Almost every major advancement in human society has been met with panicked people insisting it will turn the future into an unrecognizable hellscape. But when we say that the Internet is fundamentally changing how humans behave, we're not demanding somebody go take an ax and hack through the cables before it's too late.
None of this stuff is going to ruin the world. But it is weird as hell.
#5. The Internet Is Training Your Eyes to Move in Certain Patterns
AntonioGuillem/iStock/Getty Images
There are some who argue that, thanks to the Internet, social media, and text speak, we are moving toward a post-literate society. When a hit "article" on big sites like BuzzFeed consists of a series of GIFs and image macros made by other people and tied together with 100 words of sentence fragments, that argument is difficult to rebut. And according to research conducted by both Nielsen Norman Group and Mediative, this type of content is changing the way we read.
For as long as large blocks of text have existed, your eyeballs have been trained to suck in the information by quickly hopping horizontally from one word to the next, then zipping back to the start of the next line, like so:
Wikipedia
Assuming your language reads left-to-right, obviously
... and on and on steadily down the page, until you get bored or decide you've pretty much gotten the gist. But this was back in the days when you were reading a single book or a newspaper and your only choice was to either steadily plow through it, or stare quietly at the wall. Today, your brain is a battered refugee huddled in the middle of a howling typhoon of web content. You can't hope to read it all, or even skim it. So, your eyes have adapted. NNG refers to it as the F-Shaped Pattern, while Mediative calls it the Golden Triangle, but what they both boil down to is that when screen reading (i.e., reading on Internet-connected computer screens, smartphones, e-book readers, etc.), our eyes make a triangle or F-shape down the page:
Eyetools, Inc. via Mediative
According to that image, you're not reading this caption. So, the government is giant crabs,
and the moon landing was a cartoon.
According to this theory, you've already stopped paying attention to any of the crazy language shapes we're typing, but we'll explain what's going on up there anyway: Basically, when we start to read a webpage, we view the first couple lines in full, giving them our complete attention and reading them in their entirety. However, as we begin to work our way down the page, we start reading less and less of each line until we finally get to the bottom, at which point we're basically reading nothing at all. It's the whole reason the TL;DR tag exists -- if a piece of content or information is longer than a few lines, most will not read it.
While the effect is strongest when scanning Google search results, NNG found that it's still present when reading everything from product pages on Amazon to news articles to delightful informative comedy pieces on your favorite website.
Cracked
Just don't put sunglasses on when you're reading us.
The effect was first discovered back in 2005, which has given savvy Internet marketers ample time to capitalize on the decaying orbit of our reading patterns by making sure premium content is displayed within the Golden Triangle, which is beginning to sound less like a scientific phenomenon and more like the tarp shielding the space of carpet between R. Kelly's bed and DVD player. But human progress doesn't hold itself captive to the whims of marketing experts -- according to a recent eye-tracking study, it seems that the F-Shaped Pattern/Golden Triangle is evolving. Now our reading habits look more like this:
Mediative via Search Engine Land
This might also just be a person tea-bagging someone wearing infrared goggles.
Basically, the diagram of our literacy looks like a pear-shaped Grinch penis and/or Predator masturbating.
#4. Our Real-Life Behavior Changes According to How Attractive Our Online Avatar Is
Bethesda Softworks
One of the most stressful moments of any online role-playing game is the character-creation screen, because we can easily spend just as many hours crafting the perfect fanciful alter-ego as we can playing the game itself. Choosing between a wood elf, a wood elf with large breasts, a barbarian, or a barbarian with large breasts is an array of options amounting to a type of purgatory for the indecisive. However, it turns out that all that time and anxiety we pour into selecting our avatars is actually way more important than anyone had any right to reasonably expect.
Specifically, the constructed identities we use for all of our online interactions, be they gaming or ranting to strangers on message boards about gaming, are responsible for a phenomenon called the Proteus Effect, which is a fancy name for describing how we gradually begin to act like our online selves in our real-world lives.
Cracked
Unrelated photo of the default Cracked avatar.
