This is Your Brain on Facebook

I wrote this as an Op-Ed for the last progression of University Writing. Posted here to share.

A recent study found that 87% of US undergraduates are on Facebook for an average of 93 minutes daily. At 11 hours a week that’s nearly as long as many of us spend in class. If 12 hours of classroom time is supposed to not just teach us facts but also train us to become more complex thinkers why do we pretend that 11 hours of Facebook won’t have an affect, too? Facebook asks us to constantly sift through posts, skim, evaluate, and make microscopic comments. By using Facebook we are training our minds to condense all issues into easily “like”-able one-liners, rather than complex essays.

During finals last month many of us turned to Facebook to relieve stress. Many students, including myself, found that Facebook became not a limited relief valve but a means of procrastination. By the night before an exam we thought our only recourse was to block Facebook. Then, finally, our true academic selves would shine in blissful focus and productivity.

If only it was that easy. The distraction and inability to focus that led us to block Facebook wasn’t because we were using Facebook that night. It was the result of our brain adapting to excel at the Facebook friendly tasks we demanded of it, at the expense of less frequent tasks, such as deep reading. After so many hours on Facebook over so many months the Facebook way of shallow thinking was dominant. The focused contemplative mindset became a difficult to achieve anomaly. The night before a paper was due was simply too late to change anything. Even though we were offline we carried Facebook’s in our cognition.

Any new intellectual technology, including Facebook, encourages certain ways of thinking and discourages others. The invention of writing allowed humanity to easily store and retrieve information, a laborious process in oral cultures, and in turn led to an explosion of knowledge. However Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, warns of the cognitive downside to writing by retelling the legend of king Thalmus, who, upon receiving the gift of writing from the god Theuth immediately questions the tradeoff it requires. Readers, Socrates says, will “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant” because there was no oral instruction, and therefore, in his opinion, no deep learning. Writing fundamentally changed how we think. Today Facebook is changing it again. It encourages us to think in terms of connections, which may be advantageous in an increasingly interdisciplinary world, but it discourages deep reading, analysis, and debate. We must acknowledge these changes, and then adapt to them.

Facebook has many advantages, such as staying in touch with friends & family. However research, and common sense, suggest that large amounts of unfocused Facebook browsing damages our ability to concentrate, to understand complex ideas, and to develop our own ideas. Must we choose to either concede our thought patterns to Mark Zuckerberg, or abandon Facebook entirely? Neither is a great choice.

Instead of simply embracing or abandoning Facebook take the opportunity presented by the new semester to assess your use over the long run. What benefits does it provide you? How can you maximize those benefits, while reducing the costs? By becoming a conscientious user today, by finals at the end of the semester your brain will be better trained to focus and think richer thoughts.

Being deliberate about Facebook isn’t easy, but hopefully a few of these techniques, which helped me, will help you. Schedule a concentrated block of Facebook time rather than browsing whenever the urge strikes; this shifts Facebook into a hobby rather than a shameful timewasting habit. When you’re off Facebook, be off Facebook; avoid the siren call of a quick status post, “Studying sooooo hard at Butler!” Adjust your Facebook settings to reduce notification emails; it’s much harder to resist temptation when it thrusts itself into your inbox. Don’t use Facebook as a study break; it forces you into the skim-evaluate-quip mindset rather than read-analyze-write. Plus, just like potato chips, it’s awfully hard to limit it to “just 2 minutes.” Experiment with different ways to control your use, and see what works for you.

Facebook will one day be passé, but whatever replaces it will affect our cognition, just like speech, writing, email, and Facebook itself already have. By first understanding the medium, and then deliberately engaging with it, we can attempt to capture the benefits and avoid the harmful effects.

Facebook and Apple should both be scared.

The ever clever DrJonboyG linked to this article about Facebook being too large to adequately handle dispute. Luckily I haven’t had to deal with that part of the service. However like all their users I’ve had to deal with them, and other services, viewing user privacy and security as a tertiary, at best, concern. It seems like over the last year or so we’ve entered what feels, to me, like a big slide back in individual user rights in technology.

