How Depressives Surf the Web
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Having said that, I found this worrying:
We hope to use our findings to develop a software application that could be installed on home computers and mobile devices. It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression. This would not replace the function of mental health professionals, but it could be a cost-effective way to prompt people to seek medical help early. It might also be a tool for parents to monitor the mood-related Internet usage patterns of their children.
One of the things I've noticed over the period of creating a lot of applications and sites is that any interaction with a computer can be interpreted in the opposite way from which it was intended. (I nominate this as Markham's Law of Technology Reciprocity) Upvote an article on HN? You're not just tagging articles for quality, the system is also tagging you to see what kinds of articles you upvote (whether or not that information is used or not is not important here). Have a lot of tabs on your browser and switch between them? You're not just engaging sites with the browser; the browser is also engaging you on how you spend your time. Show Facebook who you would like to invite to be a friend? Facebook is watching who you pick as folks you want to associate with socially. You are not just interacting with the net; the net is closely watching you. It's a two-way street.
This can lead to some scary places. Having a computer monitor my actions and "help" me identify my emotional state and mental health could be awesome -- or it could be a tool that lets outsiders climb inside my head in ways no human has ever dreamed of before. If you think keeping your DNA information secret is important, you'll be having heart palpitations when you start thinking this stuff through. There's this world of data mining out there that mostly has to do with your internal thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. I'll repeat: I think this is a good thing. But hell if I'm happy about the trend in general.
I've started making sure I use an app (Pocket) to keep track of articles so I can close the browser tab immediately and read one article at a time exclusively, and on my schedule (e.g. sitting in a taxi or on the subway). For emails, I guess I should write them in a text editor before switching to GMail, so I just have to copy, paste, send.
I will second that! But isn't the "You are the product" law prior art for that?
"... when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." [1]
Nietzsche was a quotable fellow. [2]
-
[0] "Wikiquote - Nietzsche - Beyond_Good_and_Evil - Aphorism 146" http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil#Aphorism_1...
[1] "When you stare into .. " http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/39793.html
[2] "Nietzsche quotes" http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Friedrich_Nietzsche
I primarily use tabs as a "live bookmark", both positive ("remind me to look at this later"), and negative ("I don't want to deal with this now, but should later"). I usually browse non-linearly, where I go through an entire page opening interesting links in new tabs before moving on. Thus, I end up with tons of tabs that, by default, stay open. I usually do a quick clean up every few days.
A sample:
1) JavaScript cheat sheet. I've been needing to brush up.
2) A recipe that I want to try soon.
3) Ask HN page on best Git GUI for Windows. We're switching to Git at work, and most developers use Windows, so I need to find something that will make the transition easier.
4) "How to Read Mathematics". I'd normally add this to Pocket and read on my Kindle, but I also want to send it to old professors.
5) A couple tabs for a pair of prescription sunglasses I'm considering buying,
6) My side project's Trello page.
7) Several pages with design ideas for my side project (both JS and CSS)
8) Long Ask Reddit threads I wanted to die off before I read them.
9) A couple blog posts I've been wanting to read, but not long enough to add to Pocket.
10) Links that I've opened after seeing HN's homepage. etc.
Window 1:
1. Episode guide for Babylon 5, which I'm currently watching my way through on days that I'm not watching Euro 2012 matches.
2. Strategy guide for a game I play.
3. Scott Chacon's "Pro Git" book, which I've been meaning to read.
4. A reddit/r/metal thread recommending doom metal bands, since I've liked a few doom metal songs on that subreddit and are meaning to get into the genre more.
5, 6. More reddit/r/metal threads for similar reference.
7. A blog post on Pry, the Ruby REPL/debugger
8. A web caching tutorial, which I found on Hacker News
9. A blog post about "Real World Clojure", which I found on Hacker News
10. A listing of 2 minute tutorials about R, which I found on Hacker News
11. A European seedbox provider's front page
12. This, which I've been meaning to share with my girlfriend, and which I found on Hacker News: http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html
13. A wiki page about a comedian, as a reminder to check out his work later, since he's purportedly similar to two other comedians I like
14, 15. Youtube links to metal songs from /r/metal
16. Hacker News itself
17. A reddit/r/soccer thread with a video I've been meaning to watch
18. My monthly budget in a Google Docs spreadsheet
19. An interesting looking article about Copland, Apple's project to replace the Mac OS before they bought NeXT.
20. An old Ars Technica post about Mac OS X memory management that mentions Copland; a false positive in a recent Google search about the topic.
