Psychology
From CityVille to WikiLeaks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/12/2010 - 15:53I’ve always been interested in the positive aspects of computer games. In previous years, I’ve covered Games for Change on my blog. I’ve spent a bit of time in virtual worlds, from the text based MOOs to Second Life and OpenSim. I’ve kicked around OpenCobalt a little and explored virtual worlds from my cellphone.
Part of what I like about things like MOOs, OpenSim and OpenCobalt is that they are worlds that the users can construct themselves, and I believe that this sort of construction has some great educational potential. It is part of what went into what I’ve always told my kids about being allowed to play any computer game that they could write.
I’ve also been very interested in the potential of virtual worlds for therapeutic purposes. Recently, the New York Times ran an article In Cybertherapy, Avatars Assist With Healing. It captures some of the potential for virtual worlds in therapy. The article mentions the CyberTherapy 2011 conference next June in Canada. It looks like an interesting conference and I’m starting to read through some of the material to see if people I know will be presenting.
On the other hand, I’ve been less interested in social gaming. FarmVille just hasn’t captured my attention. What did capture my attention, however, was a request from a friend of Facebook to join CityVille.
Carlos Miranda Levy sent me the invite. is currently Social Entrepreneur in Residence at National University of Singapore. He has also been Information Society Development Consultant at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and a 2004-2005 Google Fellow with the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University. His bio at the Digital Vision Program describes him as follows
Carlos Miranda Levy is an Information Technologies Consultant with wide experience on developing ICT strategies for development, education and e-government. A social entrepreneur, developer, and founder of a network of Latin American virtual communities and local, educational, environmental, and cultural websites, Carlos was selected by CNN in 2000 as one of Latin America's Internet 20 most influential people. He has undertaken extensive research and work with educators, education, and human development.
It was enough to make me sit up and take notice. Is Zynga moving its social games in the direction of games for change and social entrepreneurship? Could something similar be done for the health care industry?
If I could find a way to play CityVille without it sucking up all my time and productivity and without it spamming my Facebook wall, I just might check it out.
Yet let me end this off with a very different twist. I’ve been reading a bit of the discussion about WikiLeaks. The best comment I’ve found so far came Josh Wilson. Josh compared the whole story line of Wikileaks with stories coming straight out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. Josh talks about cyberwarfare going on. It led me back to thinking about the old movie War Games.
“Shall we play a game?”
“Love to, How about WikiLeaks?”
“Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of CityVille?”
“Later. Let's play WikiLeaks”
Rethinking the Social Contract
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/09/2010 - 07:36The U.S. Declaration of Independence says, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”. It is an idea that goes back to the social contract. We live in society with other people and we establish social contracts that govern that society and, ideally, keeps things running smoothly. People will argue many nuances of the social contract. Brought forward to the language of the twenty-first century, there people may ask if it is an opt-in or opt-out contract. Do we need to read and agree with the fine print, or is simply not revolting an implicit agreement.
Yet our social contracts go much further than just our relationship with a government. In the United States, we have a Federalist system where we are in a national social contract and state social contracts and then there are contracts between the states and the Federal government.
People join together in other social contracts to create churches, corporations and other organizations, and contracts between the governments and these organizations also come into play. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the relationship between the State of Arizona, the U.S. Government, and corporations licensed to do business in Arizona. While most people are looking at this in terms of the implications for immigration, I’m especially interested in this in terms of what it means to all these different contracts.
Many of us assent to different social contracts on a regular basis as we click on the line about agreeing with the terms of service of various websites, probably most often, without ever reading those terms.
Getting closer to home, I’ve entered into an agreement with an organization. I will provide my expertise, on a full time basis, in exchange for money and benefits. It’s called getting a job. Beyond the simple agreement to be employed, there are other agreements in play.
One such agreement is about how social media and Internet Communications Technology is used. The other day, I sent out a request to friends for examples of these agreements from other corporations and received a great list. Now, I’m going over them to talk with my co-workers about how we can improve our agreements about social media.
As I thought about this, I pondered other agreements that people enter into. One agreement is a contract that patients assent to when they start group psychotherapy. The goal of this agreement is to provide a framework that will help patients work together to address issues in their lives.
This morning, I sent off an email to the group psychotherapy mailing list asking if they could share examples of some of these contracts. The question I am pondering: Can we learn from therapeutic contracts and bring some of the ideas into our other agreements? Can we do this in such a way that our actions within the broader society can also become more therapeutic? Can, or should we, assent to be civil online, or in our interactions with governments?
