Physical Pain and Hard Thought
Good morning. It's December 13, 2020.
Thought of the Week:
“All walls are great if the roof doesn’t fall.” - Thom Yorke, frontman, Radiohead
New Research
Physical pain preferred to demanding thought. As technology changes our lives, we’re forced to rethink how we view the world. New research shows how biologically averse we are to the mental effort required to do so. Last month, psychologists at McGill and Carleton Universities published pioneering research comparing cognitive effort directly with physical pain. The study looks at the extent to which demanding mental tasks were aversive enough to drive people to accept physical pain as a means of escape. As cognitive demands increased, people chose to receive a painful stimulus than exert effort. (source: eLife Sciences)
DIY meaning-making on the rise as trust in institutions plummets. Last week, with the Institute for the Future, Weber Shandwick published a study to understand how people make sense of a world challenged by events in 2020. We found one clear theme: The ways people stay informed, build relationships, and find meaning is at a historic inflection point. Do it yourself world-building is preferred to sources reflecting the status quo. (source: Weber Shandwick).
Interpreting New Perspectives:
Zoom fatigue alters how we view distanced work and learning. Analysts are investigating why it feels more exhausting to meet on Zoom than in person. The term Zoom fatigue returns almost 700,000 hits on Google for tips to combat it. Investigations suggest the fatigue stems from seeing a reflection of ourselves, a draining form of self-surveillance. In addition, while Zoom has ways to position the squares, who is full-screen, and whether someone is visible, we can't see how others view us. The combination of personal reflection and uncertainty of appearance makes people feel uneasy and anxious. Analysts call it "Zoom Gaze," an underlying paranoia about how conversations, and our appearances, are administered. (source: Real Life Magazine).
Interest in online chess surges, along with cheating. Since airing on Netflix, The Queen's Gambit attracted 62 million viewers, making it their most-watched scripted series. It's sparked an online chess craze, with 100,000 new members a day joining Chess.com. Along with it, site administrators found a surge in the volume and dimensions of cheating. They've engaged "chess narcs" to protect the game's transition online. Chess narcs build algorithms to detect suspicious moves, with the capability of analyzing hundreds of millions of games. The systems have caught tens of thousands of chess cheats, including grandmasters. "It's a constant fight," said Emil Sutovsky, the director-general of FIDE, the chess's world governing body. Without the chess police, "it would be impossible to host any serious events." (source: WSJ, Business Insider)
Once private, diaries build local networks. This year saw a sharp rise in local communities built on pandemic diaries. In Wuhan, lockdown diaries from medical workers, Covid-19 patients, government officials, and writers brought visceral realities of the pandemic close to home. Pandemic diaries created small communities comprised mainly of friends, family, and acquaintances. Others, from regionally famous writers like Fang Fang, attracted millions of readers. By sharing personal stories of daily struggles, private thoughts brought the nation closer together. These diaries were eventually lifted out of their original context and turned into something else—a way to check people’s ideological temperatures. (source: Insights from Social Sciences).
TikTok, and its algorithms, building individualized worlds. With 700 million monthly users, TikTok broke out as a global phenomenon in 2020. Yet, there's more to study than its growing influence on digital and popular culture. TikTok is the only major social media app driven almost exclusively by artificial intelligence. The app's 'For You' page is chosen by an algorithm. What you see is determined by your previous behavior, along with other factors, such as location and device used. The algorithm's structure and priorities are critical, as it increasingly determines what we watch, read, and hear. It also influences how people are incentivized to create to get attention. If TikTok algorithms follow other big social network engagement models, it will make our digital worlds even more walled off from diverse perspectives, add to political polarization, and divert attention to extreme content. (source: Rest of World)
Educators becoming celebrity talent, category disruptors. The Hollywood agent model monetizes artists — not just stars on screen but those who have an outsized influence on culture like celebrity chefs. An emerging category is educators: those who combine insight, performance, and social network understanding to build influence outside campus along with their personal brands. Scott Galloway, a well-known NYU marketing professor, is among the most visible pioneers in this new field of “edutainment.” Anyone can take his new course, five hours of content in total, for $750. While more expensive than most online content, it's a fraction of the $70,000 students pay on campus. These online courses might be better thought of as private clubs. For a premium, you get the content as well as a new social network of interesting people and an alternative education experience. (source: Business Insider).
Buried in opinion, people constructing news worlds. A "news" paradox characterizes our age. We’re awash in what’s packaged as news, but we find ourselves in a state of deep distrust and confusion. Little-known legislation led to the extreme polarization and avalanche of opinion that causes it. In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine which required broadcasters to inform on public interest matters and present contrasting views on its meaning. This opened the floodgates for slanted opinion in the United States media ecosystem. Opinion was found to be a powerful attractor and less expensive than hard news to produce. The result is what we face today. It's harder to understand what is actually news. And it’s more difficult for carefully argued, rigorously presented opinion to breakthrough. This void leads to people to construct their information ecosystems, in some cases independent of truth, that form deep-seated beliefs. (source: CJR)
Other Links of Note
18 things that happened for the first time in 2020. 125 artists create 125 parallel worlds. We're touching our phones more than ever—and it's changing our bodies and brains. A community is working to build a second brain. Edutainment is not learning. Nothing made sense this year—unless you were on the Internet.
Bell well. I will see you next week.
CP
Each week, I share research bits informing 'Perspective Agents'—a media project about how intelligent products, ideas, and revelations change how we see and experience the world.