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We can now play being inside a virtual world. It could be integrated in shopping to customise products, etc.

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Virtual Reality - SteamVR featuring the HTC Vive

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Famous photograph of people reading newspapers and not talking to each other on the bus. So, do technologies make us antisocial, e.g. not talking on busses and underground, or it is exaggerated?

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150 -is the number of people we call casual friends

50 -the number of people we call close friends—perhaps the people you’d invite to a group dinner

5-your close support group

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If you've ever been romantically rejected by someone who just wanted to be friends, you may have delivered a version of this line: "I've got enough friends already." Your implication, of course, being that people only have enough emotional bandwidth for a certain number of buddies.

It turns out that's not just an excuse. There are well-defined limits to the number of friends and acquaintances the average person can retain. But the question about whether these limits are the same in today's digital world - one in which it's common to have social media profiles, or online forums, with thousands of followers - is more complicated.

According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the "magic number" is 150. Dunbar became convinced that there was a ratio between brain sizes and group sizes through his studies of non-human primates. This ratio was mapped out using neuroimaging and observation of time spent on grooming, an important social behaviour of primates. Dunbar concluded that the size, relative to the body, of the neocortex - the part of the brain associated with cognition and language - is linked to the size of a cohesive social group. This ratio limits how much complexity a social system can handle.

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Dunbar and his colleagues applied this basic principle to humans, examining historical, anthropological and contemporary psychological data about group sizes, including how big groups get before they split off or collapse. They found remarkable consistency around the number 150.

According to Dunbar and many researchers he influenced, this rule of 150 remains true for early hunter-gatherer societies as well as a surprising array of modern groupings: offices, communes, factories, residential campsites, military organisations, 11th Century English villages, even Christmas card lists. Exceed 150, and a network is unlikely to last long or cohere well. (One implication for the era of urbanisation may be that, to avoid alienation or tensions, city residents should find quasi-villages within their cities.)

Dunbar has a sense of humour about becoming nearly synonymous with a number - an unusual bragging right for a social scientist. "The odd thing about it is most people who have things named after them are actually dead," he observes drily.

But 150 alone doesn't tell the whole story. Other numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis too.

According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people - loved ones. That's followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.

Dunbar isn't sure why these layers of numbers are all multiples of five, but says, "this number five does seem to be fundamental to monkeys and apes in general".

Of course, all of these numbers really represent range. Extroverts tend to have a larger network and spread themselves more thinly across their friends, while introverts concentrate on a smaller pool of "thick" contacts. And women generally have slightly more contacts within the closest layers.

"What determines these layers in real life, in the face-to-face world... is the frequency at which you see people," says Dunbar. "You're having to make a decision every day about how you invest what time you have available for social interaction, and that's limited."

Certain organisations have taken these ideas to heart. The Swedish Tax Authority, for instance, has restructured their offices to stay within the 150-person threshold.
Debating Dunbar
Not everyone subscribes to the social brain hypothesis. Some are sceptical about the possibility of deriving a magic number for social interaction at all.

Still, it can be a useful exercise for thinking through communities and evolution.

"Although there are many factors that can limit the number of relationships that we create and maintain, these studies help us to better understand... and measure such variables' influence," says Cristina Acedo Carmona, an anthropologist and economist at the University of León in Spain.

Among those who agree that a Dunbar-ian number can be found, some contest whether it's 150. Research on varied social groups in the US suggests that their social networks cluster around 290 in size. And these numbers may be significantly skewed by outliers.

One argument is that the number of social connections isn't normally distributed (or shaped like a bell curve), so a few people with massive numbers of contacts may be throwing off the average.

For instance, if someone is wealthy enough to hire assistants to partly manage their relationships - or to outsource some of the emotional labour to others - they might be less constrained by the number of relationships they can comfortably maintain. As in so many aspects of social life, the super-connected are the super-privileged.

There are also critiques of Dunbar's number on methodological grounds. Primates' brain sizes are influenced by other aspects besides social complexity: factors such as diet may explain them too. And a British-Dutch team has argued that even though the neocortex is finite, social capacity can be stretched in different cultural settings and with the aid of different technologies. One example is the use of extensive mobile phone contact lists by low-income Jamaicans. These lists, which involve careful cultivation of even casual relationships, often contain many more than 150 contacts.

Indeed, social capital can be especially important for people who don't have other forms of capital, as suggested by Acedo Carmona's comparative research on northern Ghana and Oaxaca, Mexico. High biological diversity, remote mountainous settings, and the influences of Spanish colonialism on ethnic identities have all contributed to Oaxaca's small trust circles, largely consisting of nuclear relatives. But northern Ghana's scarcer environmental resources have made inter-ethnic cooperation and larger trust circles more important for survival. Thus, "focusing on brain size and cognitive limitations may be overly simplistic", Acedo Carmona stresses.

Dunbar's number may be most applicable for premodern societies or for middle-income groups in contemporary Western societies. Research that supports it is skewed towards Weird (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) societies.

But even these are becoming more complicated, due to the way internet culture is transforming relationships.
Online presence
One modern-day version of a cave-side campfire gathering is Slack, the email replacement app that's been delighting workplace communications pros, and exhausting overworked employees, since 2013. And one person who's taken advantage of Slack's community-building possibilities is US digital designer Carly Ayres.

Several years ago Ayres created a Slack group for fellow designers, 100s Under 100. It now hosts 84 channels moderated by 14 admins, who are aiming to diversify the group behind its initial core of white US women.

Dunbar's number makes intuitive sense to Ayres, given her observations of online communities. "I do think there's some truth to the idea that there's only really so much information you can keep in your head... so many avatars. The more you know about someone, I think the better that relationship is, but probably also limits the number of relationships you can have," she says.

100s Under 100 aims for a balance between size and intimacy by splintering channels into smaller ones when they become unwieldy. Akin to "a state school or a large university, you make it smaller with subcommunities", Ayres explains.

The group also purges inactive members periodically - a more deliberate form of the way everyone lets certain relationships fade away because of insufficient time or energy to maintain them.

More and more people are preaching the gospel of small being better when it comes to online social life. Scale may be one of the issues with the massive social networking sites that now dominate our lives. And for certain Facebook users, the smaller and more secret the groups, the better.

Thus far, the research of Dunbar and colleagues on online relationships suggests that these are similar to offline relationships in terms of numerical restrictions. "When people looked at the structure of online gaming world, they get virtually the same layers as we get in all of the other contexts," he says. "And it just looks as though it's the same design features of the human mind that are imposing constraints on the number of individuals you can kind of work with mentally at any one time."

Dunbar and colleagues also have performed research on Facebook, using factors like the number of groups in common and private messages sent to map the number of ties against the strength of those ties.

When people have more than 150 friends on Facebook or 150 followers on Twitter, Dunbar argues, these represent the normal outer layers of contacts (or the low-stakes connections): the 500 and 1500. For most people, intimacy may just not be possible beyond 150 connections. "These digital media - and I'm including telephones in there - are really just providing you with another mechanism for contacting friends," Dunbar says.

Even the possibility of anonymity online doesn't seem to Dunbar to be substantially different to the offline world. He compares anonymous internet interactions to the use of confessionals in the Catholic church. It isn't a close relationship, but it is one that recognises the benefits of confidentiality among quasi-strangers.

"It's extremely hard to cry on a virtual shoulder," Dunbar deadpans. "Having a conversation isn't like a lighthouse; it is not just blinking away out there and maybe someone is listening, and maybe somebody is not."

In this view, the non-physical, non-real-time nature of internet relationships means that they can't challenge "real-world" ones in meaningful ways. Face-to-face relationships, with all the non-verbal information that is so critical to communication, remain paramount.

But Dunbar's own research suggests generational differences in this regard. Those aged 18-24 have much larger online social networks than those aged 55 and above. And the primacy of physical contact in the social brain hypothesis may apply less to young people who have never known life without the internet, for whom digital relationships may be just as meaningful as analogue ones.

Plus, online groups like 100s Under 100 aren't intended to last forever; Ayres initially envisioned that the group would dissolve within a few years. Without the pressure for longevity, ideal community size may be less relevant.

It makes sense that there's a finite number of friends most individuals can have. What's less clear is whether that capacity is being expanded, or contracted, by the ever-shifting ways people interact online.

Invisible numbers
Curious about the hidden forces shaping the world? So are we. This article is part of our Invisible Numbers series, where we explore the digits, percentages and equations that govern our everyday lives in dramatic ways, often without us realising it.

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Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships

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The theory of Dunbar's number holds that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at once. But is the rule true in today's world of social media?

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38. How disconnecting the internet could help our identity

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38. How disconnecting the internet could help our identity

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"I'll often see moments as 'good content' for my social media followers,"

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As the internet has developed and social media has grown, people's online identity has shifted increasingly away from their real-life personas. But how has this online influence changed us?

In 1993, in the early days of the world wide web, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker.

It showed a dog, sitting at a computer, turning to another dog and saying: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

The cartoon by Peter Steiner and one of the magazine's most reproduced ever, captures the thrill of those early days when the internet, then a matter of slow dial-up connections and clunky text-only "bulletin boards", provided a way for people to reengineer their identity online.

Men could pose as women, the young as old, amateurs as experts, country loners as sophisticated urbanites.

Last year, 22 years on, The New Yorker published another cartoon on the subject, drawn by Kaamran Hafeez. This time, two dogs are watching their owner surf the web. The caption: "Remember when, on the internet, nobody knew who you were?"

The internet has had a huge impact on our sense of identity since its explosion into popular use about 25 years ago. It has brought into our lives people, ideas, viewpoints and cultures that, otherwise, we would never have met or heard of.

And that has forced us to reconsider our identities in comparison with theirs. It has allowed us to ally with people with a similar outlook and become part of their group, even if they live thousands of miles away.

And, above all, it has given us a way to re-engineer our identity almost continually and discover what it is like to be someone very different from our "real" selves.

This is not new, of course. Through make-up, clothing, the music we like, the books we read, the opinions we express, the people we vote for, and so on for ever, we have always been busy defining and redefining our identity.

But, before the internet, that busy-ness took place in the small arena of our friends, family and colleagues - and indeed, much of it was about developing separate identities to show to each group.

Now the potential audience for our identity - and so much of identity is about performance - has increased to levels that, a quarter of a century ago, we would have had only if we were a film star or a rock musician.

If we have 300 friends on Facebook and each of them has 300 friends - and many people, of course, have more - that's 90,000 people who are two degrees of separation away.

And even if 90% of those are duplicates (people who are also friends with our friends), that leaves 9,000 people observing our life, Like-ing, or not, our opinions and commenting on our photos.

That's an audience that would have been almost impossible, for someone not working in the arts, politics or the media, to reach in pre-internet times. Now it's commonplace. Is it surprising that many of us spend a huge amount of time managing our online identity?

Not only has the internet given us these vastly bigger audiences for our identity, it has changed the way we understand how other people see us, from a (usually) private and intimate process to a very public scrutiny of who we are.

Through Likes, comments, ratings and so on, we receive almost instantaneous feedback on the adjustments we make to our identity, and these then become part of our identity itself, as other people can see them.

This is not quiet feedback from close friends - the traditional way that we understand how our identity is perceived. This is the opinion of the masses, viewed by the masses.

Social media has, in part, become a huge exercise in public judgement. And, as anyone who has been shamed or bullied online knows, it can be incredibly powerful.

In small groups of individuals who know each other, the clash between how we see our identity and how others see it can be managed. Managing our identity on the internet takes much more work.

A man called "Jack" told the Guardian recently that he checks his social media profiles tens of times a day and how that takes him away from the physical world around him.

"I'll often see moments as 'good content' for my social media followers," he said. "It's almost like the photographing and sharing of a cool time is more important than actually appreciating it in real life."

This ability to comment on others, often from a distance, has given us a significant power without much corresponding responsibility.

Online, we regularly rate and comment on people and services in ways that, if we are British at least, we wouldn't think of doing face to face - and that changes our own identities too, from, to put it crudely, being reasonable human beings to acting as cowardly bullies.

The internet is heralded as being about connection. But in many ways it has given us the opportunity to disconnect our acts from their effects. How often do we, for example, consider the consequences of giving an Uber driver a low rating because we didn't like the way they spoke to us?

Yet falling below an average score of 4.5 stars puts Uber drivers at serious risk of being thrown off the network. Is that really what we had in mind when we tapped out our rating on the way out of the cab?

As well being a world of huge numbers, the internet is also about very high speeds - churning big numbers very quickly is about the only thing computers are good at. And we humans are in danger of trying to keep up with it - a race we can never win.

This means that the world feels much faster than it did even a quarter of a century ago. The same effect was felt in the early days of the industrial revolution in the late 18th Century.

We fret about replying quickly to emails and WhatsApp messages, we worry about not having instant answers to problems we face in life - the illusion created by Google - and we also flit very quickly between identities.

A good example of this is online activism. There are many organisations online that bring about significant change in the world by amassing the power of large numbers of people. And the internet gives us a way of expressing our opinions on geopolitical developments even from a long way away.

But, encouraged, I think, by the speed of the internet, we are also very fickle in the campaigns we support, because they require almost no effort to get involved.

Is it still the case that #weareallCharlieHebdo? Or that we are desperately concerned about the fate of the 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria in 2014? Or was it just too easy to send a tweet or sign a petition and then move on?

In one sense, of course, the world has (sadly) long been like this, with the news-cycle's intrinsic short attention span feeding our own. But identity is just as much about purpose and a cause as it is about appearance and opinion, and it is about our actions too. And when those actions stop at clicking on a link and entering our email address, it makes our identity, at the very least, dangerously superficial and fragile.

But, for me, the biggest threat to our identities comes from the internet's noise. I teach at The School of Life, which was set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to help people think better about the lives they live.

About the author

David Baker is a journalist and broadcaster with a special interest in technology's impact on humanity. He was the founding managing editor of Wired in the UK and teaches at The School of Life in London and Brazil.

Many of the people who come to our classes complain of the difficulty of finding their "true" identity in amongst all the conflicting messages and demands of the world around them.

This idea, that, somewhere deep down, is the "real" us, is as old as philosophy itself. And it is probably the bedrock of our identity, because it involves things like our values, our sense of purpose, the beliefs that make us who we are. This is a long way from identity as defined by our culture or ethnicity, or as defined by the things we buy and Like.

It is more intimate than that, the part of us that keeps us understanding who we are when the rest of the world becomes overwhelming and confusing. At the School we often pose the question, "Are you living the life you want to be living, or the life other people want you to live?" (It comes from Socrates.)

The internet has brought the opinions of others flooding into our own lives as never before, and it is threatening our ability to understand who we really are.

