I just love that word! I could sit and say it to myself for hours. Well, I could say it to myself for minutes. It’s fun to say. Say it out loud, for yourself, right now. Let it roll off your tongue slowly and enjoy it.

Laaaahhhhhhzzzzzzeeehhhhnggge.

Yes! Ten brownie points to the people who actually just did that. Turns out, in this one instance, I’m not a complete freak because a lot of people have preferences for words because of the way they sound. Conversely, some people hate certain words for the same reason. Here’s a very incomplete list of words I stole from this website that people seem to hate inexplicably:

moist
slacks
ointment
impossible
vomit
panties
spew

“My impossible cousin spewed moist vomit all over my panties as I was trying to put ointment under my slacks.” I bet you have a really sour look on your face after reading that. I know I do. Did you know there are three groups on Facebook for “people who hate the word moist”? I agree wholeheartedly. Let’s banish it from the English language. But, I don’t like the word “wet” much better, and the word “ointment” makes me want to . . . well nevermind.

If I had all the money and time in the world I would love to do some real research on this phenomenon. But until then I will keep on childishly saying my favorite words like The Biggest Nerd Ever. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must away to extol the glories of a pineapple lozenge whilst spelunking.

from wikipedia

I heard a loud sound like a car horn, and turned around to realize I’d been standing in the middle of a parking lot without a clear idea of for how long. After having left the grocery store I remembered hearing the sound of an incoming text, and without thinking I’d stopped to dig my phone out of my purse and respond. Then, out of habit, I checked my email. There I found a couple notifications from facebook, but before I’d finished reading the sound startled me and I realized I was standing in the middle of the road. I scurried out of the way and realized for the first time how strange it is that tech savvy people these days live lives which are physically divided– real life and virtual life. I was cognizant for the first time of the look that must have been on my face, and ever since then I’ve been seeing that look everywhere, like their real-life body has been put on pause while they live their life in another world. I’ve grow a nasty habit of staring at these people and wondering if they know how strange they look.

Ever since watching Lain, one of the most mind-screwy animes ever conceived, I’ve been having these troubling thought experiments about the meaning of online existence. For example: lets say a person lives a profound and influential life in the virtual world but nowhere else. They never leave their home, never meet people in person, but online they accomplish a great many things. This is a though experiment, but certainly not impossible, and becoming more possible all the time. Can that person be said to have lived a meaningful life? I suppose that question is fundamentally unanswerable as the definition of a meaningful life is subjective, but it’s a fun question to ask.

Enter virtual suicide. Sometimes we get obsessed with things and realize far too late how strange and probably psychologically unhealthy they are. The other day I discovered this web-based way to commit virtual suicide, and I’ve been addicted to reading people’s “last words” testimonials. The website is essentially a shamelessly emo way to cancel your twitter or facebook account, completely with totally wrong puns galore, but I found myself being unreasonably interested from a philosophical/psychoanalytical standpoint. Why is this so fascinating to me? Is it because I’ve always wanted to know what my own funeral will be like? The idea that we could live a virtual life is interesting because once the notion of a life existing in two places can be accepted, then life after death becomes possible in a very real way. Uh, yeah, by the way, I have a cold and probably shouldn’t be allowed to post anything in a public way. Now that my head feels even more like a swimming pool I think I’ll go lay down

What if you had an enormous network of people who were interacting with each other in a virtual space? It wouldn’t really be reality, but the mind would have a hard time telling the difference. Would people behave differently, and if so, how? We already have such a beast, called the internet, and psychologists are scrambling to come up with a paradigm which explains human behavior in it. Unfortunately, many of the early work on virtual spaces was done by psychologists who had no native understand of this big, internet-type thing all the crazy kids are into these days. It hasn’t been until fairly recently that members of the 1337 have tackled these issues.

I was prompted to write this post after reading about how Micheal Arrington is taking a break from tech crunch because of the threats on his life. This sparked a discussion on mixx about human behavior in virtual spaces. To be perfectly honest, empirical research on this subject is virtually non-existent (no pun intended . . . well, maybe a little). Not to sound too much like a jackass, but it’s going to be people like me, and others of my generation, who work on solving the great human behavioral mysteries of virtual spaces with a native understanding of the beast.

All I have at this point are my observations and beliefs about human nature and interaction in virtual spaces. Relationships tend to be more intense and shorter lived than in “real life”, or what I like to call “the meat space.” Anyone who’s been flamed or has visited the seedy underbelly of the internet knows the depths of utter ridiculousness that internet relationships can reach. People get angry, volatile and spew hatred that they would never dream of in the meat space. my friend Jay’s favorite saying is “internet audience + anonymity = asshat.” I don’t know if that’s completely true, but what is it about the internet that changes people’s behavior? And what about those people who seem to act exactly the same online as in real life, what’s different about them? Maybe someday we will know.

Ah, yet another completely unfulfilling blog post brought to you by me. Have a nice day!

Well, it happens a lot.

Just a couple months ago there was an article on mixx entitled “smarter women have bad sex” that was a perfect example of this bullshittery. I blew that story out of the water with mixx’s official “greatest comment of all time,” but this kind of thing happens a lot. (Not the great comment, that’s Honest Ape’s domain, I mean the crackpot study.)

I think about this sometimes because I’m interesting in psychology, but it wasn’t until yesterday when I was listening to NPR that I realized its true danger. There was some really cheesily done public service announcement with Jamie Lee Curtis talking about how “studies show that kids whose parents eat dinner with them regularly are less likely to do drugs” or something. I scoffed at the radio and ranted to Brennan all that way home about how misguided they were.

First of all, the study she mentioned was more than likely a non-experimental, correlational design. (Wordpress doesn’t think correlational is a word, but it is, I promise.) That means the psychologists went around handing out surveys asking people how often they ate with their family and whether or not they or their kids did drugs. This type of design is not highly regarded in psychology because it’s very weak. Your results rely entirely on what people decide to tell you and you just have to assume they’re telling the truth while remembering correctly. A lot of parents don’t have a clue what their kids are doing, so collecting accurate data for this particular study would be nearly impossible. A psychologist can pretty much make any claim they want about people and “prove” it with such a design. Sometimes longitudinal studies are taken seriously, but I highly doubt this study was such.

Secondly, correlation does not equal causality! People have such a hard time with this for some damn reason. Even if it is true that families who eat dinner together are less likely to have children with drug habits, it’s not a testament to the magical power of eating dinner together. Eating dinner together is a lot more likely to be a symptom of a healthy family for a wide variety of reasons; parents who make the effort for family time are involved, caring, supportive, etc. If a family is already hopelessly broken, then forcing the kids to the dinner table is only going to aggravate the situation.

The final reason why these studies are dangerous is because they lead people to believe that small actions can solve problems that require a great deal of work. If you’re a parent who has a kid on drugs, please don’t ask them to dinner and think you’re doing something about their drug problem. It takes a lot to overcome or prevent addiction and, in my humble opinion, psychologists who lead people to believe otherwise are a shame to the profession.