still add up to a lot. It makes you wonder if the same dumb people buy all the spam merchandise in the world. Maybe every city has one person whose house is overflowing with fake watches and pills from junk emails.
# MoRe to coMe guyz ...
Between sending emails, sorting out your social life, slobbing out watching YouTube and meandering down a crooked and endless path of links, it's possible to while away hours online. Is it possible, though, to be addicted to the Internet? If you've ever watched an entire day go by in front of a screen you may have wondered whether it is. Courtesy of the excellent blog Mind Hacks, we've got some good news and bad news for you on that front. The good news is that Internet addiction doesn't seem to be real, but the bad news is that there are good psychological reasons for why the internet can be so distracting. Here's the lowdown.
In the decade since the Internet went mainstream, there has been a certain amount of worry that people could become addicted to its electronic charms. Media reports tell stories of people who've dropped out or lost their jobs from spending all their time online, and American psychologists have even considered adding 'Internet addiction' to their official list of mental disorders. Fortunately, all that talk doesn't add up to a real condition. A recent roundup of all the studies ever conducted on Internet addiction finds that there's never been any good evidence for its existence.
Part of the problem lies in how some people define an addiction. If you consider yourself addicted to something if you spend lots of time doing it, suffer negative consequences from doing it, but also harm when you don't, then you'd be 'addicted' to lots of things. Like school, for example, or eating. It's true that some people do use the Internet so much that the rest of their lives falls apart, but blaming the Internet for it doesn't work. It's just as easy to spend all your time reading books or building model boats. All those things can certainly eat up your life if you let them, but that's not the same as being addicted.
All the same, the Internet is a great distraction. It’s easy to get away from doing difficult work (like, say, writing an article) by checking email, seeing what friends are up to on Facebook, or watching a video online. That ease is part of the problem. When you’re already working on your computer, the entire rest of the Internet is right there. It takes a mere few clicks to switch between your work and some funny cats. What’s more, online content tends to be short. You probably wouldn’t stop writing to watch an entire episode of a television show – half an hour is a big break to take just on impulse – but what’s the harm in stopping for a few minutes to watch something on YouTube? The cost in effort and time seems to be low, but the benefit of watching the funny cats is huge. You get to watch funny cats!
A classic approach to changing that distracting behaviour might be to change the cost/benefit ratio. If it weren’t so easy to get to the rest of the distracting stuff online, we might get more done. So perhaps someone could design a browser with a ‘work’ mode, where distracting sites were blocked. If you had to go through the trouble of turning off the work mode you probably wouldn’t do it quite so often.
There’s another interesting psychological principle that might be helping distract us, particularly in email checking. Do you ever find yourself checking your email so often it’s almost compulsive? There’s virtually no chance that someone will have emailed you in the time since you last checked it, but still…why not check just in case? It turns out that one of the best ways to train an animal (or, indeed a person – we’re animals too after all) is not to reward it every time it performs a particular action. It’s to reward it randomly when it performs the action. If there’s no way to predict whether it will get a reward or not, there’s no reason to ever stop performing the action. The reward could come at any time. If you think of an email as the reward, you can see why the lure of email checking can be so strong. Most times when you check your email there won’t be anything, but sometimes – at random times – there is! That tickles the reward centres of our brain, and we learn to do it more, in the hope of more rewards.
If someone ever tells you they think you’re addicted to the Internet, now you can reassure them that there’s never been a study that shows it’s possible. The power of the Internet to distract us is built right into the way we use it, though, so it’s good to be aware of that. Sometimes it just takes a really good amount of self-discipline to avoid the tempting distractions the Internet can offer. A good strategy might be to hold out the prospect of a reward once you’ve finished your work. Now that this article’s finished, for example, a bit of email checking and funny cats seems like just the right thing.
What does your email address say about you?
Everyone’s a little bit superficial. Even if we pride ourselves on being unjudgemental, whenever we meet someone we make guesses about their personality, and sometimes from the smallest clues. Neat appearance? We often bet they’ve got tidy lives too. Fidgety? Probably nervous. Researchers have found that we even make those kinds of judgements about people’s screen names and email addresses. But is that fair? Can you really tell what someone’s like from their email?