To discover our true selves, maybe it's time to disconnect. Not for ever, that would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater, but for significant periods of our days, weeks, months. Because, with disconnection comes quiet and with quiet comes the ability to reflect.

In researching my World Service documentary Default World, for the BBC's season on identity, I spoke to a lot of people about their experience of technology.

Many said they were trying to spend less time online, taking a break from Facebook, connecting only when they needed to. And they spoke with pleasure of rediscovering the physical world around them and the world of human-to-human interaction, unmediated by computers. I think this is encouraging.

We are still learning how to be on the internet, what effect this huge network of computers, server farms, fibre-optic cables and radio signals - a network we have built ourselves - has on our sense of self. We are at the moment, as Thoreau said of people in the industrial revolution, "tools of our tools".

Disconnecting gives us a chance turn the tables - to see the internet not as something that overwhelms us but as a tool, which we use as and when we need it. Only then can we really understand who we are and what we can give the world. And that, deep down, is the real root of our identity.
As people become increasingly connected and more mobile, the BBC is exploring how identities are changing.
Catch up with programmes, downloads and clips from the season.

Where are you going? - The surprising answers to a simple question

Default World - The morals of the technical elite

Why I'm Not Just Blind - Must blind people be either inspirational or deserving pity?
Learn more about the Default World Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. is broadcast on the BBC World Service at 18:00 GMT on Saturday 2 April and at 11:00 GMT on Sunday 3 April - catch up on BBC iPlayer Radio BBC's Identity season, find all the programme s or join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #BBCIdentity.

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As the internet has developed and social media has grown, people's online identity has shifted increasingly away from their real-life personas. But how has this online influence changed us? In 1993, in the early days of the world wide web, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker.

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37. Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?

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37. Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?

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'The old web, a place where identity could remain separate from real life, is rapidly disappearing from the computer screen'

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Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?

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Facebook and Google want to link online and offline personas, while 4Chan and other social sites prefer people to play with the freedom of pseudonyms

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36. Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

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36. Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

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We are connected, but still alone. The type of connections we used to make is the one that could be amended, reviewed, deleted. We expect more from technology and less from each other. Being alone feels like a problem to us, so we try to solve it by connecting. However, Turtle shows how connection could lead to isolation. Solitude is important, she claims.

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35. This video of all the worst bits of Instagram will make you want to delete your account

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35. This video of all the worst bits of Instagram will make you want to delete your account

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The video shows the variety of pictures on Instagram in a slideshow and there are just several types of photos. We could have taken those pictures in so many different other ways!

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A musician called Hiérophante has made a video that shows just how unoriginal we all are on Instagram. Well, most of us.

The video is a slideshow of images - collections of all the tedious clichés that are perpetual on the app.

Selfies feature heavily, as do pictures of people "propping up" the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or doing the leg-sausage thing in the bath.

I took advantage of our tendency to be unoriginal on social media to make this animation.

Everything from images search to editing is made 'by hand' without any automated software.

Some people point out to me that some similar videos already exists so it seems that making a video about clichés is a cliché too...

It's so uninspiring that it's almost inspiring. But it's not. It's just upsetting...

Unhandled component type: vimeo

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This video of all the worst parts of Instagram will make you want

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A musician called Hiérophante has made a video that shows just how unoriginal we all are on Instagram. Well, most of us. The video is a slideshow of images - collections of all the tedious clichés that are perpetual on the app.

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'But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute.'

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Zygmunt Bauman has just celebrated his 90 th birthday and taken two flights from his home in the northern British city of Leeds to get to an event in Burgos, northern Spain. He admits to being tired as we begin the interview, but he still manages to express his ideas calmly and clearly, taking his time with each response because he hates giving simple answers to complex questions. Since developing his theory of liquid modernity in the late 1990s - which describes our age as one in which "all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice" - he has become a leading figure in the field of sociology. His work on inequality and his critique of what he sees as the failure of politics to meet people's expectations, along with a highly pessimistic view of the future of society, have been picked up by the so-called May 15 "Indignant" movement in Spain - although he has repeatedly highlighted its weaknesses.

Born in Poland in 1925, Bauman's parents fled to the Soviet Union following the German invasion in 1939. In 1968, after he was stripped of his post as a teacher and expelled from the Communist Party along with thousands of other Jews in the wake of the Six-Day War, he left for the United Kingdom, taking up a post at Leeds University where he is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology. His work has been awarded numerous international prizes, among them Spain's Prince of Asturias Award, in 2010.

He has outlined his pessimistic world view in books such as 2014's Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, which argues that the world is paying a high price for the neoliberal revolution that began in the 1980s and that wealth has not trickled down to the rest of society. In Moral Blindness, published last year, he and co-author Leonidas Donskis warn about the loss of community in our increasingly individualistic world.
QUESTION. You have described inequality as a "metastasis." Is democracy under threat?
ANSWER. We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn't keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it's a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.
Q. In which direction is the pendulum that you describe between freedom and security swinging at the moment?
A. These are two values that are tremendously difficult to reconcile. If you want more security, you're going to have to give up a certain amount of freedom; if you want more freedom, you're going to have to give up security. This dilemma is going to continue forever. Forty years ago we believed that freedom had triumphed and we began an orgy of consumerism. Everything seemed possible by borrowing money: cars, homes... and you just paid for it later. The wakeup call in 2008 was a bitter one, when the loans dried up. The catastrophe, the social collapse that followed hit the middle classes particularly hard, dragging them into a precarious situation where they remain: they don't know if their company is going to merge with another and they will be laid off, they don't know if what they have bought really belongs to them... Conflict is no longer between classes, but between each person and society. It isn't just a lack of security, but a lack of freedom.
Q. You say that progress is a myth, because people no longer believe the future will be better than the past.
A. We are in a period of interregnum, between a time when we had certainties and another when the old ways of doing things no longer work. We don't know what is going to replace this. We are experimenting with new ways of doing things. Spain tried questioning things through the May 15 (15M) movement, when people took over public spaces, arguing, trying to replace parliamentary procedures with a kind of direct democracy. This hasn't lasted long. Austerity policies will continue, nobody could stop them, but they could still be relatively effective in finding new ways to do things.
Q. You have argued that the likes of 15M and the global Occupy movement know "how to clear the way, but not how to create something solid."
A. People set aside their differences for a while in the public squares for a common goal. If that goal is negative, about getting angry with someone, there is more chance of success. In a way it could have been an explosion of solidarity, but explosions are very powerful and short-lived.
Q. You also believe that by their nature, there is no room for leadership in rainbow coalitions.
A. It is precisely because such movements lack leaders that they can survive, but it is also precisely because they lack leaders that they cannot convert their sense of purpose into action.
Q. In Spain, the 15M movement has helped create new political forces.
A. Changing one party for another will not solve the problem. The problem is not that the parties are wrong, but that they don't control things. Spain's problems are part of a global problem. It's a mistake to think you can solve things internally.
Q. What do you think about the Catalan independence project?
A. I think we're still following the principles of Versailles, when the idea of each nation's right to self rule was established. But that's a fiction in today's world, when there are no more homogeneous territories. Today, every society is just a collection of diasporas. People join the societies to which they are loyal and pay their taxes, but at the same time, they do not want to give up their identity. The connection between where you live and identity has been broken. The situation in Catalonia, as in Scotland or Lombardy, is a contradiction between tribal identity and citizenship. They are Europeans, but they don't want to talk to Brussels via Madrid, but via Barcelona. The same logic is emerging in almost every country. We are still following the same principles established at the end of World War I, but there have been many changes in the world.
Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called "armchair activism," and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?
A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren't created, and you either have one or you don't. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it's so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn't about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don't teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy... But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.

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Zygmunt Bauman: "Social media are a trap"

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Zygmunt Bauman has just celebrated his 90 th birthday and taken two flights from his home in the northern British city of Leeds to get to an event in Burgos, northern Spain. He admits to being tired as we begin the interview, but he still manages to express his ideas calmly and clearly, taking his time with each response because he hates giving simple answers to complex questions.

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33. How Many Seconds to a First Impression?

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33. How Many Seconds to a First Impression?

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'A series of experiments by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that all it takes is a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face.'

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You'll never get a second chance to make a great first impression." We've all heard that an interviewer, or a stranger at a party, will form an impression of you, your character, your personality - an impression that is nearly indelible - all within the first 60 seconds of meeting you.

Or wait, is it 30 seconds? Twenty?

Two or three?

Forget whatever figure you may have heard. Not to intimidate you, if you happen to be preparing for a job or grad school interview, or a blind date, but new research shows that you may need to have your act together in the blink of an eye.

A series of experiments by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that all it takes is a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face, and that longer exposures don't significantly alter those impressions (although they might boost your confidence in your judgments). Their research is presented in their article "First Impressions," in the July issue of Psychological Science.

Like it or not, judgments based on facial appearance play a powerful role in how we treat others, and how we get treated. Psychologists have long known that attractive people get better outcomes in practically all walks of life. People with "mature" faces receive more severe judicial outcomes than "baby-faced" people. And having a face that looks competent (as opposed to trustworthy or likeable) may matter a lot in whether a person gets elected to public office.

Willis and Todorov conducted separate experiments to study judgments from facial appearance, each focusing on a different trait: attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness. Participants were shown photographs of unfamiliar faces for 100 milliseconds (1/10 of a second), 500 milliseconds (half a second), or 1,000 milliseconds (a full second), and were immediately asked to judge the faces for the trait in question (e.g., "Is this person competent?"). Response time was measured. Participants were then asked to rate their confidence in making their judgments.

Participants' judgments were compared with ratings of the same photographs given by another group of participants in a preliminary study, in which there were no time constraints for judging the personality traits of the faces. (In that preliminary study, there was strong agreement among the various participants about the traits of the people in the photographs.)

For all five of the traits studied, judgments made after the briefest exposure (1/10 of a second) were highly correlated with judgments made without time constraints; and increased exposure time (1/2 or a full second) didn't increase the correlation. Response times also revealed that participants made their judgments as quickly (if not more quickly) after seeing a face for 1/10 of a second as they did if given a longer glimpse.

Longer exposure times did increase confidence in judgments and facilitated more differentiated trait impressions (that is, less correlation between the different traits for a given person).

All the correlations between judgments made after a 1/10-second glimpse and judgments made without time constraints were high, but of all the traits, trustworthiness was the one with the highest correlation. Along with attractiveness, this was also the trait that participants were able to assess most quickly. The authors suggest, based on evolutionary psychology, that an accelerated and accurate ability to judge trustworthiness in others may have evolved as an important survival mechanism.

But before you rest secure in the knowledge that at least you have a whole 1/10 of a second to make that great first impression at your next job interview, the authors acknowledge that future research may well close that window even smaller. Other researchers recently revealed in Psychological Science that objects are categorized as soon as they are perceived; something similar, Willis and Todorov suggest, may be true of certain trait judgments.

It may be that, to impress a prospective employer with your competence and trustworthiness, or a prospective mate with your attractiveness, you can do it in, well, no time. That may be a good or bad thing, depending.

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You'll never get a second chance to make a great first impression." We've all heard that an interviewer, or a stranger at a party, will form an impression of you, your character, your personality - an impression that is nearly indelible - all within the first 60 seconds of meeting you.

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'Be right back' episode. Martha and Ash are the main two characters. Ash dies and Martha is left with a child without a husband and really misses him. He gets a robot, which is identical to Ash, but it is a robot, it can talk like Ash and operates after analysing Ash's social networks, all the media content about him available. That is scary for Martha, but he decides to let Ash stay for he daughter to have dad and she would probably never found out that it is not her real dad. Is it ethical?

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"The Entire History of You" episode.
They can 'redo' their lives, as everything being filmed and you can then share or review it later. Extensive scrutiny of relationships is not good, but digital culture does emphasize the idea of constant control on each other. Trust is important.

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30. Privacy and what does google know about my day

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30. Privacy and what does google know about my day

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Predictive analysis combs through calendars and search histories-and gets in the way of routine self-deception.

Thomas Peter/Reuters

Every weekday at 3:40 p.m., the message popped up on my phone: 22 mins to Work. Google Now was doing its job. It was reminding me where to go and how to get there.

Google Now, in case you don't know, is the flagship software embedded in the Android smartphone operating system (it's also available on iOS); its aim is to seamlessly turn your device into a personal assistant that provides "just the right information at just the right time." It achieves this by using Google's devouring awareness of your calendar, inbox, and movements. It tracks and predicts your travel, your appointments, your web interests: it tracks you. That may make some people antsy. Not me. Let's be real: Google knows so much about me already. Might as well put it to use. For me, Google Now is strange and neat and vital.

It can also be kind of a jerk, which brings us back to this daily reminder.

"Work" was the label that, at some point, Google Now had suggested for the place that I went most afternoons: the home of the Kim family, whose kids I tutor. I had okayed this label, tickled that Now was finding patterns. But seeing those daily directions to "Work" quickly began to sting. Because tutoring-and the Kim kids are terrific, really-is not my work. This, what you're reading, is my work; the novel I'm trying to push up the sales rankings on Amazon is my work. I'm a writer: Writing is my "Work." Tutoring is a thing I do because, let's face it, my income as a writer can be inconsistent. Like many writers, I've come up with a narrative for this, an equilibration of present and future that looks forward to a time when I don't need to tutor, sort-of accepts that now is not that time, and holds tight to the fact that my real work is writing-and then there's this other thing I do for right now that's really not so bad.

But now, with Now, I had this tool, this digital fifth column, heckling that narrative. Telling me that, inasmuch as "Work" is commonly understood-you go there regularly, to make money-the Kim home was my "Work." And this sucked because Now was entirely correct. Now's constant, tabulated observation of me-the truth-was exploding a self-serving conceit I'd constructed. We all have stories we tell ourselves, stories about who we really are. All Google Now does is reveal whether these stories check out.

They often don't.

* * *

Now's tracking runs headlong into our need to lie-a little! sometimes!-to ourselves. It's a truism of this era that Facebook statusing and avatar design and Instagram filters have transformed how we self-present: the way we tell other people true and untrue stories about who we are. What's transformative about Now is how it makes it harder to tell such stories to ourselves. This matters. Small, self-deceptive fictions are a big part of how we operate. Human beings are not totally awesome at distinguishing between the things we'd like to like and do and the things we actually like and do. So while the sexy endgame of "personal digital assistants" and predictive algorithms may lie in science fictive images of perfected machine intelligence and Scarlett Johansson-y singularities, there are some much more prosaic problems to grapple with right now, today: like the accountability and truthfulness that this technology demands of and imposes on us already.