In the mid-2000s everyone was in favor of openness. Big players had APIs, folks opened their systems up, open source was considered cool, mashups were all the rage. More recently, the biggest players took a look at that, and seemed to realize that they had most of the cards, and that they could turn this openness into a one way street. Facebook asked itself, “Why should we integrate with anyone else, when we can try to force everyone else to integrate with us?” They also looked around and realized they had a lot of information about people, information that was valuable to advertisers and others. If they combined steps 1 & steps 2 they could easily have more control, more relevance, more information, and therefore more money. Matt McKeon and The NY Times have excellent visualizations of Facebook’s evolving privacy policies.

Facebook is certainly pissing off a lot of users who’ve noticed this. Research from my employer suggests that it’s mostly the 35+ group that’s pissed off, but anecdotally I know many in their 20s that are angry about it. I have yet to see anyone defend the expansionist policies. I support the idea of reducing redundant and unnecessary logins, but Facebook as the one-true-account has never sat right with me. The issue for me isn’t any one thing right now – I (think I) turned off the privacy settings I object to, and prevent Apps from doing things I object to. However they’re destroying the goodwill I have toward them, and making it more like that I’d kill my account there and jump ship.

I view Apple’s policies with the iPhone as fairly similar. They’ve had a pretty good lead and an excellent product, but their continued asinine policies are destroying not just their market share, but the good will people feel to the brand. I actually don’t have that many objections to AT&T lately, but I know that’s a major sticking point for many. My objections are almost all related to openess and control. One of the major reasons I love OSX is that it gives me the best of both worlds – I have a polished UI with excellent commercial and free desktop software, as well as robust open source software and plenty of control. I can swap out a SSD, run server software, use Homebrew to easily install traditionally linux software. This combination is more than the sum of its parts, for me.

However Apple has done the opposite with the iPhone – making it more locked down and controlled than just about any other device I use regularly. I can’t install random software I want to. I can’t use it easily/cheaply in Europe. I can’t tether with it. I can’t customize the interface. I don’t want flash on my smartpone at all (and use click to flash on my laptop) but Apple’s sweeping rejection of non-Objective-C apps is a dangerous prescedent, and I am sad that whatever other cool stuff a developer might come up with may be stifled by the new policy. The new features in iPhone OS4 are hardly anything to get excited about – more ads, more obnoxious ads, extremely controlled multitasking for limited uses, and removing a few of the limitations on the private APIs.

Android has overtaken the iPhone in US sales, and anecdotally I know many people in the Smartphone market who’ve gone for Android devices like the HTC Incredible. I know that the 4th generation iPhone this summer will be a much harder sell to me, and many others. We’re tired of Apple incompetently managing their walled garden, and Google has cleverly provided the alternative. Developers who’ve been bit by AppStore policies may moving elsewhere.

Twitter has some potential trouble with their developer ecosystem. They now have official iPhone (Tweetie, which I use, bought and rebranded), Blackberry and Android apps, potentially alienating many of the third party developers already. They’ve basically stated that they’re going to be moving in to plug holes in the service that third parties are filling now. In the end, I think that’s good. It’s stupid to expect people to know about and use bit.ly, twitpic.com, etc. However they’re also increasing the risk of those developers fleeing to a competing service as well. The changes twitter is introducing are the least risky in my opinion – they’re codifying a lot of the stuff the ecosystem has built and making it easier for all users to do what many already do. I think there will still be room for innovative services (like bit.ly’s analytics) and clients (like CoTweet and TweetDeck providing business user features).

It’s interesting to see how these great tech companies who’ve built very successful products seem to be missing their achilles’ heels. They have big established market share, but refusal to deviate from their established plans seems to be costing them dearly in terms of consumer interest and good will. Facebook and Apple both had near monopolies in their sectors. They’re strong, good companies with lots of intriguing ideas. However they’re inflexible, and hard to deal with. I see big problems in both their futures unless they learn and change directions.