Engagement, Connectivity and Creativity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/25/2010 - 09:51This is a slightly edited version of an email that I sent to a list of group psychotherapists that I participate in. It pulls together some ideas from Story.lab and my thoughts about writing my blog and writing for The Patch.
Here in the United States, it is Thanksgiving Day. I will spend most of this day with my extended family away from technology. There are over 10,000 unread emails, including a fair amount from this list, sitting in my inbox. There are websites I should visit and articles I should write.
Yet I want to take a few moments to reflect on the comments on the mailing list. I have an odd relationship with media. As a technologist, I am immersed in it. Yet at the same time, I have a strong dislike of what I consider 'bad' media.
To me, technology and media are not bad in and of themselves. They are neutral. They can be used for good, or they can be used for bad. As I try to determine what makes for the good or bad use of technology or media, I come back to three key ideas. Engagement, connectivity, and creativity. Technology and media that encourages engagement, connectivity and creativity are, in my mind, technology and media that is being used for good. Technology and media that discourages engagement, connectivity and creativity are, for the most part, being used badly.
My older two daughters grew up watching limited television. Typically, we limited it to arts and education shows. They are better versed in opera than in boy bands. For computer games, they were typically limited to educational games and I always told them they were free to play any game that they could write.
Years later, they have commented about how this created difficulties in them adjusting to the society around them and I worry that in some ways I was too restrictive. It is useful to have at least some exposure to popular culture to be able to relate and connect with our peers that are more steeped in popular culture. In addition, it seems like there is something artificial in a line between high brow culture and low brow culture. There are good boy bands and there are bad operas.
As an aside, as I talk about technology and media, I think of two addition thoughts. First is Marshall McLuhan and "The Medium is the Message". Certain media encourages passivity. Certain media encourages creativity and engagement. This leads into the second thought. My middle daughter is now a senior in college majoring in art. She did drop the double major in psychology, but it remains a strong interest of hers. As a creative fine artist, her favorite media are oils and clay. Her favorite technology is the paintbrush and the potter's wheel.
So, I've altered my parenting style with my youngest daughter. When she comes home, she plops down in front of the television. She needs time to unwind. We all need that from time to time. I let her chose what she wants to watch. However, she knows that my wife or I are likely to engage her in discussion about what she watches. There are a few evening television shows that she likes and is permitted to watch, Glee and Modern Family. They often lead to long discussions about the moral issues as well as the creativity involved.
At the beginning of this week, I took a new freelance position as the Around Town columnist for a hyperlocal online news site. I am very aware of the content I am being paid to create and I constantly ask myself, is this good content? Am I being creative? Will people be better people by reading what I write. As I talk about media and technology the same applies to my coverage of local events. Am I promoting engagement, connectivity and creativity? I hope so.
So, whether you are concerned about schools, media, technology or whatever, I come back to engagement, connectivity and creativity. I hope we call all learn a more of this.
Self
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:52Yesterday, I posted a Wordless Wednesday image which I left untitled and invited people to share their thoughts on. Today, I’ll explain it a little bit more.
First, I should talk about Wordless Wednesday. It is an old Internet meme. Every Wednesday, people post images, typically with no words or a minimum of words. Wordless Wednesday participants visit each others blogs and share comments and links. It is an important way of being part of a blogging community.
My blog is decidedly eclectic. I write about politics, technology, psychology, media, marketing, what’s happening here in Connecticut, and anything else that captures my imagination. For me, it is important not to be a niche blogger, but to be a connector. I want to get people coming to my blog for one reason to stop and spend a little time and perhaps read about a topic they don’t normally pay attention to. Wordless Wednesday is a great way to do this.
The image, ‘Self’, ties a lot of this together. It is an image I created with Graphviz. Graphvix is a popular graphing program and my tutorial on using GraphViz continues to be one of the most popular posts I’ve written.
The image is a combination of Graphviz images. Each of the eight larger circles contain an image I created in Graphviz, and Graphviz was used to combine all of them into the one image. The smaller images were created with a PHP script that randomly created connections between 25 nodes in a graph. These smaller images are meant to represent neural networks. In biology, a neural network is the network of connected neurons and are associated with how we perceive and learn things.
This has led to work in artificial neural networks. These are computational models especially well suited towards pattern recognition. I spent a bit of time looking into artificial neural networks back in the 1990s, and it struck me that when you combine various networks with one another, you end up with an ‘internet’ or simply a larger network.