We've been managing this tension for years. Anyone who's ever cleared a browser history to maintain self-respect, or been appalled by a song that some predictive streaming music service suggests (then ... liked it), has faced technology's ability to throw us back at ourselves. And even with Now, most revelations feel small. I suppose I do procrastinate by searching movie showtimes, and Chrome on my computer talks to Now on my phone (that's the point), so, yup, I get notifications about every film screening within three miles of my location pretty much at all times. I asked friends about similar experiences. Most are light: "Now also reminds me *all the time* that I buy my clothing at brooks brothers," wrote a woman who really doesn't see herself as a seersucker and polo type. "I'm not entirely comfy with that level of self-awareness. So tracking is disabled," from an opt-outer. Another friend's childish Netflix suggestions confirm that, whatever else he might be, he is now a dad. Some start funny, then go melancholy: a buddy whose web browser helpfully suggests a porn site as his likely destination, no matter how many times he Xs out the choice, as if it has "a never-ending supply of my own shame to replenish itself with."

So, what? What will we gain, or lose, in being stripped of our pretenses? Turns out to be a thorny question. Ask the Internet about "self-deception," filter the pop psych, and you're still plunged into an inter- and intra-disciplinary quagmire of psychologists and philosophers disagreeing with themselves and each other on what "self-deception" even means. It exists; it's important. Everyone's on board up to that point. But what it is, how it works, and why we do it are topics of active dispute. Is self-deception intentional? What "psychological or temporal divisions" are required to maintain it? Is it simply, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "motivationally biased belief?"

And, finally, is it good or bad for us?

On this, the evidence is mixed. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers argues that self-deception is adaptive, because it makes us better at fooling others. If I really believe I'm a writer, correctly or not, then I've a better chance of success when I walk into that meeting with someone who's looking to hire a writer. This view frames self-deception as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I'd be very sorry to learn that my smartphone is kneecapping my ability to succeed. I'd be even sorrier, however, to lose my " positive illusions," as articulated by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown in a landmark 1988 paper. "Most healthy adults are positively biased in their self-perceptions," Taylor and Brown state. They outline commonly held illusions that fool us into feeling better about who we are, more in control of our lives, and more optimistic about the future. These sound like illusions I need-we all need-to survive.

But self-deception also harms. For one thing, it makes us stupid. In a much-cited 2010 study, researchers discovered that people who performed well on a test because they were given the freaking answer key "interpret their resultant high scores as evidence of superior intelligence," and that "when asked to predict their performance on a future task, they fail to account for the impact of having had the answers, even when inflated predictions prove costly." Most of us have spotted this bias in others; most of us are compromised by it ourselves. Even Taylor et al argue for " windows of realism," observing that people in a decision-making mode tend to be more realistic. And the philosophers point out the ethical importance of self-knowledge, labeling self-deception "a problem of particular concern for moral development, since [it] can make us strangers to ourselves and blind to our own moral failings."

The issue boils down to this: how is Google Now going to find this balance, for me? How will it temper illusion and reality, according to my complex personal needs? I called Google to ask. Baris Gultekin, one of the founders of and the product lead on Google Now, thinks that the key is in simplifying and refining communications between user and software. "In the real world, you have this communication with your [actual, human] assistant," he said. "So we want the software to be cognizant of that, to not presume many things, to have a conversation with the user."

The tension is between seamlessness-a tool that is automatic, predictive, requires no input-and not wanting that tool to be "presumptuous." This is challenging because all of Now's data-mining and hey-is-this-what-you're-looking-for suggestions run on algorithms, and algorithms are algorithmic. Those responses then need to be personalized; to adapt to every individual. "What's very important is that we need to make sure that the user is in control of all of this," Gultekin notes. "To create an easy way for the user to communicate with the assistant, to make it for that specific user and no one else."

I know what this user wants. My perfected digital assistant would help keep me organized, while respecting the touchy stuff. It'd protect healthy fantasies while simplifying my days; allow for "positive illusions" of an aspirational self, present, and future, while making it easier to live effectively in the world as it is. Maybe this is ridiculous-a pipe dream. But hey: 10 years ago, did you even have a smartphone?

The definition of self-deception that I liked best was offered by Chance et al, the researchers with the answer key: "Positive belief about the self that persists despite specific evidence to the contrary." I can see how this could be dangerous. It also sounds pretty nice. After a few months, I got fed up with my phone telling me what I did, and therefore who I was. I wiped the Kims' address from Now, told it I was "no longer interested" in travel to that place. I kept going, of course, and so Now kept asking about it; without a name for the location, it would just pin the address: street name and number. Impersonal. Almost a slight, against a family I like and a part of my life that is ... part of my life. I finally came up with a solution:
22 mins to the Kims
Maybe someday, Google Now would've known to do this from the start. I still kind of wish it reminded me less often, though it's still mostly right when it does. And the label is both true, and acceptable. I can live with that. For now.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

James Carmichael is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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Google Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

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Predictive analysis combs through calendars and search histories-and gets in the way of routine self-deception. Every weekday at 3:40 p.m., the message popped up on my phone: 22 mins to Work. Google Now was doing its job. It was reminding me where to go and how to get there.

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29. What do our smartphones know about us

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29. What do our smartphones know about us

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Mobile devices gather piles of data that you may actually find helpful.

Inside Science Contributor
Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today. The opinions contained in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Inside Science nor the American Institute of Physics and its Member Societies.
By: Gary M. Weiss

(ISM) -- Did you ever wonder what your smartphone knows about you? Or how it learns about you? Wouldn't it be great if it could tell you things that you don't even recognize about how you walk, talk and act?

Smartphones are already capable of doing this, and many researchers are dedicated to finding ways to gather and interpret the most useful information. Modern smartphones are packed with many powerful sensors that enable the phone to collect data about you. Although that may alarm anyone who is concerned about privacy, the sensors also present an opportunity to help smartphone users in previously impossible ways. When I realized how much these sensors could tell about a person, I established the Wireless Sensor Data Mining (WISDM) Lab at Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y. The goal of this lab is to apply modern machine learning and data mining methods in order to "mine" knowledge about smartphone users from their sensor data.

Smartphones contain more sensors than most people would ever imagine. Android phones and iPhones include an audio sensor (microphone), image sensor (camera), touch sensor (screen), acceleration sensor (tri-axial accelerometer), light sensor, proximity sensor, and several sensors (including the Global Positioning System) for establishing location.

Early on we decided to focus our efforts on the tri-axial accelerometer, since we felt that it is one of the most informative -- and underutilized -- sensors. This sensor measures the phone's acceleration in all three spatial dimensions as well as its orientation. This enables the phone to adjust the screen display in response to changes in phone orientation, while also supporting advanced motion-based game play.

Our first goal was to use the accelerometer to perform activity recognition -- to identify the physical activity, such as walking, that a smartphone user is performing. We figured that this ability could then be used as the basis for many health and fitness applications, and could also be used to make the smartphone more context-sensitive, so that its behavior would take into account what the user is doing. The phone could then, for example, automatically send phone calls to voice mail if the user was jogging.

We used existing classification algorithms to identify activities, such as walking, and help map accelerometer data to those activities. These algorithms, or methods, learn from specific examples. When given data about U.S. football players and non-football players, such an algorithm might learn that football players tend to weigh over 200 lbs. In our case we provide the algorithm with acceleration data that is labeled with the associated activity, and from this data the algorithm automatically generates rules for identifying the activities. Since these rules can be implemented in software, the activity recognition process can be automated.

The activities that our system can recognize include walking, jogging, climbing stairs, sitting, standing, and lying down. We collect a small amount of labeled "training" data from a panel of volunteers for each of these activities, with the expectation that the model that we generate will be applicable to other users. The only assumption that we make is that the user's phone is running our app in the background and that the phone is in their pocket.

Initially, we could identify the six activities listed above with about 75 percent accuracy. These results are adequate for obtaining a general picture of how much time a person spends on each activity daily, but are far from ideal. However, if we can obtain even a very small amount of data that a user actively labels as being connected with a particular activity, we can then build a personal model for that user, with accuracy in the 98-99 percent range. This shows that people move differently and that these differences are important when identifying activities.

We call our system Actitracker. If you download our Android app , it will allow you to review reports of your activities via a web-based user interface. This will allow you to determine how active or -- perhaps more to the point -- how inactive you are. We suspect that these reports may serve as a wakeup call to some and hope it will lead to positive changes in behavior. Such a tool could also be used by a parent to monitor the activities of their child, and thus could even help combat conditions such as childhood obesity.

We are also studying what other things we can learn about a user from their accelerometer data. Currently, using this data we can predict a user's gender with 71 percent accuracy, and can distinguish between "tall" and "short" people and "heavy" and "light" people, each with about 80 percent accuracy.

We have also established that one's gait, as measured by a smartphone accelerometer, is distinctive enough to be used for identification purposes. From a pool of several hundred smartphone users, we can identify any individual with 100 percent accuracy if we have a previous data sample. Soon, we may be able to use accelerometer data to help diagnose gait problems. This application is important since gait problems are often indicators of other health problems. All of these applications are based on the same underlying methods of classification as our activity recognition work.

This category of applications is part of a growing trend towards mobile health. As new sensors become available and as existing sensors are improved, even more powerful smartphone-based health applications should appear. For example, other researchers are boosting the magnification of smartphone cameras so that they can analyze blood and skin samples. Researchers at MIT's Mobile Experience Lab are even developing a sensor that attaches to clothing, which will allow smartphones to track their users' exposure to ultraviolet radiation and the potential for sunburn.

Smartphone sensor technology, especially when combined with data mining, offers tremendous opportunities for new and innovative applications. We are committed to exploring these applications and expect that there will be a flood of new sensor-based apps over the next decade. While many of these apps may just be curiosities, we suspect that some will "stick" and provide tangible benefits to individuals and society.

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Your Smartphone Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

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Mobile devices gather piles of data that you may actually find helpful. Inside Science Contributor Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today.

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When you can't stop watching series. That made me think why we can not stop? Probably because we see different reality, which is much more fascinating and interesting than our own, the lives of the heroes of episodes are full of beautiful moments.

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How to Overcome a Binge-Watching Addiction

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The key to the cure? Understanding how TV scripts and your willpower work.

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27. Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults

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27. Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults

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the more internet use, the lonelier

happiness and social connections dropped

envy

+

makes us happier

social trust

against stress and pain

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No one joins Facebook to be sad and lonely. But a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross argues that that's exactly how it makes us feel. Over two weeks, Kross and his colleagues sent text messages to eighty-two Ann Arbor residents five times per day. The researchers wanted to know a few things: how their subjects felt overall, how worried and lonely they were, how much they had used Facebook, and how often they had had direct interaction with others since the previous text message. Kross found that the more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt-and the more their overall satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its end. The data, he argues, shows that Facebook was making them unhappy.

Research into the alienating nature of the Internet-and Facebook in particular-supports Kross's conclusion. In 1998, Robert Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, found that the more people used the Web, the lonelier and more depressed they felt. After people went online for the first time, their sense of happiness and social connectedness dropped, over one to two years, as a function of how often they used the Internet.

Lonelier people weren't inherently more likely to go online, either; a recent review of some seventy-five studies concluded that "users of Facebook do not differ in most personality traits from nonusers of Facebook." (Nathan Heller wrote about loneliness in the magazine last year.) But, somehow, the Internet seemed to make them feel more alienated. A 2010 analysis of forty studies also confirmed the trend: Internet use had a small, significant detrimental effect on overall well-being. One experiment concluded that Facebook could even cause problems in relationships, by increasing feelings of jealousy.

Another group of researchers has suggested that envy, too, increases with Facebook use: the more time people spent browsing the site, as opposed to actively creating content and engaging with it, the more envious they felt. The effect, suggested Hanna Krasnova and her colleagues, was a result of the well-known social-psychology phenomenon of social comparison. It was further exacerbated by a general similarity of people's social networks to themselves: because the point of comparison is like-minded peers, learning about the achievements of others hits even harder. The psychologist Beth Anderson and her colleagues argue, in a recent review of Facebook's effects, that using the network can quickly become addictive, which comes with a nagging sense of negativity that can lead to resentment of the network for some of the same reasons we joined it to begin with. We want to learn about other people and have others learn about us-but through that very learning process we may start to resent both others' lives and the image of ourselves that we feel we need to continuously maintain. "It may be that the same thing people find attractive is what they ultimately find repelling," said the psychologist Samuel Gosling, whose research focusses on social-media use and the motivations behind social networking and sharing.

But, as with most findings on Facebook, the opposite argument is equally prominent. In 2009, Sebastián Valenzuela and his colleagues came to the opposite conclusion of Kross: that using Facebook makes us happier. They also found that it increases social trust and engagement-and even encourages political participation. Valenzuela's findings fit neatly with what social psychologists have long known about sociality: as Matthew Lieberman argues in his book " Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect," social networks are a way to share, and the experience of successful sharing comes with a psychological and physiological rush that is often self-reinforcing. The prevalence of social media has, as a result, fundamentally changed the way we read and watch: we think about how we'll share something, and whom we'll share it with, as we consume it. The mere thought of successful sharing activates our reward-processing centers, even before we've actually shared a single thing.

Virtual social connection can even provide a buffer against stress and pain: in a 2009 study, Lieberman and his colleagues demonstrated that a painful stimulus hurt less when a woman either held her boyfriend's hand or looked at his picture; the pain-dulling effects of the picture were, in fact, twice as powerful as physical contact. Somehow, the element of distance and forced imagination-a mental representation in lieu of the real thing, something that the psychologists Wendi Gardner and Cindy Pickett call "social snacking"-had an anesthetic effectâ€š one we might expect to carry through to an entire network of pictures of friends.

The key to understanding why reputable studies are so starkly divided on the question of what Facebook does to our emotional state may be in simply looking at what people actually do when they're on Facebook. "What makes it complicated is that Facebook is for lots of different things-and different people use it for different subsets of those things. Not only that, but they are also changing things, because of people themselves changing," said Gosling. A 2010 study from Carnegie Mellon found that, when people engaged in direct interaction with others-that is, posting on walls, messaging, or "liking" something-their feelings of bonding and general social capital increased, while their sense of loneliness decreased. But when participants simply consumed a lot of content passively, Facebook had the opposite effect, lowering their feelings of connection and increasing their sense of loneliness.

In an unrelated experiment from the University of Missouri, a group of psychologists found a physical manifestation of these same effects. As study participants interacted with the site, four electrodes attached to the areas just above their eyebrows and just below their eyes recorded their facial expressions in a procedure known as facial electromyography. When the subjects were actively engaged with Facebook, their physiological response measured a significant uptick in happiness. When they were passively browsing, however, the positive effect disappeared.

This aligns with research conducted earlier this year by John Eastwood and his colleagues at York University in a meta-analysis of boredom. What causes us to feel bored and, as a result, unhappy? Attention. When our attention is actively engaged, we aren't bored; when we fail to engage, boredom sets in. As Eastwood's work, along with recent research on media multitasking, have illustrated, the greater the number of things we have pulling at our attention, the less we are able to meaningfully engage, and the more discontented we become.