A team at the University of Leipzig in Germany wanted to find out. Almost 600 teenagers gave them their email addresses, which then went to a group of people to get their first impressions. These judges imagined what they thought the person was like in real life – based only on their email address – and gave them a rating on six different personality traits.
Underscore your personality
Even though they each did their judging separately, the judges came up with pretty similar guesses as each other. People tended to think that anyone with a Hotmail address was more extroverted – they were more likely to enjoy being the centre of attention. The same went for people that had funny email addresses. If you had an address that was boastful or a bit sexy, the judges guessed you probably thought a lot of yourself. People even had ideas about how many underscores were in an address – more made you look like you liked variety and were open to new experiences. When all the rating was over the researchers were surprised to find how consistent the judges’ answers were. Even in something as small as an email address, it looked like people shared the same stereotypes about what they meant.
The first impression test
Were those stereotypes correct? Well, there was a way to find out. Each person who put in an email address had also taken a personality test that rated the very same things the judges had been asked to rate. So when a judge thought that someone was likely to enjoy new things, the researchers could go back to their test and see if it was true. In the end it turned out that there was a kernel of truth in the judges’ predictions. They weren’t always right, but the judges did get a few handles on people’s personalities just from their email addresses.
Having a creative email address really does mean you’re probably more open to new things. Remember those underscores, the ones that people thought made you look like you liked variety? They were right about that too. That personality trait – called ‘openness’ – was what the judges were best at spotting. They were also good at telling what someone thought of themselves. If your email name is ‘thefascinatingking’ you probably are really that boastful in real life, but if it’s ‘shyguy’ you’re more likely to be a bit neurotic.
Fooled you!
Sometimes the judges all agreed on something that turned out to be completely wrong. The judges all thought they could tell when someone would be the life of the party – like if they had a funny address, or if they used Hotmail – but the personality tests showed there weren’t any factors in an email address that tell you reliably whether that’s true. That enjoyment of being around people, called ‘extroversion’, was the only trait the experiment looked at that email addresses couldn’t tell you anything about.
It’s maybe not surprising that certain traits of email addresses say something about your personality – after all, if you choose a name rather than use your real one, that’s kind of the point. The thing is, when even subtle choices like what email service you use affect how people see you, it shows just how much we all rely on figuring out what a new acquaintance is like. Lots of tiny little clues, from dress sense to address sense, add up to our first impression of someone.
The recipe for spam
It just keeps piling up. No matter how much email spam you get rid of, more of its slimy chunks always find their way to your inbox. Even though it’s so common, it’s a little mysterious. Who sends it? Does anyone actually buy the stuff in spam messages? What’s the best way to keep spam from oozing into your email? Much like both the processed meat and the Monty Python sketch from which it takes its name, the world of spam is weird.
Spam-spewing zombies
Depending on your point of view, spam could be sent by just a few rogues or millions of zombies. Even though Spamhaus, a charity devoted to tracking spam, estimates that more than 90% of all the emails sent in the world are spam, amounting to billions every day, there are probably only around 200 people responsible for it. That’s a tiny number of people for such a huge glut of emails. Those few people don’t send out all those messages themselves though, and that’s where an army of zombies comes in.
The few spam kingpins need lots of others to do the work, so a lot of spam actually gets sent by regular people all around the world, completely unaware they’re doing it. Their computers spew out spam on the sly because of little programs called malware running on their machines. Often malware comes tucked into attachments on other spam emails, into downloads on peer-to-peer networks, or even as part of a website. It secretly installs itself and gets to work in the background, turning someone’s friendly computer into a zombie under its control, using their internet connection to send out thousands of spam emails with its owner none the wiser.
The maths of being dumb
Ever read through a spam email advert? They might be lots of things – saucy, badly spelled, offensive, even criminal – but tempting probably isn’t one of them. If they’re so bad then why does spam exist at all? Isn’t the point of adverts to make people buy things? Get ready for this: it turns out that spam actually works. Not many people fall for spam, but not many have to. Because it’s free for the spammers to send their zombie-powered emails, even if fewer than one in a million people is head-slappingly brainless enough to click on a spam advert for an expensive designer watch, the spammer still makes money. When you’re sending out billions of emails every day those few people still add up to a lot. It makes you wonder if the same dumb people buy all the spam merchandise in the world. Maybe every city has one person whose house is overflowing with fake watches and pills from junk emails.
# MoRe to coMe guyz ...