21. Bus directions from home to work on Google Maps
22. The purported homepage of "Balance of Power: 21st Century", which is down.
23. The Wikipedia article about the original Balance of Power game.
24. Similar to 22--this is actually the homepage, 22 is the top-level domain.
25, 26: This article and thread from HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114295
27, 28: Other HN threads
29: My threads
30: Reddit
31, 32: Various Reddit threads
33: An installment of Dinosaur Comics
34, 35: An HN thread--the same one, since I open "reply" links in a new tab.
36: This HN thread.
37: The tab I am typing this comment in.
38: This HN thread again.
39: My HN threads again.
Window 2: 1. The homepage for orgmode, which I've been meaning to look into.
2. A Trello board for a personal project.
3, 4: A page about "GTD for hackers", which I found on HN awhile back
5, 6: Other random self-improvement links
Window 3: 5 tabs of Coursera and other online course pages
Window 4: 16 tabs of technical subjects I've been meaning to look into
Probably less a sign of depression and more a sign of a surfeit of RAM and whatever mentality lies behind a cluttered desk....
I'd actually recommend Steven Wright if you like Mitch Hedberg. He's more deadpan but rather similar.
3, 4: A page about "GTD for hackers", which I found on HN awhile back
Maybe I should be happy about Firefox (granted: Beta) being extremely buggy for me when restoring sessions. Just today it killed my equally big list of things I meant to look at again and never did.
I am a visual person and that's why tabs help me, they are queues. Perhaps what I need is to learn some discipline in opening a 'TODO' task list daily, though then I find that overwhelming; Maybe I need to try to give that a bit more of a chance, and maybe I just haven't found the right tool(s) that work for me?
I imagine if I found a way to be more organized then my creative flow and potentially creative capacity would be diminished. I would potentially become too fixed on organization as the main importance, and that would take away from fluidity that creativity needs; Perhaps I need this, I don't know.
If a service that tracked my behaviours was used to suggest better tools for me to use based on my patterns, then that'd be neat - however because they are a business and want to make profits - I can see it being used in less-than-pure ways.
My hope is that's just a cynical eye-on-funding thing thrown in, and the researchers are really interested in the science, only gesturing towards this other suggestion as a way of ticking the "potential future applications" box that funding agencies like. But it's hard to tell.
I don't get why 1) everyone has to be HAPPY, and 2) why the high ups seem so intent on making sure we're HAPPY.
Here's reality: life can be utterly fucking shitty. People get depressed. Then you get over it and life goes on and eventually someone will die, or your S.O. will dump your ass and you'll get depressed again. Then you get over it.
Fund proper counselling problems to reach out to kids at high risk of suicide and stop giving a shit if everyone is happy. 99.9% of depressed people aren't going to lynch themselves otherwise there wouldn't be a human race.
A very slim number of people get depressed and try to commit suicide. Normally there are a shit ton of signs that everyone around them ignore. If everyone around them actually paid attention to these depressed people before they became suicidal, you'd cut the suicide rate to 1 in 1000 of what it is right now.
Exactly. But you know the way society is. 99% of the men or woman who cheat don't kill their spouse but that info being uncovered certainly increases greatly the suspicion that they committed the crime.
> why the high ups seem so intent on making sure we're HAPPY.
You just rediscovered the age-old correlation between a desire for totalitarian control and a preoccupation with superficial happiness. The theory is that the best way to ensure that existing structures of power and domination remain in place in perpetuity is to ensure that everyone is happy. Because happy people don't complain loudly. In Brave New World, the unhappy Bernard was the only insider who challenged the norms of a society where everyone was supposedly happy. In that book, the authorities try their damnedest to keep everyone happy, occupied, and productive so that there will be no occasion for some depressed dude to start mulling over the deficiencies of the system. Because people tend to see those deficiencies more clearly when they're unhappy and dissatisfied with the status quo.
Seriously, we need depressed folks, autistic folks, OCD folks, and all these other kinds of people in our world in order for progress to happen. Happy people won't fix what they don't think is broken!