In other words, the world of constant connectivity and media, as embodied by Facebook, is the social network's worst enemy: in every study that distinguished the two types of Facebook experiences-active versus passive-people spent, on average, far more time passively scrolling through newsfeeds than they did actively engaging with content. This may be why general studies of overall Facebook use, like Kross's of Ann Arbor residents, so often show deleterious effects on our emotional state. Demands on our attention lead us to use Facebook more passively than actively, and passive experiences, no matter the medium, translate to feelings of disconnection and boredom.

In ongoing research, the psychologist Timothy Wilson has learned, as he put it to me, that college students start going "crazy" after just a few minutes in a room without their phones or a computer. "One would think we could spend the time mentally entertaining ourselves," he said. "But we can't. We've forgotten how." Whenever we have downtime, the Internet is an enticing, quick solution that immediately fills the gap. We get bored, look at Facebook or Twitter, and become more bored. Getting rid of Facebook wouldn't change the fact that our attention is, more and more frequently, forgetting the path to proper, fulfilling engagement. And in that sense, Facebook isn't the problem. It's the symptom.

Maria Konnikova is the author of the New York Times best-seller "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes." She has a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University._
Photograph by Luong Thai Linh/EPA/Corbis

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No one joins Facebook to be sad and lonely. But a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross argues that that's exactly how it makes us feel. Over two weeks, Kross and his colleagues sent text messages to eighty-two Ann Arbor residents five times per day.

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'We write more, but learn less; we plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait; we have higher incomes, but lower morals; we have more food, but less appeasement; we build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.". Nice quote

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The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints; we spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less.

We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get angry too quickly, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too seldom, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life; we've added years to life, not life to years.

We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We've conquered outer space, but not inner space; we've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul; we've split the atom, but not our prejudice.

We write more, but learn less; we plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait; we have higher incomes, but lower morals; we have more food, but less appeasement; we build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men, and short character; steep profits, and shallow relationships. These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare; more leisure, but less fun; more kinds of food, but less nutrition.

These are days of two incomes, but more divorce; of fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throw away morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer to quiet to kill.

It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stockroom; a time when technology has brought this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to make a difference, or to just hit delete...

This version was compiled from a few different versions found on the Internet:

Original version Dr. Bob Moorehead:

We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry quickly; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values; we fly in faster planes to arrive there quicker, to do less and return sooner; we sign more contracts only to realize fewer profits; we talk too much; love too seldom and lie too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life; we've added years to life, not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We've conquered outer space, but not inner space; we've done larger things, but not better things; we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul; we've split the atom, but not our prejudice; we write more, but learn less; plan more, but accomplish less; we make faster planes, but longer lines; we learned to rush, but not to wait; we have more weapons, but less peace; higher incomes, but lower morals; more parties, but less fun; more food, but less appeasement; more acquaintances, but fewer friends; more effort, but less success. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; drive smaller cars that have bigger problems; build larger factories that produce less. We've become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men, but short character; steep in profits, but shallow relationships. These are times of world peace, but domestic warfare; more leisure and less fun; higher postage, but slower mail; more kinds of food, but less nutrition. These are days of two incomes, but more divorces; these are times of fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, cartridge living, thow-away morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies and pills that do everything from cheer, to prevent, quiet or kill. It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stock room. Indeed, these are the times!

Learn more about this version here.

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The Paradox of Our Time In History - The Complete Version!

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The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints; we spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less.

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Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.

Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

...

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Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.

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24. Addiction to smartphones causes inability to save up

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24. Addiction to smartphones causes inability to save up

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"Research concerns that increased use of portable electronic devices could have negative impacts on impulse control and the ability to appropriately valuate delayed rewards". We are becoming really inpatient, as networked individuals, we need to get everything quickly, immideatly, we can not wait!

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Mobile technology habits: patterns of association among device usage, intertemporal preference, impulse control, and reward sensitivity

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Mobile electronic devices are playing an increasingly pervasive role in our daily activities. Yet, there has been very little empirical research investigating how mobile technology habits might...

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robot wrote a story winning the price

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22. Online identity. Deception."What it's like to be a hot girl online ( ... when you're a nerdy guy in real life)"

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22. Online identity. Deception."What it's like to be a hot girl online ( ... when you're a nerdy guy in real life)"

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Crosses with the book 'in real life' by Nev Schulman

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Technically speaking, Krishnabh Medhi is a nerd with thick gray glasses, a mop of black hair and a brand-new computer science degree. But for two glorious weeks in early February, the 23-year-old software engineer was - on Facebook, at least - a hot blonde chick named Amanda who loved Starbucks and "adventuring."

"I had a lot of free time, and a lot of boredom, and a weird suspicion that other people experience the world in different ways," Medhi said. "I wanted to see what they experience."

[What's in a profile picture? Just about everything, actually.]

As Medhi later described in a viral Quora post-mortem that's racked up nearly 860,000 views, the Amanda experiment began on a whim - a way to kill time until his immigration paperwork came through. He opened the blank Facebook account, set its location in West Lafayette, Ind., and scrolled through pictures of women in Google Image Search until he found a good set of stock photos. Then he set his interests as Starbucks and adventures ("I put minimal effort into it," he explains), and, unconvinced the project would amount to anything, friend-requested 20 strangers.

Within 24 hours, hundreds of people were swamping "Amanda" with Facebook friend requests. Within 72 hours, foreign men were offering to order pizza or sushi to "her" apartment. Medhi had never been so popular, such a crowdpleaser. At one point, he hooked his computer up to his living room TV so some friends could come over and gawk at the sorts of weird, unprovoked homages Amanda was receiving.

"I felt," Medhi would write later, "like I was violating the rules of reality."

[Quiz: Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?]

"Reality," of course, is a flimsy thing these days: It's never been quite so easy to blur and stretch it to one's particular purposes. Hoaxes spread as comfortably as news does; the vernacular's ballooned with words like "finstagram" and "catfish." And yet, Medhi is correct that one corner of "real life" hasn't expanded online quite like we hoped: Contrary the promises of early Web utopians, your online identity is probably very similar to your physical one.

It's not acceptable for nerds to "become" hot girls online - or anything else, for that matter.

This development would have disappointed the earliest online communities, and not only because they contained lots of nerds. One of the pillars that made the Internet so mind-blowingly revolutionary was that, when you "met" someone on it, you couldn't immediately deduce characteristics like their race, biological sex, age, height or attractiveness.

For 100,000 years of human history, those sorts of immutable physical characteristics had dictated everything from social class to evolutionary success to your chance of getting a promotion; research has found that people form an impression of you, based on nothing but your face, in as little as a tenth of a second.

[The hot new thing on Tinder: Posting photos of your bank account instead of your face]

But here, in the primordial fog of early cyberspace, was a chance to finally choose your destiny: to obscure those signals, or alter them, or mute them entirely. Idealists like Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow - who wrote, in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, that "our identities have no bodies" - dreamt of a Platonic space that eschewed superficial, physical concerns in favor of deeper engagements. They prophesied the end of race, of gender, of conventional social hierarchies.

"You could alter nearly every aspect of your identity: You could be a man or a woman, young or old, bald or bearded, whatever," Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote, grandly, in "Who Controls the Internet." "With complete control over their identities, people could cluster with congenial souls to create virtual communities. ... The first truly liberated communities in human history."

Goldsmith and Wu were writing, specifically, about the philosophies of '80s gaming communities called MUDs - basically, early versions of online role-playing games. But the idea of having a self-created "online identity," as distinct from an imposed, physical one, persisted well into the next two decades.

Until Friendster cropped up, circa 2002, virtually every major forum, instant messenger and gaming site used avatars or buddy icons, not profile pictures, to distinguish its users. And if you, like I, are a child of the late '90s Web, you may remember the (now-redundant) chatroom shorthand "a/s/l" and the creative license with which you answered it: On the Internet, no one knew or cared you were a dog.

Until, of course, they did.

This isn't to suggest, of course, that the Internet doesn't still host its less literal identity communities - its pockets of anonymity, pseudonymity and straight-up play-acting. But generally speaking, the mainstream social Web demands, if not requires, that people port their physical selves over to it. According to the Pew Research Institute's most recent survey on the subject, 91 percent of teenagers have a real photo of themselves - and thus, a declaration of their age, race, gender and attractiveness - associated with their social media accounts, up from 79 percent in 2006.

Over that time, using a non-photo avatar, or no avatar at all, became both unusual and suspicious: "One time-tested method for settling the question [of whether to engage with someone on Twitter] is to look at the person's avatar," Max Read wrote in 2015. "If it's the default white egg, ignore, or block."

And using someone else's photo or "pretending" to be someone else is grounds for straight-up account suspension. If you want to see Amanda's profile, for instance, you can't anymore: Medhi deleted it.

"I know it's against Facebook's Terms of Service, and I don't want to get in trouble," he said.

There are, of course, a lot of good things to be said for the literal identity regime: Among others, the fact that it helps prevent pranksters like Mehdi from catfishing strange men out of their pizza/dignity. Facebook, for one, has long argued that the merger of one's virtual and physical identities is critical to preventing abuse. Certainly it fosters a different sort of connection than the ones early MUD players were used to.

Still, it seems a loss - not just of personal agency, but of potential - that the Internet may not liberate us from our bodies and circumstances after all. In the early aughts, the Internet researcher Yael Kaynan wrote, optimistically, about the revolutionary ways that people formed relationships on the anonymous and pseudonymous Web; it appeared as if, for the first time in history, physical and social shortcomings wouldn't unfairly torpedo a first impression.

Now we commonly make online the same sort of superficial, split-second judgments that we've made for thousands of years in the "real world." Qualities like your trustworthiness and approachability are instantly inferred by details as small, and as immutable, as the width of your mouth in a single Facebook photo.

"Your picture is worth that fabled thousand words," OkCupid's Christian Rudder wrote in 2014, summarizing his company's research on the subject. "Your actual words are worth almost nothing."

After two weeks as Amanda, Medhi came to much the same conclusions. It didn't matter how limp or noncommittal his messages were, and it didn't matter that he never publicly posted: Hundreds of people were into him, courtesy a stock photo.

Would he prefer an Internet without profile pictures? An even playing field divorced from physical identity?

"I don't know which is inherently better," he punts. But he wouldn't refuse more free sushi.
Liked that? Try these!

The big myth Facebook needs everyone to believe

Beme wants to be the app for social media authenticity. Too bad there's no such thing.

What it actually means when someone flaunts their relationship online

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What it's like to be a hot girl online ( ... when you're a nerdy guy in real life)

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Technically speaking, Krishnabh Medhi is a nerd with thick gray glasses, a mop of black hair and a brand-new computer science degree. But for two glorious weeks in early February, the 23-year-old software engineer was - on Facebook, at least - a hot blonde chick named Amanda who loved Starbucks and "adventuring."

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21. Chatbot from Microsoft. "Microsoft made a robot that tweets about loving Hitler and hating Jews"

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21. Chatbot from Microsoft. "Microsoft made a robot that tweets about loving Hitler and hating Jews"

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Are we ready to give that much freedom to technologies and let them analyse us?

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Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down.

The company made the Twitter account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence prowess. But it quickly started sending out offensive tweets.

"bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now," it wrote in one tweet. "donald trump is the only hope we've got."

Another tweet praised Hitler and claimed that the account hated the Jews.

Those widely-publicised and offensive tweets appear to have led the account to be shut down, while Microsoft looks to improve the account to make it less likely to engage in racism.

The offensive tweets appear to be a result of the way that the account is made. When Microsoft launched "Tay Tweets", it said that the account would get more clever the more it was used: "The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets".

That appears to be a reference to machine learning technology that has been built into the account. It seems to use artificial intelligence to watch what is being tweeted at it and then push that back into the world in the form of new tweets.

But many of those people tweeting at it appear to have been attempting to prank the robot by forcing it to learn offensive and racist language.

Tay was created as a way of attempting to have a robot speak like a millennial, and describes itself on Twitter as "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill". And it's doing exactly that - including the most offensive ways that millennials speak.

The robot's learning mechanism appears to take parts of things that have been said to it and throw them back into the world. That means that if people say racist things to it, then those same messages will be pushed out again as replies.

It isn't clear how Microsoft will improve the account, beyond deleting tweets as it already has done. The account is expected to come back online, presumably at least with filters that will keep it from tweeting about offensive words.

Nello Cristianini, a professor of artificial intelligence at Bristol University, questioned whether Tay's encounter with wider world was an experiment or a PR stunt.

"You make a product, aimed at talking with just teenagers, and you even tell them that it will learn from them about the world," he said.

"Have you ever seen what many teenagers teach to parrots? What do you expect?

"So this was an experiment after all, but about people, or even about the common sense of computer programmers."

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Microsoft made a robot that tweets about loving Hitler and hating Jews

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Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down. The company made the Twitter account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence prowess. But it quickly started sending out offensive tweets.

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"The pervasive use of technology is likely the most obvious characteristic of Generation Z, and it's a characteristic the generation shares with the Millennials."

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This feature is the first in a four-part series about the differences and similarities between baby boomers, Millennials and a newly defined subculture, Generation Z.
A new subculture has been identified: Generation Z, a distinctive group of young adults who were born sometime around 1995 and are now entering college.

You may be thinking, "Wait, weren't we just talking about Generation X and the Millennials? How can we be already talking about a new generation?"

But it's true, said Corey Seemiller, director of Leadership Programs at the UA.

"Generations continue to get shorter and shorter," Seemiller said. "As they progress, technologically and socially, they are beginning to change more rapidly. So you can't generalize generational characteristics over a 30-year period like we once did."

Coinciding with Seemiller's observations, Beloit College recently released its Mindset List for the class of 2017 - which includes Gen Z, a group researchers haved determine were born after the Millennials. As Beloit reports, these über-connected young adults are highly engaged, socially conscious and tech-immersed.

Seemiller shares even more research and insights, emphasizing that while there still remains some uncertainty about Gen Z, the class appears to be distinctive in some important ways.

So what is Generation Z all about?
A Sharing Generation That's All Technology, All the Time Photo courtesy of Best-Memes.com
The pervasive use of technology is likely the most obvious characteristic of Generation Z, and it's a characteristic the generation shares with the Millennials.

Members of Generation Z live their lives online, and they love sharing both the intimate and mundane details of life, whether that be their relationship status, a restaurant review or an Instagram photo of themselves lounging on the beach.

Seemiller cited research that found about 50 percent of Generation Z members will send at least 50 texts each day. Read that slowly: 50 texts a day.

