Category: Social Computing

Writing about social computing (digital media, social media, cyborg anthropology, online communities, et cetera).

Online Psychotherapy May Be More Effective

Psychotherapy Via Internet as Good as If Not Better Than Face-To-Face Consultations: I think this is fascinating, and look forward to seeing more research into this going forward. (I’d like to see the experiment replicated as well as a more thorough tear down of the paper, but I appreciate the research nonetheless.)

“In the medium term, online psychotherapy even yields better results. Our study is evidence that psychotherapeutic services on the internet are an effective supplement to therapeutic care.”

I’m both pleased and unsurprised by the findings, when you take into consideration some prior research that’s been done (thinking about some of the comments in the IRC Francais paper published back in 2002: I think it allowed us to get to know each other better. […] You learn about [the others] as people. We would talk about relationships and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t talk about in class.). It helps validate my feeling that online interaction and community serve very real, very valid roles, in ways that can be just as effective (or more) as in-person interaction. That’s not to say there aren’t issues that also need to be taken into account, but there IS value there.

Toxic Communities: Behavior vs People

Toxic Behavior in League of Legends: A nice summary of some of the research coming out of Riot Games about toxic behavior in gaming communities, over at Nelson’s Weblog. You should really go read it (and watch the talk it’s based on), but the quick takeaway is: most toxic behavior comes from people who are usually upstanding community members but end up having a “bad day.” As Andy Baio points out, the solution for toxicity in your community isn’t (always) banning, but rather having moderators and community managers available to intervene and check in on users when toxic behavior first starts manifesting. (This mirrors my own observations doing community management work — the people acting out are rarely bad people, and the more you can treat them like humans having a bad day, the more you can smooth out toxic behavior before it becomes overwhelming.)

More on Cognitive Load and Decision Making

8 Things You Don’t Know Are Affecting Your Decisions Every Day: As a follow-up to the article I posted yesterday, here’s another article about cognitive load, and how we end up making worse decisions over time, over at Buffer. The more choices the user has to make, the more likely they’ll simply choose the default/easy/safe (but not necessarily correct) choice as time progresses. (Hat tip to Felicia Day for linking to it.)

Depleting Cognitive Resources

Your App Makes Me Fat: a neat essay over at Serious Pony discussing research into cognitive load and why it makes sense to avoid branding noise in your user experience.

But if it’s “content” designed solely to suck people in (“7 ways to be OMG awesome!!”) for the chance to “convert”, we’re hurting people. If we’re pumping out “content” because frequency, we’re hurting people.

Hypersigils, Identity, and the Internet

Back in 2010, I ended up having a really rewarding Twitter conversation with some very smart people, talking about hypersigils and how they apply to the internet. I’ve been thinking more about the topic lately, and wanted to expand on what was said before.

Let’s start with the term hypersigil. The term was coined by Grant Morrison, but the concept has been around for a lot longer than that. The term has a certain magickal [sic] connotation because of its origins, and I know that some folks get squicked out about that. If it makes you feel any better, just think of it as a psychological focus used to affect personal change, in the form of creating a narrative. If that’s still not enough, come up with a better term that does an even better job of wrapping a complex concept into a compact term, that does an even better job of packing loads of exformation into one word, and then popularize that instead. I’d love to hear it.
Continue reading “Hypersigils, Identity, and the Internet”

Clay Shirky's TED Talk about SOPA and PIPA

I completely agree. I also feel the online protests today are invaluable: it’s not enough to defeat these bills. We need to make it absolutely and abundantly clear that these sorts of laws are unacceptable.

I’d go farther than that, though: I sincerely hope that this pushback will cause dialogue to be opened up about revisiting the nature of intellectual property and copyright — and I mean REAL dialogue, not just specific industries with a vested interest in locking in more power and restrictions. We need to acknowledge that the idea of the Commons has grown. Scrap what we have and go in with no preconceived notions, go back to the original discussions of copyright (and patents and trademarks…) and ask the question of what exactly we need to protect and how much.