I have to point out one little oversight though:
> Seriously, we need depressed folks, autistic folks, OCD folks, and all these other kinds of people in our world in order for progress to happen. Happy people won't fix what they don't think is broken!
It almost sounds like you're implying that people are either happy, or have one of n classifiable psychological disorders. The reality is that the disorders are statistical classifications that fit an infinite number of shades of the human condition. Umbrellas.
Personally I consider myself hapilly-awake? I guess I know we live in a very suboptimal world but I am happy to exist and do my best to change what I can about it.
The kind of happiness that "higher ups" want to propagate, on the other hand, often involves accepting the status quo and just trying to fit in.
The world becomes very easy for government when you can lump every unhappy or disgruntled citizen as having a mental disorder, so you can medicate and silence them.
Governments are in the very uneasy position of being who the peasantry get angry at. Feudal lords understood this danger very well. The middle-eastern and north-african dictators have been learning this. How long before our own politicians have to learn this lesson before we get our fair and responsible government back?
It won't take guns to topple our government. It will take people protesting. If you can unite a fraction of a populace, you can topple industries and topple governments simply by orchestrating where your dollars go. Want an end to walmart and their policies? Get 10% of their shoppers to start buying from Target or whomever who treat their workers better, or support local communities better. If it happens country wide, walmart has too much equity sunk into brick and mortar that they can't rapidly restructure. 10% less income from stores across the board mean stores taking losses, means stores breaking even. Lay off staff and you lose more customers. Close stores, and you lose more customers. Even if you close stores, it's going to be 6 months to a year to get the equity back into working capital.
If 10% of the population with held taxes. That's 230 billion dollars in unpaid taxes. Governments will change quickly when you can't do anything to penalize these people. Fine them? They wont pay, and there's way too many to effectively jail, and if you do you lose even more taxes from what they would spend on food and goods.
If the powers that be just want to keep us happy to paper over the shittiness that their regime brings, why are they so adamant about banning drug use? If I were in charge, I'd see that as a cheap way to buy the population happiness of the kind that makes them not want to rebel.
In fact, in the Brave New World world, that's exactly what they do -- give everyone drugs so they're happy enough not to challenge the SQ.
So what gives?
In the actual world, only a subset of the population uses drugs frequently, only a subset of available drugs can be used without serious side effects (we haven't invented the perfect Soma yet), and there is a lot of moralizing about drug use. Under these circumstances, nothing the government does will make everyone happy, so the government optimizes for the happiness of the voters who matter the most: conservative parents who get all worried about their kids doing ecstasy.
This is not snarky, I am genuinely interested, if a little unbelieving.
There's a difference between being reasonably unsatisfied with life because of poor life situations (grief, for example, is normal) and reactive depression (grief won't go, and now you're depressed not grieving) and other forms of depression. (No rational reason for depression but you are anyway.)
> A very slim number of people get depressed and try to commit suicide.
Compared to what? Suicide rates have been dropping in the most of the UK, but it's still a significant public health issue.
On a less anarchistic note, we need to start questioning the mental health of our society as a whole (the abyss might stare back at you but you stared first, stick with it).
That there is an obsession with everyone being in a particular state is indicative of anxiety. That it cannot comprehend the fact that our emotional states are the products of our physical and social environments indicates denial.
It's just like family therapy - no single member of a family can be mentally ill in isolation - the whole family needs treatment. So it is with humanity - the sky high levels of reported anxiety and depression are not isolated to the individuals suffering from them, they are a result of the very fabric of our society. It's the way we look at and treat each other, it's the inequality, the prejudice, the hatred, the litigation, the constant shifting of blame and severe lack of responsibility that's endemic in our culture. THAT is what's making people feel bad.
Treating individuals is patching the symptoms and not addressing the root causes.
For example, how is “30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms” in line with “10 to 40 percent of college students at some point experience such symptoms”. It’s not: 30% have depressive symptoms now vs 10% having symptoms at some point? One of those two numbers is way off, or they are comparing apples to oranges.
There is no mention of how strong the correlations are (though one would expect such in the full paper). This is a small number of people – around 200 – all of which are of a similar age & occupation.
The idea that this evidence would lead one to consider monitoring implies a certainty and generality about the results which appears unjustified.
