cure – ThursdayAgain

If you’re feeling guilty about how much time you spend on social media sites like Facebook & Twitter, the “Pavlov Poke” could be the answer to all your worries, by making you feel seriously worse.

Originally designed as a joke with a serious message about the excessive hours we fritter away on internet services, the system gives you a small electric shock via the keyboard after you have clocked up a pre-determined amount of time on specified websites or applications. The shock is not fatal (yet), but is strong enough to act as a deterrent. (Look to see employers installing this on their networks soon.)

Social media sites are often described as more addictive than cigarettes & alcohol, & given the business model of Facebook et al., that may be an understatement. They are addictive by design.

Suffering from a deficit of will power, post-grad students Robert Morris & Dan McDuff at the MIT Media Lab put together a bespoke gadget from spare equipment lying around their office (That has to make you wonder, doesn’t it? What were their dissertations on, “Capital punishment in the workplace”?) hoping it would help them spend less time on social media sites & encourage them to finish their dissertations.

The home-office-torture-kit uses software that monitors what applications are being run & when it detects that a given time threshold has been exceeded by an application, it triggers a short circuit in an electronic device connected to the computer, sending a current to metal pads in front of the keyboard. If a person’s hands are resting on those pads they get a shock.

If you have a real problem with going cold turkey, the system can help fry the monkey on your back (if you don’t quit before the system kills you) it will also automatically place a request on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk with your phone number & instructions for a crowd-worker to call & yell at you.

Ah, the gleaming spires of academe will never seem the same.