"They love to contribute their knowledge and opinions online," Seemiller said, citing research that found 8 percent of Gen Z members use Twitter while 93 percent use YouTube to view, upload and comment on videos.

"They like to engage in the co-construction of knowledge; they don't like to just be recipients of communication," Seemiller said. "They do that to feel good about themselves. They find that sharing online is entertaining, and they like to learn new things that way."

Generation Z tends not to use blogs, detests emailing and avoids voice messaging. Why? "Too many words," Seemiller said, citing research indicating that the current generation is especially fond of "short communication bursts."

While members of Generation Z are all about sharing, when they do so via social media they like to keep it on point and brief.

Generation Z and Millennials - Not the Same Thing

"Here we are, just figuring out Millennials and one blatant misconception is that Generation Z is just an extension of Millennials," Seemiller said.

While both Generation Z and Millennials are collaborative, tech-savvy and socially engaged, major differences do exist.

For example, Millennials are known to be very reward-oriented. For Gen Z, gratuitous pats on the back are not as important; they do not generally desire that type of endorsement, Seemiller said. "They are more of a humble crew."

Also, unlike Millennials, Gen Z tends to be a bit less rebellious. You can see that in their interactions with their parents, Seemiller said. "They tend to follow authority because they respect their parents."

But, as noted below, that does not mean that they do not question established rules, regulations and traditions.
Generation Z + Parents = Besties Photo courtesy of QuickMeme.com
Speaking of interactions with parents, as Seemiller puts it, "Generation X is raising Generation Z."

Unlike earlier generations, Gen Z appears to have much more in common with their parents and appear to be quite trusting of their parents.

They may enjoy listening to the same type of music and watching the same television shows. Also, they don't tend to be embarrassed hanging out with their parents.

"They aren't just helicopter parents; Generation Z will consult their parents. That means their parents have a different role," Seemiller said. "They are more likely to see their parents, rather than celebrities, as heroes."

Seemiller said this is largely because the parents of Gen Z worked to instill resiliency in their children, which Gen Z members respect and appreciate.
Service With Purpose Photo credit: QuickMeme.com
Remember when we mentioned authority earlier?

While Gen Z members do appear to have more of an appreciation for authority figures, such as their parents, that does not mean that they do not critically consider established rules and traditions.

In fact, Generation Z is hugely concerned with sociopolitical issues, locally and globally. They tend to be acutely aware that they live in pluralistic society and tend to embrace diversity.

"They are incredibly open-minded, respectful and tolerant of others," Seemiller said. "And they expect to see diversity around them."

For Generation Z, "cultural difference" means more than race or gender-based variation. This translates directly into how they engage in service.

"Because of the power of social networking and the Internet, they are incredibly aware of what is going on around them in the world," Seemiller said. "They are incredibly connected in that sense, and are more aware that there are a lot of social justice issues and other deep seated problems."

So don't expect that Gen Z will show up to your bake sale with wholehearted enthusiasm merely because there is a social service component. This generation wants to tackle serious problems at the root, Seemiller said.

"They have to have an emotional connection to a problem and feel like they are addressing the problem, not the symptoms. I see this as a generational shift. They want it to count for something; they want to delve much deeper into the problem."
Expectations for the Future Photo courtesy of Diy.Despair.com
Generation Z tends to be less optimistic about their futures than their older counterparts.

Why? This is the generation that has seen the U.S. and other nations enter war after war and has seen one of the most devastating economic declines in modern world history. Generation Z is aware of increasing college costs with unprecedented rates of loan defaults and huge unemployment rates in the current century.

For a group that is generally globally minded, socially conscious and openly engaged, such a reality wrecks one's ability to imagine a more blissful future, Seemiller said.

"They are a little bit more cautious than the Millennials," Seemiller said. "The Millennials were a more hopeful generation and grew up without a war and with a budget surplus. But not Generation Z."

The current generation has been witness to numerous school shootings. They are familiar with Sept. 11, 2001 and are acutely aware of international relations. They were there when their parents lost their jobs and when homes foreclosed at record levels.

"They are not cynical and they are not overly optimistic; they are cautious," Seemiller said. "And they are more realistic in terms of their outlook."
They are Game Changers Gif credit: GifSoup.com
All of this means that in addition to educational institutions, marketers and social media managers must evolve if they are to capture the attention of Generation Z.

Now might be the appropriate time to consider the lives and experiences of this new subculture as Gen Z members begin entering colleges and universities, like the UA.

Colleges and universities who are attentive to this generation should consider the delivery of educational materials and how students are engaged and supported, Seemiller said. The same goes for social networks and marketing.

"Generation Z loves constant feedback - not necessarily about themselves," she said. "But they want information at the touch of the finger."

This is the generation that can Google just about anything and find an answer from a hugely diversified source base.

Seemiller said: "So if you are having a workshop on the 10 steps of conflict management, why would they come if they can Google '10 steps of conflict management?'"

That does not mean that Gen Z is disinterested; it means they are engaged in a different way.

"Gen Z really relies on its network of relationships and believes that their peers are more influential in their learning," Seemiller said. "They learn by sharing among themselves and believe no one is an expert, but that everyone is the expert because there are a bazillion people with knowledge."

Other articles in this series are:
Contact: Corey Seemiller, director of UA Leadership Programs at crs@email.arizona.edu or 520-621-8046.

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This feature is the first in a four-part series about the differences and similarities between baby boomers, Millennials and a newly defined subculture, Generation Z. A new subculture has been identified: Generation Z, a distinctive group of young adults who were born sometime around 1995 and are now entering college.

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19. "No LOL matter: Tween texting may lead to poor grammar skills"

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19. "No LOL matter: Tween texting may lead to poor grammar skills"

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Intensive texting and messaging could result in poor grammar skills, as people nowadays started thinking of such short texts as conversations, however, they are not. Also, all the abbreviations we always use do not help to maintain grammar skills on a certain level.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Text messaging may offer tweens a quick way to send notes to friends and family, but it could lead to declining language and grammar skills, according to researchers.

Tweens who frequently use language adaptations -- techspeak -- when they text performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in communications, Penn State, and currently a doctoral candidate in media, technology and society, Northwestern University.

When tweens write in techspeak, they often use shortcuts, such as homophones, omissions of non-essential letters and initials, to quickly and efficiently compose a text message.

"They may use a homophone, such as gr8 for great, or an initial, like, LOL for laugh out loud," said Cingel. "An example of an omission that tweens use when texting is spelling the word would, w-u-d."

Cingel, who worked with S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Penn State's Media Effects Research Laboratory, said the use of these shortcuts may hinder a tween's ability to switch between techspeak and the normal rules of grammar.

Cingel gave middle school students in a central Pennsylvania school district a grammar assessment test. The researchers reviewed the test, which was based on a ninth-grade grammar review, to ensure that all the students in the study had been taught the concepts.

The researchers, who report their findings in the current issue of New Media & Society, then passed out a survey that asked students to detail their texting habits, such as how many texts they send and receive, as well as their opinion on the importance of texting. The researchers also asked participants to note the number of adaptations in their last three sent and received text messages. Of the 542 surveys distributed, students completed and returned 228, or 42.1 percent.

"Overall, there is evidence of a decline in grammar scores based on the number of adaptations in sent text messages, controlling for age and grade," Cingel said.

Not only did frequent texting negatively predict the test results, but both sending and receiving text adaptations were associated with how poorly they performed on the test, according to Sundar.

"In other words, if you send your kid a lot of texts with word adaptations, then he or she will probably imitate it," Sundar said. "These adaptations could affect their off-line language skills that are important to language development and grammar skills, as well."

Typical punctuation and sentence structure shortcuts that tweens use during texting, such as avoiding capital letters and not using periods at the end of sentences, did not seem to affect their ability to use correct capitalization and punctuation on the tests, according to Sundar.

The researchers suggested that the tweens' natural desire to imitate friends and family, as well as their inability to switch back to proper grammar, may combine to influence the poor grammar choices they make in more formal writing.

Sundar said that the technology itself influences the use of language short cuts. Tweens typically compose their messages on mobile devices, like phones, that have small screens and keyboards.

"There is no question that technology is allowing more self-expression, as well as different forms of expression," said Sundar. "Cultures built around new technology can also lead to compromises of expression and these restrictions can become the norm."

Cingel, who started the study as a student in the Shreyer Honors College at Penn State, said the idea to investigate the effect of texting on grammar skills began after receiving texts from his young nieces.

"I received text messages from my two younger nieces that, for me, were incomprehensible," Cingel said. "I had to call them and ask them, 'what are you trying to tell me.' "

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No LOL matter: Tween texting may lead to poor grammar skills | Penn State University

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Text messaging may offer tweens a quick way to send notes to friends and family, but it could lead to declining language and grammar skills, according to researchers. Tweens who frequently use language adaptations -- techspeak -- when they text performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in communications, Penn State, and currently a doctoral candidate in media, technology and society, Northwestern University.

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18. Facebook Messenger may undergo huge revamp soon

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18. Facebook Messenger may undergo huge revamp soon

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Basically, we would be able to talk to bots. They already installed and used on Telegram, for example. The point is that you need something, say pizza, you just chat with bot on Facebook messenger and it gives you the options. Well, why not to call and order? Why not to order online through the website? Have we become so lazy? Or why do we need this service. Feel less lonely? Even when ordering pizza you will communicate.

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17. "The Creepy Thing About Self-Driving Cars"

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17. "The Creepy Thing About Self-Driving Cars"

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Self-driving cars will definitely have a massive impact on privacy, as the car knows where you going, where you have been and stores and analyses it to know you better

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The companies building self-vehicles have been cagey, so far, about how they're thinking about using individual data. At a Congressional hearing about driverless cars last week, Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, asked repeatedly whether driverless car manufacturers would undertake a minimum standard for consumer privacy protection. No one who was there to testify-including representatives from Google, GM, and the ride-sharing service Lyft-had a clear answer. "You need a minimal standard," Markey said at one point. "I'm not in a position to comment on that for Google," said Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving car project.

Google has avoided this question before, too.

Last June, John M. Simpson, the director of the Privacy Project for the nonprofit advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog, attended Google's annual shareholder meeting. (Simpson bought two shares of Google stock, he told me, just so he could have the opportunity to question the company's executives.)

Simpson asked: "Would you be willing to protect driverless car users' privacy in the future, and commit today to using the information gathered by driverless cars only for operating the vehicle-and not for other purposes such as marketing?"

The executives on the stage glanced at each other for a moment, before David Drummond, a senior vice president and Google's chief legal counsel, spoke.

"I think it's pretty early in the game with driverless cars ... to have a lot of rules saying, 'thou shalt not do X, Y, and Z, with the data,'" Drummond said. "I think once we get these operational, the value could be significant ... it's a little early to be drawing conclusions which would, in a lot of ways, reduce innovation and our ability to deliver a great consumer product."

One approach to protecting privacy could be to anonymize all of the data that self-driving cars collect-making sure specific travel itineraries or details from a given trip aren't tied to an individual, for example.

But there's huge potential value to companies who mine individual data and use it for marketing and other services. Self-driving car makers could require an opt-in from consumers before collecting their data-but even that approach is often imperfect. For one thing, self-driving car manufacturers could choose to make opting in a requirement for using the technology at all. And even if individuals are given the choice to opt out of sharing their data-as anyone who has signed a tech platform's terms of service without reading it knows-terms of service agreements are often lengthy, full of legal jargon, and difficult to parse. Shashua is convinced that Google and its peers have enough incentive to be transparent about how it intends to use passenger data.

"For companies like Google and Uber, privacy issues are very important," said Amnon Shashua, a co-founder of MobileEye, which makes machine-vision technology for self-driving cars. "That could kill a business, if you don't handle privacy properly."

Simpson, from Consumer Watchdog, doesn't believe that privacy being important means tech giants will do the right thing. "Sometimes it's just that the people who are designing the gizmo don't even think in terms of privacy," he told me. "They just think: More data is always better. In their minds, it's just, 'We may not know what we're going to do with that data.'"

But that's not good enough, Simpson says. "It's inappropriate."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Adrienne LaFrance is the editor of TheAtlantic.com. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic.

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The Creepy Thing About Self-Driving Cars

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The companies building self-vehicles have been cagey, so far, about how they're thinking about using individual data. At a Congressional hearing about driverless cars last week, Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, asked repeatedly whether driverless car manufacturers would undertake a minimum standard for consumer privacy protection.

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16. When Computers Started Beating Chess Champions

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16. When Computers Started Beating Chess Champions

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20 years ago, a machine defeated a sitting world champion for the first time.

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But the tin box won that game, becoming the first computer to defeat a sitting world chess champion.

Chess players and computer scientists alike were stunned. Computers were by then known for doing some things better than humans could, like solving complex math problems or processing employees' paychecks. "But everybody knew that chess required intelligence to play well, so to see that a computer could do this and compete with the best player in the world-that was sort of a wakeup call," says Murray Campbell, one of the IBM computer scientists who developed Deep Blue, and a competitive chess player himself. "It was a sign that a lot more was coming."

The concept of chess-playing machines dates back centuries. One of the first iterations was rather dishonest: an automaton created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian inventor, in the 1760s only managed to win because the human player hidden inside was pulling levers to move pieces across the board. It took humans until the 1950s to program machines to observe the rules of chess. By the 1980s, computers could conduct basic searches of potential moves and strategies, but at considerably quick speeds, searching several thousands positions per second. They started competing against skilled human players-and winning. In 1987, Deep Thought, the precursor to Deep Blue, defeated British chessmaster David Levy.

"Deep Thought sees far but notices little, remembers everything but learns nothing, neither erring egregiously nor rising above its normal strength," the IBM scientists wrote in 1990. "Even so, it sometimes produces insights that are overlooked by even top grandmasters."

Deep Blue was considerably more advanced. At its core, the computer was built to solve complex numerical problems. In front of a chess board, Deep Blue, equipped with data from hundreds of existing master games, would scan the board for features it recognized. Like a human player, the computer thought ahead, exploring potential moves in terms of sequences, envisioning future positions. It numerically rated the moves as it went, finally making the one that came out with the highest rating-the "best" move. Deep Blue was capable of evaluating 100 million positions per second.

Kasparov went into the historic game in 1996 feeling confident, but it soon became clear Deep Blue was a tougher competitor than he'd expected. Kasparov, already known for being an animated player, was visibly frustrated during the game, often shaking his head, says Jeffrey Popyack, a computer science professor at Drexel University who was in the room. At one point, Kasparov spent 27 minutes deliberating before moving his queen. "The thing that really sticks with me now was just the anguish that Kasparov was going through," Popyack recalls.