Sherry Turkle on Social Media

Social media, for all of it’s bounties—and I’m very enthusiastic of all the bounties of social media—it also gives us an opportunity to hide. We perform ourselves on social media, and that is different from being ourselves on social media. That ability to perform yourself is also an ability to hide. It leads to something that I call “Fear of missing out.” You’re always watching what other people are doing and you begin to be jealous because they’re showing their best selves and you’re showing your best self. You almost become jealous of the life you live on Facebook. You have to remind yourself that it’s your life because you’re showing your best self. Sherry Turkle

Indie Web Wishlist

I’d like to self-host everything, and then broadcast those materials out to the relevant locations (rather than vice versa). With that in mind, these are my wish list services I want to replicate in a self-host+broadcast method:

  • Status Updates — broadcast automagically to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+, including long-form article notification
  • Gallery (media management) — with broadcasting to 500px and flickr.
  • Bookmarking — with broadcasting to delicious and google bookmarks
  • Identity management — tracking what services I’m connected to, with notes as to which are broadcast TO, and which are still broadcast FROM (plus aggregation of all these services into one self-hosted spot wherever possible)

Comcast, Walled Gardens, and Games

There’s a lot of talk currently about the Level-3/Comcast mess, where Comcast is demanding additional money from Level 3 (an internet backbone and current partner with Netflix for providing streaming media) before they will allow streaming media onto their network. Comcast’s reasoning is that Level 3 is acting as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), not just as an internet backbone, and thus no longer qualifies for the peerage agreements that would allow for traffic between the two networks without additional fees. Which is a bogus assertion, and feels like a money-grab: Comcast’s customers are paying for that bandwidth already, and making a legitimate request for the data being provided — all Level 3 is doing is sending the requested data. To then block the data that the customer has paid for (twice: they pay Comcast for the bandwidth, and Netflix for the content) directly violates the principles of an open internet.

This is a prime example of why there are concerns over the imminent Comcast-NBC Universal deal (for those who haven’t been paying attention: Comcast is trying to purchase NBC Universal from General Electric for $6.5 billion dollars CASH, plus investing an additional $7.5 billion dollars in programming), in terms of media consolidation and vertical control effectively creating a walled garden. To quote Senator Bernie Sanders:

The sale of NBCU to Comcast would create an enormously powerful, vertically integrated media conglomerate, causing irreparable damage to the American media landscape and ultimately to society as a whole.

This is hardly the first time Comcast has been caught with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar, taking censorial action while claiming to be in favor of an open internet. Their behavior is antithetical to net neutrality on a fundamental and obvious level.

So, why does this matter to game development? A variety of reasons, actually. Regardless of what type of games you are talking about, modern gaming takes bandwidth: assets need to be downloaded, whether as a standalone game title, or even the casual, cloud-based games you find on Armor Games or Kongregate or even Facebook. If there is any type of online component, there will be regular communication between client and server. This sort of bandwidth costs money, and if developers have to start paying additional fees to be allowed into walled gardens, the cost may reach a point where it is no longer feasible for many developers to continue. Even already, a number of games are looking at solutions to mitigate the costs of hosting content, such as distributed downloading solutions like BitTorrent (yes, believe it or not, peer to peer isn’t just for illegal uses). While some price fluctuation is expected and reasonable as the market shifts and costs of hosting and bandwidth change, at what point do developers (including smaller developers without the resources of large publishers) have to start dealing directly with Comcast (or other gatekeepers) for the right to sell their own product to the public? One of the biggest benefits of the internet, open access, not having to go through a gatekeeper process and large publishers to share your work with the world, is already being challenged by device-specific gates, like the Apple App Store for the iPhone, and to a lesser extent the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare. (I say lesser extent because those networks are ones that ostensibly can’t reach the rest of the internet without additional effort, if at all, whereas the iPhone App store has no such issues.) We do not need, nor want, service providers blockading legitimate customers from our products.