Social networking is all the rage these days. Our social networks are, essentially, networks biological neural networks, or a larger neural network. I don’t find a lot of people thinking about the social networks this way, perhaps because it is a bit too geeky, but I do believe there is importance in thinking about our connections this way.
I explored this idea a bit recently in my blog post The Self at the Intersection of Podcamps and Group Psychotherapy . I quoted a line from one of the keynotes at the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington, "The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks."
I believe it is important to explore our social networks as an extension of our internal neural networks and think about how they are affecting us. How does your blog surfing, email reading, Facebook status, twitter tweeting affect and change who you are?
I felt that a good way to illustrate some of this was to create my Wordless Wednesday image. Each larger circle is a person in a social network. The links between them represent the links they have in their social networks. The images inside of them are their own internal neural networks.
Is your social network changing your internal neural network? Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Or neutral? What are your thoughts about this image now?
Footnote: PodcampCT was a great chance to explore connections in our social network face to face. Today, Wendy from Life With Wendy wrote about her social media experience at PodcampCT. Check it out as you think about further explorations into your social network.
The Self at the Intersection of Podcamps and Group Psychotherapy #PCCT #AGPA
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 11:42Note: This blog post started as a message to a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists and has been adapted.
Yesterday was PodcampCT, an unconference about podcasting and social media that I helped organize. It was also the fourth anniversary of my first message on Twitter. I spent the day talking with many people, face to face, about the role of social media in their lives. In one of the discussions, I even brought up the line I often quote from one of the keynotes at the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington, "The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks."
It seems to me that there is something important in the idea of thinking about the types of relationships that we have as a result of online social networks. As I write this, I have 1,775 Facebook friends, 3,128 followers on Twitter where I am following 2,910 people. When I have time I try to read at least 300 different blogs a day, and get at least one blog post written each day. The stream of incoming emails is endless and many go unread.
Yes, the self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks, and for me, that is a very busy intersection.
The British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, has proposed a theoretical limit to the number of people that we can maintain stable social relationships. The work was based on studies of limits to group sizes and Dunbar suggests is based on the size of the neo-cortex. The exact number varies, but is typically presented as around 150, although Dunbar's work does also explore tribes in the 500-2500 member range.
Are my connections online more tribal than an indication of stable social relationship? Or, has online technology given us the ability to maintain multiple groups of stable social relationships? e.g. In writing this message, I'm stepping into the Group Psychotherapy group of stable social relationships after spending yesterday in the Connecticut Social Media
Enthusiasts group of stable social relationships?
What does all of this do to my 'self'. Is it more fractured? Is it richer? Some combination of both? How does this relate to people coming into small therapeutic groups? How are they changing and what is changing about what they bring into a group?
On top of this, what role does machine mediation take place. I was struck by a journal entry where the writer talked about calling people on the phone instead of contacting them via email. Later, in the entry she spoke about how Facebook has produced a new form of relating to people through a machine. This really struck me. Calling someone on a telephone is also relating to them through a machine. Actually, through a collection of machines, and these days, more and more of the machines involved in transmitting the audio signal from one telephone to another are computers.
Last month, there was an interesting article on NPR about functional connectivity MRIs. They are being used to better understand what is going on with autistic children. Instead of measuring the brain size of children, researchers have been focusing on the connections in the brain. The broadcast spoke about how some connections grow and others are pruned away as brains grow, but that process seems to get delayed for children with autism and some other developmental disorders.
What particularly struck me was about how autistic brains do not function as well because of abnormal retained connections all over the place. Does this say something about how we should be managing our social networks? Was the writer of the journal entry who was unsubscribing to many of her mailing lists on to something important?
I have not unsubcribed from many of the mailing lists that I am on, but I am selective about which emails I read and how closely I read them. I still read the Group Psychotherapy list fairly closely, but often with a little bit of a delay. I often simply glance at the title or author of emails on other lists before simply deleting them, and if I find the percentage of interesting emails I'm getting on some list drops below a specific threshhold, I unsubscribe. I have multiple email addresses and go for long periods without checking some of the email accounts.
Yes, I do believe the self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. Online social media has made that intersection very busy for many of us. Changes in technology will cause this to continue to evolve and our means of handling this and what it does to our 'selves' need to evolve as well.
Thoughts? Comments?
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