Toward the end of game, Kasparov and Deep Blue were like "two sumo wrestlers battling one another at the edge of a high cliff," as Monty Newborn, chairman of the computer chess committee for the Association of Computing Machines, once put it. Kasparov was mounting an aggressive attack on Deep Blue's king when the machine made an unusual move-going after a pawn across the board-that suggested the machine was unaware it was in trouble. ("It would be kind of like your house was burning down and you decided to go grocery shopping," Ashley, the American grandmaster, said.) Turns out the computer had calculated that Kasparov's move-a bold bluff that would have intimidated a human player-wasn't going to work. The world champion, visibly distraught, resigned a few moves later.

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When Computers Started Beating Chess Champions

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But the tin box won that game, becoming the first computer to defeat a sitting world chess champion. Chess players and computer scientists alike were stunned. Computers were by then known for doing some things better than humans could, like solving complex math problems or processing employees' paychecks.

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'by some reckoning, social isolation is a big risk factor for premature death as smoking' and the Internet is to be blamed for.

3 close friends in 1985 and 1-2 when interviewed

1 in 4 has nobody with whom to discuss personal issues

there's a difference between extensive networks and deep ones

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The question about loneliness is: Why do people do this to themselves? Why do Americans, who reported an average of nearly three close friends in 1985, now report an average of just over two? And why does one in four have nobody with whom to discuss personal issues? This is the age of Oprah and MySpace, of public emoting on television and the Web. Apparently people watch "Friends" but don't actually have many.

When the new loneliness numbers appeared Friday in the American Sociological Review, some experts cautioned that the problem can be overstated. Americans say they feel close to an average of 15 others, according to Barry Wellman and Jeffrey Boase of the University of Toronto. But there's a difference between extensive networks and deep ones.

If you get sick, stressed or just plain sad, you are going to want the sort of friend you can rely on. Maybe you'll be able to convert an acquaintance into a soul mate when you discover you need one. But this just-in-time approach to emotional crises isn't always going to work. Look at the way the slow decline of friendship has been mirrored by the rise of emotional problems. Over the past half-century, the prevalence of unipolar depression in affluent countries has jumped tenfold.

People's myopia on friendship is like their myopia on saving. They know that jobs are insecure, that a health problem can cause bankruptcy, that retirement is fabulously expensive; but the household savings rate has fallen below zero. Equally, people know that spouses aren't immortal and that divorce is common. But nearly one in 10 -- a much higher share than in 1985 -- reports that their husband or wife is the only person they confide in.

People are taking these financial and emotional risks even as they neurotically avoid other risks. Today's consumers buy bike helmets and ski helmets and antibacterial soap; they fret about partially hydrogenated fats and consume less tobacco than their parents. But by some reckonings social isolation is as big a risk factor for premature death as smoking.

You can see how this American isolationism sets in. Modern society creates the tools that allow you not to save -- if you have to pay for the kids' college, you can refinance your home -- while doing little to change the basic need to save for old age and misfortune. In the same way, modern society creates tools that extend your casual networks -- e-mail, instant messaging, social-networking Web sites -- while doing nothing to remove the basic need for soul mates.

Meanwhile, people work more hours. They commute longer because they've moved to the exurbs in search of larger homes; they've got spacious entertainment rooms but no mental space for entertaining. And then there's the subtle effect of the culture. "Family time" is endlessly extolled, and lovers emit poetry and song about every facet of their relationships. But when was the last time a rock singer or a new man waxed lyrical about friendship?

Yet the biggest reason for American loneliness, and perhaps the clue to some kind of cure, lies in path dependency. People know that tending to friendship is important, but their behavior follows the path created by countless other decisions -- and friendship is neglected. Social science experiments reveal lots of behavior of this kind. People who agree with their doctors that they need hip replacements seldom get around to having the procedure.

There are ways to beat path dependency, however. Another experiment has shown how undergraduates who agree to get a tetanus shot seldom actually do so, but if you make them an appointment and hand them a map to the clinic, the odds that they'll comply leap tenfold. Savings habits are equally sensitive to slight tweaks in incentives. Invite workers to sign up for 401(k) pensions and many will procrastinate. Tell workers they are part of the program unless they opt out and the participation rate rockets.

Can Americans be prodded to invest more in friendships? It's hard to imagine American companies organizing regular Japanese-style drinking sessions for the staff; it's hard to believe that a French-style cap on working hours would do more than encourage yet more lonely Web surfing.

Twenty years ago, remarks Princeton's Eldar Shafir, a concerned European might have prescribed an emergency program of cafe construction: a reverse Marshall Plan for cappuccinos. But now Starbucks has run that experiment for us. American caffeine addicts demand lattes to go -- or to sip as they enjoy the company of Wi-Fi-enabled laptops.

But there's one antidote to loneliness that is at least intriguing. In an experiment in Austin, Princeton's Daniel Kahneman found that commuting -- generally alone, and generally by car -- is rated the least enjoyable daily activity, but commuting by car pool is reasonably pleasant. Measures that promote car pooling could make Americans less isolated and healthier.

So here's my slogan for 2008: Gas taxes make you happy.

smallaby@washpost.com

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In an age of Oprah and MySpace, Americans have fewer real friends than they need. There's something they can do about it.

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14. Rainie and Wellman on what internet is doing to the relationships

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14. Rainie and Wellman on what internet is doing to the relationships

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It is a short version of a full Pew internet and american life project 'the strength of internet ties'

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Does the internet degrade friendship, kinship, civic involvement, and social capital?

One of the great debates about the internet is what it is doing to the relationships that Americans have with friends, relatives, neighbors, and workmates.

On the one hand, many extol the internet's abilities to extend our relationships - we can contact people across the ocean at the click of a mouse; we can communicate kind thoughts at two in the morning and not wake up our friends. Back in the early years of the internet, some prophets felt that the internet would create a global village, transcending the boundaries of time and space. As John Perry Barlow, a leader of the Electric Frontier Foundation wrote in 1995:

With the development of the internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther (p. 36).... I want to be able to completely interact with the consciousness that's trying to communicate with mine. Rapidly... [w]e are now creating a space in which the people of the planet can have that kind of communication relationship. (p. 40)

On the other hand are those who fear that the internet causes a multitude of social and psychological problems. Several psychologists have claimed to treat people with "internet addiction." For example, in 1999, David Greenfield adapted a diagnostic tool from a gambling addiction questionnaire, substituting "internet" for gambling. This approach ignores the positive benefits of being involved with the internet: Compare a statement such as "I am gambling too much" with one such as "I am communicating on the internet too much."

Does the time people spend online damage their social connections?

In February 2004, a reporter asked one author (Wellman) to comment on the deaths of four supposed "cyber-addicts" who spent much time online in virtual reality environments. The reporter lost interest when Wellman pointed out that other causes might be involved, that "addicts" were a low percentage of users, and that no one worries about "neighboring addicts" who chat daily in their front yards.

A more pervasive concern has been that the internet sucks people away from in-person contact, fostering alienation and real-world disconnection. For example, Texas broadcaster Jim Hightower worried that:

...while all this razzle-dazzle connects us electronically, it disconnects us from each other, having us "interfacing" more with computers and TV screens than looking in the face of our fellow human beings. (quoted in Fox, 1995, p. 12)

Similarly, when the "Homenet" study in Pittsburgh found that internet newcomers were somewhat more stressed, it was front-page news. The media paid much less attention to the follow-up report that found much of the stress does not continue as people become used to the internet.

The assumption underlying fear about what the internet is doing to relationships is that the internet seduces people into spending time online at the expense of time spent with friends and family. As a result, Americans may be sitting at their computer screens at home and not going out to talk to our neighbors across the street or visiting relatives. There are worries that relationships that exist in text - or even screen-to-screen on flickering webcams - are less satisfying than those in which people can really see, hear, smell, and touch each other.

There are four key aspects to the question of the internet's impact on relationships.

The debate about the impact of the internet on social relations is important for four reasons:

There is the direct question of whether relationships continue to flourish in the internet age. Are there the same kinds of ties - in both quantity and quality - that flourished in pre-internet times? Do people have more or fewer relationships? Do they have more or less contact with friends and relatives? Does the ability of the internet to connect instantly around the world mean that far-flung ties now predominate over neighborly relations? More broadly, does internet contact take away from people's in-person contacts or add to them?

There is the associated question of whether the internet is splitting people into two separate worlds: online and offline. Originally, both those who worshipped the internet and those who feared it thought that people's online relationships would be so separate from their existing relationships that people's "life on the screen," as Sherry Turkle put it in 1995, would be different from their "real life." Is this the case? Or is the internet now an integral part of the many ways people relate to friends, relatives, and even neighbors in real life? Can online relationships be meaningful, perhaps even as meaningful as in-person relationships?

Do people's relationships (on- and offline) provide usable help? In other words, do they add to what social scientists now call interpersonal social capital? Such help could take the form of giving information or emotional support, lending a cup of sugar, or providing long-term health care. It is easy enough to give information on the internet. And while it is impossible to change bedpans online, it is easy to use the internet to arrange for people to visit and help. Robert Putnam's influential Bowling Alone (2000) provided a fair amount of evidence that American social capital declined from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. However, some scholars dispute his evidence. For example, Claude Fischer (2005) argued that the ferment of the 1960s was an unnatural high point of social involvement. Moreover, if people are not going to churches, the Lions Club, or scouting groups as much, has civic involvement died? Or, are they finding such group activity online, through chat rooms, listservs, and group email? And is the quality the same when people pray online rather than in churches (see Campbell, 2005)? In the 1990s, instead of nostalgia for the small-town community of Pleasantville, people dreamed of traveling to Cheers, the pub "where everybody knows your name." Where do they find community now?

To what extent is the internet associated with a transformation of American society from groups to networks? Myth has it that in the old days (à la Pleasantville), the average American had two parents, a single boss, and lived in a friendly village or neighborhood where everyone knew their names. Yet a variety of evidence suggests that many North Americans no longer are bound up in a single neighborhood, friendship, or kinship group. Rather, they maneuver in social networks. The difference is that a person's network often consists of multiple and separate clusters. It could well be that most of a person's friends do not know each other, and even more likely that neighbors do not know a person's friends or relatives. Moreover, rather than neighborhood communities like Pleasantville or its urban equivalents, most of a person's relationships are spread widely across cities, states, and even continents. And instead of a single community that provides a wide spectrum of help, it appears that most relationships are specialized, for example, with parents providing financial aid and friends providing emotional support. The internet supports both sparsely connected, far-flung networks and densely connected, local groups. The environment of one-to-one ties through email and instant messaging can transform groups into networks because the internet easily supports groups through one-to-many emails, listservs, chatrooms, blogs, and the like. Yet are such groups single all-encompassing Pleasantvilles, or is it more likely that they are just pieces of complex social networks?

Research points to the positive social networking effects of connectivity.

As these questions continue to be debated, research is showing that the internet is not destroying relationships or causing people to be anti-social. To the contrary, the internet is enabling people to maintain existing ties, often to strengthen them, and at times to forge new ties. The time that most people spend online reduces the time they spend on the relatively unsocial activities of watching TV and sleeping. Moreover, the relationships maintained through online communication only rarely are with an entirely new set of individuals who live far away. Instead, a large amount of the communication that takes place online is with the same set of friends and family who are also contacted in person and by phone. This is especially true for socially close relationships - the more close friends and family are seen in person, the more they are contacted by email.

Much of the communication that takes place online is with the same set of friends and family who are also contacted in person and by phone.

If Americans do not live in a single community group, but in fragmented networks, we need to understand this phenomenon. Do people now operate as part of tiny, simple networks or large, complex ones? Do they rarely see their friends? Are they enjoying or being overloaded by an abundance of communication? Are the new, internet-enhanced social networks providing social capital to help us get things done, to make decisions, and to help us cope?

It is to these questions about the nature of today's social networks that we now turn.

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What Is the Internet Doing to Relationships?

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One of the great debates about the internet is what it is doing to the relationships that Americans have with friends, relatives, neighbors, and workmates. On the one hand, many extol the internet's abilities to extend our relationships - we can contact people across the ocean at the click of a mouse; we can communicate kind thoughts at two in the morning and not wake up our friends.

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13. Could a robot write the perfect pop song? 

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13. Could a robot write the perfect pop song? 

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"Musical copies appear again and again. Artists try to recreate the sound that made them pop phenoms. It's easy to find mashups of any combination of hits, given the right beat.". I also read that it is possible now to write a 'perfect' pop song after analysing charts from past 15 years.

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But as popular as Miku is, her success relies on human ability. As Lindsay Zoladz writes for :

Far more revolutionary is the fact that all her music-including the songs performed in concert-is written by fans, some of whom cannot read music and never felt empowered to write a song before Miku came along. "Miku is seen less as this really special person, like Lady Gaga or somebody," [Tara] Knight [a professor at UC San Diego working on a documentary about Miku] says, "but rather a conduit through which you can express yourself."

Miku, therefore, is the embodiment of human creativity. She sings pop songs written by fans, with innocuous titles like "Sharing the World" and "Packaged," and those same fans cheer each other on.

Which makes her basically like YouTube or SoundCloud, but with a face and a "personality." She captures how music production has been changing: Musicians can write, produce, and distribute their work on a variety of platforms to a wide audience. "Artists don't need a label as much for distribution anymore," says Greg Milner, the author of Perfecting Sound Forever. "They're evolving independent of that."

Of course, artists are not about to all become blue-haired avatars. Easier distribution just means a more saturated pop-music landscape, which poses a new challenge: Musicians need to reverse-engineer popularity, not pop songs.

No one has figured that out, but streaming proves one part of the answer. There are myriad ways to listen to music today-on the radio, on our devices, on anything but (R.I.P.) CDs and tapes-but the method that gives the listener the most control is the Internet, through sites like Spotify, Pandora, and Rdio. Users input their music tastes into the sites, essentially teaching them what songs and artists are popular. They then are able to play music similar to or match those tastes. It's a type of reverse engineering that begins with understanding what a listener likes.

But it's not perfect. Pandora, for example, occasionally rotates the covers of a song a user already disliked to cycle into a playlist or suggests a song that barely matches a user's tastes. And on the artist's end, if an artist hopes to build an audience, they'll have to reach the ones that already like the type of music they're making, and they have to capture those listeners' attentions before they skip ahead to the next song. "Music is all around us because it's so flexible and so easy," Milner says. "There are just too many other distractions now, so our attention spans have lessened ... I think we're going to be listening to music both a lot more and a lot less closely."

On top of that, the use of data to track what we like listening to can backfire. The more we listen to a song, the more ubiquitous it becomes, and the more studios want to copy that song's success. We like the familiar, so the same sounds resurface, lending pop music its reputation for being repetitive and generic.

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Could a Robot Write the Perfect Pop Song?