It's interesting seeing my alma mater show up here. I wouldn't be surprised if Rolla students exhibited a higher rate of depression than the norm. Having spent 4 years there, I knew a lot of people that were bitter about being there. It's a small state engineering school in the middle of nowhere, without any particular pedigree or notoriety, known mostly, at least among other students in the midwest, for it's St. Patrick's Day festivities and drinking culture.
At any rate, I'd certainly want to see a sample from a different or at least more diverse population before I would think my browsing habits said anything about my general mental state. Beyond what was mentioned about, the sample at Rolla was presumably first- and second-year students living in the dorms as the rest would not be sharing an internet connection in a way that makes monitoring per student feasible.
Our university has about as high a percentage of Engineering and Science students as any university does. Again, don't quote me, but it has gotta be pretty darn close to the top.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070930201652/http://www.slate.c... - Missouri College Students: Are they really that miserable?
"For five of the past nine years, one of the three colleges—the University of Missouri-Columbia, Stephens College, and the University of Missouri-Rolla—has landed at No. 1 on the Princeton Review's list for the school with the 'least happy students.'"
(University of Missouri - Rolla being the former name of Missouri S&T.)
It's part of the traditional split between quantitative and qualitative psychologists (and sociologists), each of whom gets one side of the equation stronger. The qualitative side typically goes "out into the world" and tries to interview a target community, building an understanding and iterating to fill in gaps in the understanding. They often succeed in quite good coverage, but don't produce statistical results. The quantitative side typically wants to measure statistically significant results on pre-specified, narrower questions, but often does so only on populations on convenience, rather than going "out into the world" and really understanding the populations that are out there.
humancond.org/_media/papers/weirdest_people.pdf
Unfortunately, its not going to change, because of the pressures on academics to publish, publish, publish inclines them to take full advantage of these samples of convenience.
Its actually even worse, because the majority of psych papers are based on American psych students, so there's not even much of a good geographic spread in the ridiculously limited samples psychologists use.
That and I can now refer to the number of tabs I have open as my flow duration entropy number.
How could you read comments on HN, reddit and youtube and not be depressed?
For the record, I get angry at the world problems, not depressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability
To find out the chances that a heavy web user is depressed, you have to also consider the other things that can cause someone to use the web heavily. There's a really slick theorem for calculating this:
In my personal case, I have bipolar depression and I have gone through several depressive episodes and have definately changed my internet usage during them as described in the article. So I believe this research has value and I will probably build a tool for self-tracking these variables...
What I disagree with is that there should be a central software to notify "counselors'' of this behavior. I believe there would be too many false positives and it would be a huge intrusion of privacy.
Maybe a system where users by the software get an automated "Need help?" email once where they can schedule an anonymous appointment with 1 click at the student health center or something would be fine. But it should really just be a relatively cheap way to screen for students who might be in trouble and contact them proactively, the internet usage itself shouldnt be logged or discussed as a problem ever...
I'd love to track my personal wellbeing, right now my only metrics are "am I hooked to some flash game or not" and "did I go jogging this week or not". Tracking my web surfing could give something in like "it seems you're having a lousy afternoon" which would be more handy because I might snap out of it.
"P2P packets" are signs of depression in a college campus because people are sharing files? Am I reading this right?! They're sharing movies and music - that's where it all started.
Certain users with high email usage?? How can you identify spam vs. actual? How can you state that some people simply aren't busy and receive a ton of email (including professors)?? And then this leads to speculation of "anxiety" symptoms. Haha. Great correlation there.
Who writes this crap.
Not only is the data they collected so broad and irrelevant, it cannot be accurately used against empirical (medical, depression-related) data to come up with some crap story that users that P2P are depressed.
The notion of them logging and analyzing detailed user data in the future is the cherry on top to a fascinatingly stupid read!
Goodnight, back to my IDE
If you imagine how people you might label as happy and social IRL use the net, they're online either to work or reinforce their real life connections. For them, the net is a tool rather than a destination. This article is a broad overview, but it seems to make sense in general.
I highly recommend reading Learned Optimism. It's not just some empty feel good self-help book, it has scientific rigor and explanations of the causes of much of depression.
Also, I don't think and application that pops up and says "You are acting depressed" is going to help very much.
So what uses of the internet would NOT indicate depression??
