Are we just mice trapped in a digital ‘Skinner Box’?

Yay… many thanks to Ben for mailing this awesome blog post from the O’Reilly Radar blog, by Jim Stodghill. Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year, so it’s time I finally tried to finish.

For nigh on two weeks now Jim’s post has freaked me out. I have wondered if I am a bit like this mouse. I certainly recognised some of my own obsessive digital behaviour in his  brilliantly written and moving account of life as a “digital stimulusaholic”. He describes being engulfed in a deep personal crisis, an addiction within which he feels utterly trapped. He talks of a cognitive biological barrier to our information processing powers. And the paradox of being infinitely distracted by infinite information. It’s pretty disturbing.

It’s even more worrying that this isn’t your average ’social-networking-and-Twitter-is-bad-for-you” rubbish. You can toss that sort of thing aside in a moment – but Jim is one of us. He a geek. He loves Twitter… a lot (actually that’s a big part of his problem). No, this is someone who’s done his time in the twenches. He’s a super-user, or more accurately a super-abuser. And yet it’s also massively entertaining – a bit like Trainspotting.

But hold on, what the heck is a Skinner Box?

Indeed, that was my first question too – having never worked in animal experiments. I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant. Animal lovers, look away now… It’s a machine that uses reward and punishment to train a mouse to respond to different signals by pressing buttons. The mouse receives a pellet of something yummy (presumably cheese) if it presses the button in response to the correct sound or light, and a mild electrical shock for getting it wrong.

Jim argues that social computing – particularly Twitter – has turned his world into a digital Skinner Box:

So here I am at the nexus of ADHD, AMS [= Afraid to Miss Something] and digital Narcissism. I’m in a Skinner box alright, but I don’t smack the bar and wait for pellets, I tweet into the void and listen for echoes. There it is now, that sweet sweet tweet of instant 140 char affirmation. Feels good. RT means validation. I think I’m developing a Pavlovian response to the @ symbol that borders on the sexual.

And then he cranks it up a level… resistance is futile:

This brave new inter-networked, socially-mediated, post-industrial, cybernetically-interwoven world is an integrated web of Pavlovian stimulus and response and I’m barking at the bell. Turns out, this isn’t a Skinner Box. No, “box” is too confining for this metaphor. This is a fully networked, digitally rendered, voluntarily joined Skinner Borg. It doesn’t embed itself in us, we embed ourselves in it. It’s Clockwork Orange, self served.

Jim’s zippy, hallucinatory prose makes you feel you’re inside a sci-fi adventure but this is real – one man’s real, personal, cry for help – which makes it much harder to ignore. Whilst he openly admits that an addictive and adrenaline-fueled personality is partially to blame, he still leaves you with some difficult questions:

Are we looking for knowledge? Or suggestions of what to investigate more deeply later (assuming we can find some “later” to work with)? Can we sit still for an hour even if we want to?

We don’t have parallel ports so we have to choose. Lots of bite sized pellets or slow down and go deep? Frenetic pursuit of the novel or quiet concentration? Can I stay plugged in without giving up my ability to focus?

Yes, Jim’s post took me the very edge of doubt but don’t you worry – I stepped back from the brink.

I began to wonder if Jim might be obsessive about other things if the Internet hadn’t been invented yet – like the telephone, or comics, or coin-collecting, or spoons? The fact that he’s such a power-abuser (I checked and he’s still tweeting like crazy) means that he’s quite unrepresentative of any Twitter experience the great majority of people will recognise. Most people are able to use Twitter safely simply by exercising the same self-control that they have to learn and use in every other realm of their lives.

I also remembered that am not a mouse and that the Web, or Twitter or whatever, is a very different type of Skinner Box to the one in the picture above. For one thing it’s a Skinner Box of our own making, and we’re still in the process of making it. It’s true to say that we haven’t yet figured out the rules for socialising with millions of people in real time, but Twitter and the clients and apps it continues to spawn seem to be launching new features and tools to help us manage the deluge all the time. It’s only been around for 4 years – slightly less even. We should give it a bit more time and get involved in trying to work out what we need.

Mainly, I think I simply reject Jim’s pessimism. Let’s not forget that it’s a vulnerable time of year. Jim’s post hit me in the first week of the New Year, traditionally a time for reflection and self-loathing. It was like reading about terrible disease in a medical textbook and manifesting the symptoms (I’m highly suggestive and this happens!) Now I’m back on slightly more of an even keel – into the swing of 2010 – stronger and more able to cope with a monster helping of despair. Jim asks a lot of really excellent questions but we need to be balanced. Twitter is a remarkable example of our human inventiveness. It’s a very healthy, vital part of my life and I have to report that I have met many really awesome people in real life as a result of using it.

And people have always worried that technology is advancing faster than our fragile human bodies can cope with it. Every new wave of technology ever has been followed with dire predictions of harm. Apparently, Socrates argued in the Phaedo that the emerging use of paper would destroy the human mind. Passengers on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway worried in 1830 that their lungs would be sucked from their chests by traveling so fast. We always seem to manage.

I hope Jim finds a way to manage. If his recent tweets are anything to go by he seems okay. It’s a great debate to have.