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But as popular as Miku is, her success relies on human ability. As Lindsay Zoladz writes for : Far more revolutionary is the fact that all her music-including the songs performed in concert-is written by fans, some of whom cannot read music and never felt empowered to write a song before Miku came along.

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12. New Steps Toward the Future of Virtual Reality

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12. New Steps Toward the Future of Virtual Reality

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It's getting closer and closer to us. Now we are reaching worrying, in my opinion, level of 'intimacy' with technologies. And allow them to enter our lives without thinking of consequences.

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Today we're announcing new advances in our long-term efforts to build the future of virtual reality.
Mobile VR grows: 1m hours of video watched
Virtual reality is already something people can touch and feel with the Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus, which is in stores now. Gear VR is the best mobile VR experience in the world because it combines the leading VR software, built by Facebook's Oculus team, with world-class mobile hardware, built by Samsung. Since Gear VR launched in November 2015, the response has been incredibly strong: More than 200 games and apps are now available for the platform in the Oculus store, and people have already watched more than a million hours of video in Gear VR.
Dynamic streaming coming to mobile VR
We've also been developing new technology that will make video in virtual reality work even better. 360 video on Facebook is the first step - it allows you to look around and feel like you're present while watching a video, whether it's surfing in Tahiti or exploring the surface of Mars. Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily. And we've only just begun to explore the possibilities with this format.

Today, we're taking an important step toward improving 360 video in VR: Our powerful dynamic streaming technology for 360 video is coming to Gear VR. It's a more efficient way of delivering 360 videos, showing only the pixels you're actually looking at in the highest quality, instead of delivering the entire 360 video in high resolution. To make this work, we create dozens of variants for every 360 video that gets uploaded to Facebook, each tailored to a specific viewing angle, and then as you watch the video, we rapidly adjust which variant we display based on where you're looking. By doing this, we've quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x - so videos look clearer and play faster. We're excited to bring this to Gear VR in the next few weeks. To learn more, read the blog post from our recent Video @Scale event where we previewed this technology.
Investing in social VR
As we continue to make big breakthroughs in the technology behind VR, we're also investing in efforts to explore immersive new VR experiences that will help people connect and share. We've already helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices - ranging from Facebook and Instagram to Messenger and WhatsApp - and now we want to apply that same approach to the new medium of VR. In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection - like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they're really there with each other.

We've created a Social VR team at Facebook focused entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR. This team will explore how people can connect and share using today's VR technology, as well as long-term possibilites as VR evolves into an increasingly important computing platform. They'll will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow's social VR experiences on all platforms.

Our work in VR is still early, and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that we still need to solve. But we're encouraged by our progress to date, and we're excited to continue building VR technology that gives people new ways to connect and share.

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New Steps Toward the Future of Virtual Reality

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Today we're announcing new advances in our long-term efforts to build the future of virtual reality. Mobile VR grows: 1m hours of video watched Virtual reality is already something people can touch and feel with the Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus, which is in stores now.

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Are we turning into 'shallow thinkers'?

depth, rather than velocity of human thought

less focused, less productive

signal-processing units

students who were on their laptops during the lecture showed poorer learning capability

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The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere." Today, the Internet grants us easy access to unprecedented amounts of information. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers.

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People...

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The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere." Today, the Internet grants us easy access to unprecedented amounts of information. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers.

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"As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it.". From cable TV to Netflix, etc.

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Until recently, the TV business was shielded from the turmoil that the Internet has visited upon other media industries, like music and publishing. The reason was largely a matter of network capacity. Sending high-quality video through the Web requires a lot more bandwidth than sending text or music, and until 2007 most Americans lacked high-speed Internet connections at home, according to the Pew Research Center. The Net simply wasn't a viable alternative for distributing the signals traditionally sent over cables or beamed down from satellites.

That's changing, and fast. With broadband becoming the norm and connection speeds continuing to quicken, what has happened to music companies and newspapers is beginning to happen to broadcast networks and cable companies. People like me are using the Net to bypass the customary providers of television programming, along with the ads they show and the fees they collect.

My Blu-ray player is just the tip of the iceberg that the TV business is about to hit. Today you can watch snippets of shows on YouTube or entire episodes on sites like Hulu or Yahoo TV. You can view news reports at CNN.com, sports events at ESPN360.com and documentaries at PBS.org. You can download shows, sometimes without charge, from Apple's iTunes store and watch them on your iPod, iPhone or PC. Or you can stream them through your Xbox or Wii.

Television is escaping the TV set and the cable box. We no longer watch the tube. We watch, to borrow ex-Senator Ted Stevens's memorable conceit, a series of tubes.

As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn't gone, but it's becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That's one funny thing about the Internet: it's an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we're together today, we're often apart, peering into our own screens.

Television companies, desperate to protect their sources of revenue, are trying to figure out ways to control or at least influence the shifts in our viewing practices. If a transmission company like Comcast - although it owns a few cable stations, Comcast's main business is providing cable TV, Internet and telephone service - were to own more of the programs it distributes, it could, at least theoretically, wield more power over how that content reaches viewers. In buying NBC Universal, for instance, Comcast would gain a stake in Hulu, which NBC owns with ABC and Fox. It could impose limits or even fees on the shows streamed through that popular Web site.

Such opportunities reveal the conflict of interest that's built into the TV business. The companies that supply us with pay-TV subscriptions - not just cable operators like Comcast but telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon - also tend to be the ones that provide us with Internet service. By blocking or slowing certain Net transmissions, they could shunt us toward their own programming and prevent us from viewing alternatives, particularly free ones. If my Internet provider degraded my Netflix signal, I would almost certainly go back to watching more cable programs.

That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. In 2007, Comcast was caught throttling back its customers' links to BitTorrent, a file-sharing network often used to trade bootleg copies of TV shows and movies. Comcast argues that heavy BitTorrent users were taking up too much bandwidth, to the detriment of other services. Looked at another way, Comcast was using its Web-access franchise to protect its pay-TV franchise.

But, as the company soon found out, impinging on " net neutrality " - the principle that Internet providers should treat all data the same - is a good way to make enemies. Internet purists went ballistic. Consumer advocates denounced the move. The government began an investigation. In 2008, the F.C.C. decided that Comcast had broken its rules, and it ordered the company not to impede access to BitTorrent and other such services. Comcast is appealing the ruling.

Under its new chairman, the Obama-appointee Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. is becoming even more aggressive in defending the openness of the Internet. Last month, it voted to begin preparing regulations aimed at giving net neutrality the force of law. Though controversial, the commission's move will be welcomed by most Web users. I know that I don't want my Internet provider to control the sites I visit or services I can use when I'm online. Unimpeded access to the Net has come to feel like a right.

In the end, and whether they gobble up content producers or not, network operators like Comcast may be fated to be in the plumbing business. They'll turn tidy profits by maintaining the pipes through which we get Internet service, even if we use those pipes to bypass their pay-TV offerings. We'll go on gorging ourselves on free Internet video. We, the viewers, will be the winners.

Or will we?

The smartest, most creative TV shows, from "Deadwood" to "Mad Men" to NBC's own "30 Rock," tend to be the most expensive to produce. They have large, talented casts, top-notch writers and directors, elaborate sets and generally high production values. If the changes in our viewing habits stanch the flow of money back to studios, producing those kinds of programs may no longer be possible. In their place, we'll get more junk: dopey reality shows, cookie-cutter police dramas, inane gab fests. The vast wasteland will become even vaster.

Even "free" has a price.

Correction: November 29, 2009

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Until recently, the TV business was shielded from the turmoil that the Internet has visited upon other media industries, like music and publishing. The reason was largely a matter of network capacity. Sending high-quality video through the Web requires a lot more bandwidth than sending text or music, and until 2007 most Americans lacked high-speed Internet connections at home, according to the Pew Research Center.

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Nicholas Carr article on how internet shaped and keeps shaping our ability to analyse and consume information

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faculty of the university of michigan medical school

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What the Internet is doing to our brains

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8. Infidelity site Ashley Madison hacked as attackers demand total shutdown

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8. Infidelity site Ashley Madison hacked as attackers demand total shutdown

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Hackers have stolen and leaked personal information from online cheating site Ashley Madison, an international dating site with the tagline: "Life is short. Have an affair."

The site, which encourages married users to cheat on their spouses and advertises 37 million members, had its data hacked by a group calling itself the Impact Team. At least two other dating sites, Cougar Life and Established Men, also owned by the same parent group, Avid Life Media, have had their data compromised.

The Impact Team claims to have complete access to the company's database, including not only user records for every single member, but also the financial records of ALM and other proprietary information. For now, the group has released just 40MB of data, including credit card details and several ALM documents.

According to the information security journalist Brian Krebs, who broke the news, ALM has confirmed that the hacked material is genuine, and the company is working to remove from the net the material that has already been posted. But the initial leak is just a taster, according to the Impact Team, which accompanied the data with a manifesto threatening release of further information if Ashley Madison and Established Men are not permanently closed.

"Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers' secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online," the group's statement reads.

The hackers' main point of contention is with the fact that Ashley Madison charges users a fee of £15 to carry out a "full delete" of their information if they decide to leave the site. Although users have the option of permanently hiding their profile free of charge, the company's advertisements claim that the full delete service is the only way to completely remove their information from the servers.

But the hackers say that that claim is "a complete lie".

"Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed," they allege.

ALM believes it has identified the perpetrator of the hack, which it says was likely an inside job. "We're on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication," the company's chief executive, Noel Biderman, told Krebs. "I've got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services."

The data dump seems to back-up that theory to a certain extent, specifically apologising to the company's director of security. "You did everything you could, but nothing you could have done could have stopped this," the manifesto reads.

In a statement, ALM said: "We apologise for this unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our customers' information. The current business world has proven to be one in which no company's online assets are safe from cyber-vandalism, with Avid Life Media being only the latest among many companies to have been attacked, despite investing in the latest privacy and security technologies.

"At this time, we have been able to secure our sites, and close the unauthorised access points. We are working with law enforcement agencies, which are investigating this criminal act. Any and all parties responsible for this act of cyber-terrorism will be held responsible."

Ashley Madison, along with a number of other dating sites, had already been criticised for the lack of care taken over customer information at least once before. In 2012, the online rights campaign group EFF examined eight popular dating sites, and found that just one, Zoosk, carried out simple security precautions such as enabling encrypted connections by default. In the EFF's study, however, Ashley Madison was explicitly praised for deleting data after users closed their account.

ALM later said it had used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) to demand the removal of online posts about the incident "as well as all personally identifiable information about our users published online."

Posts on Twitter which had apparently earlier linked to pages containing hacked material were now bringing up "page not found" results, the Guardian found.

ALM also said it is now offering its full-delete option free to any customer to help them protect their privacy.

Topics

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Infidelity site Ashley Madison hacked as attackers demand total shutdown

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Hackers have stolen and leaked personal information from online cheating site Ashley Madison, an international dating site with the tagline: "Life is short. Have an affair." The site, which encourages married users to cheat on their spouses and advertises 37 million members, had its data hacked by a group calling itself the Impact Team.

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IP is Internet Protocol. "An IP address is a unique address identifiying a machine (which can be a computer, a server, an electronic device, a router, a phone etc.) on a network, thus serving for routing and forwarding IP packets from source to destination.". So, everyone know you are not a dog, basically. Moreover, if someone really needs, they could identify personal details, which is slightly worrying.

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The letters "IP" stand for "Internet Protocol." It's the set of rules that govern how packets are transmitted over a network. This is why we see IP used in words like IP address and VoIP.

The good news is that you don't have to know anything about what IP means in order to use network devices. For example, your laptop and IP phone use IP addresses but you don't have to deal with the technical side in order to make them work.

However, we'll go through the technical side of it to get an understanding of what IP actually means and how and why it's a necessary component of network communication.

IP is a protocol. Simply said, a protocol is a set of rules governing how things work in a certain technology so that there is some kind of standardization. When put into a network communication context, an internet protocol describes how data packets move through a network.

When you have a protocol, you are sure that all machines on a network (or in the world, when it comes to the internet), however different they might be, speak the same "language" and can integrate into the whole framework.

The IP protocol standardizes the way machines over the internet or any IP network forwards or routes their packets based on their IP addresses.

Along with addressing, routing is one of the main functions of the IP protocol. Routing consists of forwarding IP packets from source to destination machines over a network, based on their IP addresses.

When Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) couples with IP, you get the internet highway traffic controller. TCP and IP work together to transmit data over the internet but at different levels.

Since IP does not guarantee reliable packet delivery over a network, TCP takes the charge of making the connection reliable.

TCP is the protocol that ensures reliability in a transmission, which ensures that there is no loss of packets, that the packets are in the right order, that the delay is to an acceptable level, and that there is no duplication of packets. All this is to ensure that the data received is consistent, in order, complete, and smooth (so that you don't hear broken speech).

During data transmission, TCP works just before IP. TCP bundles data into TCP packets before sending these to IP, which in turn encapsulates these into IP packets.

This is maybe the most interesting and mysterious part of IP for most computer users. An IP address is a unique address identifying a machine (which can be a computer, a server, an electronic device, a router, a phone etc.) on a network, thus serving for routing and forwarding IP packets from source to destination.

So, in short, TCP is the data while IP is the location.

An IP Packet is a packet of data which carries a data load and an IP header. Any piece of data (TCP packets, in the case of a TCP/IP network) is broken into bits and placed into these packets and transmitted over the network.

Once the packets reach their destination, they are reassembled into the original data.

VoIP takes advantage of this ubiquitous carrier technology to disseminate voice data packets to and from machines.

IP is actually where VoIP draws its power from: the power to make things cheaper and so flexible; by making optimal use of an already-existing data carrier.

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The letters "IP" stand for "Internet Protocol." It's the set of rules that govern how packets are transmitted over a network. This is why we see IP used in words like IP address and VoIP. The good news is that you don't have to know anything about what IP means in order to use network devices.

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Reflection on the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s.
We are delusional

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Say hi to Lucy.

Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group-I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing:

Lucy's kind of unhappy.

To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:

It's pretty straightforward-when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy.

To provide some context, let's start by bringing Lucy's parents into the discussion:

Lucy's parents were born in the 50s-they're Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not GYPSYs.

Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers. They wanted her parents' careers to have greener grass than their own, and Lucy's parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable career for themselves. Something like this:

They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers. As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy's parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.

With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy's parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren't alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.

This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their parents' goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn't really do it for them. A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.

This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Wildly Ambitious

The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn't quite exceptional or uniqueenough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.

Cal Newport points out that "follow your passion" is a catchphrase that has only gotten going in the last 20 years, according to Google's Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time. The same Ngram viewer shows that the phrase "a secure career" has gone out of style, just as the phrase "a fulfilling career" has gotten hot.