"It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression"
I'm not a depressive under their criteria. The software they hope for is broken before they even wrote a single line of code.
You know what helps coping with depression ? Alcohol, smoking, not standing in front of a computer downloading loads of crap to listen and watch.
It could be that the way we interact with the computer is a symptom of our depression, or it could well be that the way we use computers is causing depression (or both).
I have heard of other work associating things that split our attention, e.g. listening to podcasts while working, reading with the the television on, etc, with mood disorders. From the other side, the practice of mindfulness, which seems antithetical to these activities in that it advocates simply paying attention to one thing at a time, appears to be a path to happiness for many.
Given that if I knew I was in a study, and that my internet usage was going to be studied, that would affect my usage of the internet. I might not download movies, or watch as much porn. Perhaps I wouldn't visit Facebook from the university networks.
Even if unconscious of the act, knowledge that they were being studied could easily have affected the resulting data. I would like to see if and how this was controlled for.
The section on data collection doesn't sound like there was any opt-in
If you're constantly out with friends or playing sports, you probably aren't going to have time to use your email all day, play games, share files, and watch videos. If you're staying at home all day... well, to one extent or another, that sort of defines "depression" in a very broad sense.
I'm not sure how this article made it to the top.
Besides, in my opinion, having 20+ tabs of news and information etc helps stave off depression. It sure beats sitting staring blankly at a wall or wallowing in it by reading self-help books.
I feel we all give our brains far too much to try to comprehend, list size wise, when it comes to tasks to do. People that become really good at it find their own very unique way, from what I have read and where I see my own endeavours leading me.
I've noticed that many of the techniques or guidelines out there on the web involve resisting society or technology in someway. For example, quitting Facebook and Twitter, helped improve productivity and satisfaction. Saying "no" to many of the things that define and shape the society we live in, indicates to me, at least, that there's nothing abnormal with being depressed or being an escapist. It's the natural response, I believe.
Perhaps you're saying that modern life pushes people away from healthy eating and exercise and sensible worklife balance and towards alcohol and caffeine, and that depression is the natural result of that. In which case, I agree.
You mention information overload. Here's a nice example of sub-optimal advice about procrastination. It's too long for anyone prone to procrastination to actually read.
Okay. Sounds reliably conclusive.
> Next, we had the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants for February. This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet.
...how "they" were using the internet. During February. In Missouri.
> the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included ... “p2p packets”
O RLY
> By Sriram Chellappan (professor of computer science) and Raghavenra Kotikalapudi (software development engineer), IEEE
Pretty striking that they correlate fear mongering with file sharing, and then draw a line connecting to eavesdropping and traffic analysis. Is this article MPAA/RIAA propaganda? I can't tell.
Procrastination, multi-tasking, frequent email checking, lack of focus. It all sounds very familiar.
This work is so subjective on so many levels as to be worse than worthless -- rather than increasing humanities knowledge by even a modicum, this 'research' positively reduces human knowledge by simply adding noise. It's a shame that PhD's can't just lecture and are forced to do research. This is the crap we end up with.
Use the internet more often or leave your computer on? Depressed!
Tend to surf the web and a variety of sites? How haven't you killed yourself by now?
Lack of opportunity?
It turns out thinking hard that "I wish I were dead." is not actually lethal?
Because this is a bullshit study and a lot of the measures are things I correlate with high IQ and boredom?
I was offered the opportunity to participate in this survey.
At the time I thought it was offered by the IST (Information Science and Technology) department which does some human computer interaction stuff. As a result I decided I wasn't interested because the IST department has a really really bad reputation on campus (rightly so - I'm an IST undergrad and have witnessed gross incompetence first hand).
Turns out it was done by the Comp Sci department, which has a good reputation, but not so much for its research. Still, they are competent people which is more than I can say about the IST department.
Anyways, I find these results interesting. I don't know how they got p2p statistics, as it is painfully difficult to get IT to let me download linux ISOs.
I also share the concerns about the parent monitoring thing.
Well, then I guess G+ users are on the better side of things given that games are being scrapped off of the platform - sorry for all you depressed FB users :-)
Surely most people switch between applications and mediums? If not, then I fall within the 'depressive' category. Dual monitors plus smart phones and an iPad don't help things.