In one experiment, Stanford researchers assigned volunteers either an attractive or an unattractive character in Second Life, otherwise known as "that game John Cusack's nephew is playing in Hot Tub Time Machine." Participants with attractive avatars behaved more confidently in their interactions with other players than the participants who were forced to pilot hideous mutants, suggesting that simply having an "attractive" polygonal mask to hide behind had a tangible effect on their behavior. Similarly, people who were given taller avatars behaved more aggressively and confidently in subsequent real-world negotiation tasks. Basically, if your avatar is a sculpted Adonis, you're going to start behaving like Gordon Gekko.
In a follow-up study, researchers took it a step further: After playing the game, volunteers were asked to choose dates out of a pool of potential mates of varying physical attractiveness. People who had been controlling fitness model avatars in-game tended to pick better-looking dates because, according to one researcher, "they thought they had a shot," regardless of how attractive they were in real life. Their video game confidence had bled out into the real world like some kind of reverse-Tron, only without a Benjamin-Buttoned Jeff Bridges.
Focus Features
"This could be ahhh lot more, uh, uh, uh, complex. I mean, it's not just, it might not
be just such a simple ... uh, you know?"
And no, the effect isn't always positive. In another experiment, a group of female volunteers were assigned highly sexualized avatars and, again, subsequently told to go forth and interact with the non-pixelated populace. Despite what you'd expect (given the results of the previous studies), this time there was no reported difference in in-game behavior. However, after the study was completed, the volunteers all reported being more aware of their body image, and not in a good way -- in cases where the avatars were given the actual faces of the volunteers, the volunteers began to express opinions about themselves on par with rape myth acceptance, which refers to the idea female victims are often to blame. You may recognize this as the worst possible outcome for playing a video game outside of WarGames.
#3. Internet Anonymity Can Actually Make People Cooperate Better
Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
As cliche as it is to say that Internet anonymity makes people act like raging pissmonsters, it's true that all it takes to unleash a person's inner psychopath is a disposable email address and an overinflated sense of self-righteousness. It makes perfect sense -- remove all social consequences of rudeness or cruelty, dehumanize the target by reducing them to a username and avatar, and all bets are off. But is it possible that this new form of human communication could actually help, in some cases?
lofilolo/iStock/Getty Images
How else could people reveal the government corruption behind 9-11/Benghazi/fluoride/phantom
cellphone vibrations without the cloak of anonymity?
Yep, and it's actually for the same reasons. They call it the "online disinhibition effect" and it means that the same protection from consequence that makes us feel comfortable calling someone a shitlord for not liking the same games we do also makes us more effective when we're using those powers for good. Think about how awkward and horrible it is to hold a face-to-face intervention for an addict friend. Now think about how much easier it is to send an anonymous "This needs to be said, because I think the meth is killing you" email. Dropping our "filter" doesn't automatically mean unleashing a torrent of death threats.
So, it's been found that people anonymously participating in online workshops demonstrate enhanced problem-solving skills compared to their not-anonymous colleagues, as well as display a willingness to ask more questions. In both cases, it's like how you were unwilling to raise your hand during classes: The risk of getting laughed at for asking a stupid question or answering incorrectly isn't there -- after all, no one knows who you are.
Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images
"You really took 'there are no stupid questions' to heart, didn't you?"
Additionally, while you might associate anonymity with not giving a single shit about others, it turns out that anonymity is a great way of developing strong online communities who, you know, actually give a shit. As no one knows who anyone is, there's less pressure to stand out from the crowd and less tendency to be loyal to individuals at the expense of the group. In other words, instead of flocking around the popular kids, everyone flocks around the idea of the group and advancing the group's goals.
Yeah, there's a reason members of Anonymous can be almost cult-like in their devotion, right down to communication with each other almost entirely in memes and references no outsider would comprehend.
4chan
Above: Went to /b/, screencapped literally the first post we saw.
There is a lot of power and freedom in surrendering your individuality. And like any power, it's all about how you choose to use it.
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