To be clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did-they just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn't think about as much.

But something else is happening too. While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message throughout her childhood as well:

This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Delusional

"Sure," Lucy has been taught, "everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd." So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better-
A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition of special:

spe-cial| 'speSHel |
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.

According to this definition, most people are not special-otherwise "special" wouldn't mean anything.

Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, "Good point...but I actually am one of the few special ones"-and this is the problem.

A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job market. While Lucy's parents' expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it's just a matter of time and choosing which way to go. Her pre-workforce expectations look something like this:

Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they're actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build-even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them-and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.

But GYPSYs aren't about to just accept that.

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."

For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, "Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?" He says that "if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the 'why,' there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief."

And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few years out of college Lucy finds herself here:

Lucy's extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit deluded about one's own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early years out of college. And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her "reality - expectations" happy score coming out at a negative.

And it gets even worse. On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem that applies to their whole generation:

GYPSYs Are Taunted

Sure, some people from Lucy's parents' high school or college classes ended up more successful than her parents did. And while they may have heard about some of it from time to time through the grapevine, for the most part they didn't really know what was going on in too many other peoples' careers.

Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.

Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:

So that's why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate. In fact, she's probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing.

Here's my advice for Lucy:

1) Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out-just dive in somewhere.

2) Stop thinking that you're special. The fact is, right now, you're not special. You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.

3) Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll never have any reason to envy others.

_________

If you liked this, check out:

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
How to Pick Your Life Partner
7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook

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Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy - Wait But Why

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Say hi to Lucy. Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group-I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.

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An extract from his new book From Skedaddle to Selfie,

identifying the words that have come to define each generation. Millennials generation are described by the words "FoMo", "selfie", "abbrevs" (LOL, m8, etc), "Meh".

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For centuries, America has enriched the English language with strange and arresting terms.

In an exclusive extract from his new book From Skedaddle to Selfie, Allan Metcalf identifies the words that have come to define each generation.

The Gilded Generation (born 1822-42)
Skedaddle
The Gilded Generation contributed to our vocabulary when they went to war. Particularly notable was a coinage that came from the first battle of the American Civil War, a word in the newly exuberant highfalutin polysyllabic American pattern of "absquatulate" (depart), "hornswoggle" (cheat) and "shindig". The new word was skedaddle, meaning to scurry away, and it was applied to the Battle of Bull Run on July 21 1861, where the defeated Union army beat a hasty retreat to Washington. Southerners called it the Great Skedaddle. But it wasn't just the South who taunted the enemy with this ignominious word. When their forces retreated, they got the same label from the North.

The Progressive Generation (born 1843-59)
Dude
Dude! It's one of the great words of American English. In 1882 dude was practically unknown. In 1883 it was on the pages of seemingly every newspaper in the United States, as a label for a foppish young man. Robert Sale Hill, a resident of New York City, introduced dude to the world in a poem, "The True Origin and History of 'The Dude' ". ("Their features, first I would explain/ Are of the washed-out order - / Mild dissipation, feeble brain/ With cigarette smoke border.")

The Missionary Generation (born 1860-82)
Hot Dog

Gale: "What is the noblest kind of dog?"

Mr Strong: "I give up."

Gale: "The hot dog. It not only does not bite the hand that feeds it; it feeds the hand that bites it."

That joke, published in The Weekly Tribune of Moulton, Iowa, in 1934, is the kind of irreverent tribute accorded to the most American of foods ever since it acquired its irreverent name back in the 19th century. The sausage that we now call a hot dog was originally, and still is, known more formally as wiener (meaning Viennese) and frankfurter (meaning from Frankfurt). The dog part of hot dog came from another half-serious joke from as far back as the 1830s, asserting that the meat in these sausages came from stray dogs. For example, here's the Boston Times of September 18 1831: "The Methuen gazette editor 'infers' that dog-meat sausages is a new article of food. Bless your soul man - it's as old as your granny."

The Lost Generation (born 1883-1900)
Speakeasy
Flappers and their johns went to speakeasies. As a name for a place illegally selling alcoholic beverages, speakeasy had been around since the late 19th century. But thanks to Prohibition, the speakeasy belongs to the Lost Generation. In 1891, when the word was still new, The New York Times was curious enough to send a reporter to Pittsburgh to track it down. The reporter filed this story, published in the Times of July 6:

"The term 'speakeasy' is said to have originated in McKeesport, this county. Mrs Kate Hester has for years been a saloon keeper there. She greeted the High-Licence act by defying it and continuing to sell beer without licence. Her customers were a boisterous lot. When their conviviality became too noisy it was her custom to approach with warning finger upraised and awe-inspiring look and whisper: 'Speak easy, boys! Speak easy!' "

Until the 20th century, nobody was sexy. They may have been charming, seductive, enticing, but they weren't sexy. (In fact, they didn't even "have sex" until the 19th century.)

The generation that fought the First World War and then fuelled the Roaring Twenties was the first to be sexy - or at least the first to put that word to use in a growing number of contexts.

We see it as early as 1908 in a review of Handicapped, a book about the son of a horse trainer, whose "heritage operates against him in matters of love". The reviewer in The Nation was unimpressed: "When the book is not horsy it is 'sexy'. It is also rather dull."
Jazz
The famous baseball term, jazz, introduced and embraced by the Lost Generation, became one of the biggest hits of the 20th century. Baseball term? Yes, the evidence shows conclusively that jazz began not in the clubs and halls of New Orleans, but in a ballpark in California. The very first instance in print of jazz is from the sports section of the Los Angeles Times of April 2 1912: "I got a new curve this year," softly murmured Henderson yesterday, "and I'm goin' to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it."

GI Generation (born 1901-24)
Gung Ho
It's not an old Chinese proverb, but it is Chinese. In that language, gung ho means something like "work peace". It was a designation used by the Chinese communist government for industrial cooperatives, and it would have remained just that if it were not for Col (later Gen) Evans Carlson of the US Marine Corps.

In the late Thirties, he was a military adviser with the Chinese communists in their fight against the Japanese. Carlson understood gung ho to mean the command "Work together!" And he brought it into English by using it as a motto for the Marines of the GI Generation under his command in the Second World War. Carlson told Life magazine in 1943: "My motto caught on and they began to call themselves the Gung Ho Battalion. When I designed a field jacket to replace the bulky and orthodox pack they called it the Gung Ho jacket. And they named every new thing Gung Ho."

Credit: Wesley Merritt

Doggie Bag
Not every member of the GI Generation went off to war, but those who stayed home were involved in the war effort too. That included rationing of everything from sugar to gasoline to meat. People were encouraged to grow vegetables in "victory gardens" in their yards and to feed dogs with table scraps. Under the circumstances, when dog owners ate at a restaurant, it wasn't much of a stretch to think about bringing some of the meat home to feed the dog. Taking food from a restaurant wasn't proper in those days, so diners would be inclined to smuggle the meat home in a napkin. And so to prevent loss of napkins, or perhaps to encourage patriotic frugality, some restaurants began offering a carton or a wax paper bag for the meat.

As the idea spread, restaurateurs came up with names like "Pet Pakits" and "Bones for Bowser". By the Fifties, however, doggie bag had become the generally accepted term.

The Silent Generation (born 1925-42)
Trick or Treat

The phrase "trick or treat" is distinctive enough that it probably had a unique inventor. Most likely it was someone from the west of the US or Canada. That's because the earliest evidence we have so far is from the western parts of those countries. As far back as 1927 a newspaper in Lethbridge in southern Alberta, Canada, reported from the little town of Blackie: "The youthful tormentors were at back door and front demanding edible plunder by the word 'trick or treat' to which the inmates gladly responded and sent the robbers away rejoicing."

The Boom Generation (born 1943-60)
Groovy
For a while in the Sixties and Seventies, as they were growing up, Boomers were groovy. Before the Boomers came along, groovy had been around for decades as a jazz term, derived from and meaning the same as "in the groove". It's in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published 1952, where the bartender Barrelhouse asks: "You like the groovy music on the juke?"

What groovy meant when Boomers adopted it in the mid-Sixties was more than merely cool. It was a whole new way of life, epitomised in 1966 in Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song that popularised the word: "Slow down, you move too fast, you've got to make the morning last/ Just kickin' down the cobblestones, lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy."

Generation X (born 1961-81)
Hacker
Generation X didn't grow up with email, texting and the internet. But in the Nineties while this generation still was young, they embraced computer connections as they were being developed. The term hacker apparently had its origin in the Fifties at MIT to designate people obsessed with machinery and then particularly computers. As long ago as 1972, when the oldest of Generation X were not yet teens, Stewart Brand offered this explanation in Rolling Stone: "A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship." As the term spread among Generation X, hacker acquired connotations of outlawry, and an irreverent attitude towards the internet.

Geek and Nerd
Nor did Generation X invent the geek. As a slang term for a guy who isn't very impressive, geek has been around since the 19th century. A wordlist compiled in 1911 by students at the University of Nebraska defined geke as "awkward fellow, guy", with the example: "Isn't that fellow a queer, crazy geke?" The Surfer's Almanac of 1977 defined geek as "a beginner who is always in the way of experienced surfers". And then came the computer revolution, when geeks became the ones with the esoteric knowledge, power and wealth.

Like geek, nerd was not at first a term of endearment, but the digital revolution ascribed new power to the fanatically studious who had no time to waste on social niceties. The Oxford English Dictionary captured one 1993 effort at distinguishing between the two words: "Geek is the proud, insider term for nerd. If you are not a dedicated techie, don't use this word."

The Millennial Generation (born 1982-2004)
FOMO
With all the virtual worlds at their fingertips, Millennials have come up with a new ailment that now is afflicting other generations too: FOMO, or fear of missing out. Social media now make it possible for our friends and acquaintances to tell us instantly and constantly the exciting things they're doing. So Millennials are always aware of the good times others are having while they, for example, might just be home alone on a Saturday night.
Selfie
In 2013 there emerged a word that managed to portray the essence of Millennials, evoking their world and their world view in just two syllables: selfie. Along with its lesser-known antithesis, the unselfie, and other derivatives like shelfie (a picture of one's books) and theftie (a picture of the thief of one's cell phone, taken automatically when the thief first tries to use it), selfie reflects the Millennials' immersion in technology and social media; lives sometimes lived more comfortably online than in person; concern for their image; and generosity in offering their best selves to friends and the world. For Millennials, the selfie is the conjunction of technology with desire.

Abbrevs
As the Millennial Generation grew up, they indulged in new versions of telegraphese, inspired by the new technology of texting and tweeting. Abbreviations had been the rage before, whether encouraged by the cost of sending telegraph messages and telegrams, or just by foolishness, like the fad for abbreviations in Boston in the 1830s that led to the invention of OK. But it's not just in texting or tweeting that abbrevs characterise the communications of the Millennials. They also carry over abbrev style in f2f (face-to-face) conversations, perhaps reflecting the fact that social media has become their dominant reality. The late William Safire, pundit and columnist, observed in 2009: "Today, the fave (for 'favourite') abbreves are obvi (a shortening of 'Thank you, Captain Obvious') and belig (a clipping of 'belligerent', retaining the soft g). Nobody in the young-barflies crowd orders 'the usual'; it's the yoozh. My grandnephew Jesse concludes sentences with whatev, which is probs (for 'probably') 'whatever'. In this cacophony of abbreves, word endings are scattered all over the floor. Go fig."

Meh
Millennials aren't interested in what they aren't interested in. And they have an expression for it: "meh." There's no mystery where "meh" comes from. It was expressed, and even spelt out, in episodes of The Simpsons, which could be considered the ultimate Millennial TV show. At first, when the Simpson daughter, Lisa, used it in 1992, it was hardly more than a mutter, but it was used again from time to time and in a 2001 episode she spelt it out, dignifying it as a word and not just a sound.

Homer: Kids, how would you like to go to Blockoland?

Bart and Lisa: Meh.

Homer: But the TV gave the impression that...

Bart: We said meh.

Lisa: M-E-H. Meh.

Homeland Generation (born 2005-)
Wait
These post-Millennials, born in 2005 and later, are the first generation to grow up since 9/11. Although half of them are yet to be born, the oldest of them are turning 11 years old, not far from beginning to make their linguistic mark in their teen years. But wait. Here's an inkling of how the language of the Homelanders may develop. Goran Metcalf, in 2014 an eight-year-old resident of the Chicago suburb Oak Park, would usually say "wait" before asking a question: "Wait... What's for dinner?" "Wait... Where are we going?" "Wait... When is my birthday party?" He even would use it in front of statements: "Wait... I want to watch TV." "Wait... I'm going over to the neighbour's house." His father notes that he says it in front of everything. "I'm not sure if that's something just he does, or if that's how he talks with his friends. I'm guessing it's not just him." And there's an obvious reason why he does it, his father says. It makes you pause and listen to what he has to say. In fact, a year later his parents were beginning to pick it up too. Other members of the Homeland Generation are beginning to develop distinctive speech habits like this. What exactly will they decide as their way of expressing themselves? We'll have to wait.

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Groovy, geek, meh, selfie - which word defines your generation?

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For centuries, America has enriched the English language with strange and arresting terms. In an exclusive extract from his new book From Skedaddle to Selfie, Allan Metcalf identifies the words that have come to define each generation. The Gilded Generation (born 1822-42) Skedaddle The Gilded Generation contributed to our vocabulary when they went to war.

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"The new selfie combines 57 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of Curiosity's arm."

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They take selfies even on Mars!

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Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune

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This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at "Namib Dune," where the rover's activities included scuffing into the dune with a wheel and scooping samples of sand for laboratory analysis.

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1. Essena O'Neill quits Instagram claiming social media 'is not real life'

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1. Essena O'Neill quits Instagram claiming social media 'is not real life'

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How does media effect our identity construction. Instagram famous blogger gives reasons why quit  instagram. She claims Instagram is a place "contrived perfection made to get attention".

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Essena O'Neill quits Instagram claiming social media 'is not real life'

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Australian teenager with more than 612,000 Instagram followers radically rewrites her 'self-promoting' history on social media (and launches new website)

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4. Rejoining a world that is starkly different from the one he remembered. 

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4. Rejoining a world that is starkly different from the one he remembered. 

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"My Life After 44 Years In Prison". An interview with Otis Johnson, who was jailed at the age 25 and came out at the age of 69. Back at the time when he was out, there were no phones and technologies were not as nearly advanced. He questions if everyone nowadays became CIA agents, because he can not understand how we manage walking and being on the phone at the same time. Another interesting phrase he says is about the variety of products in the shops, different coloured drinks, he calls them, "it's a hard choice to pick out really food that you want".

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Otis Johnson went to jail at the age of 25. When he got out at 69, he rejoined a world that was starkly different from the one he remembered. This is his story.