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axelvincent · 4 years

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Relationships and digital : How does digital is transforming our relationships?

It’s estimated that by 2040, 70% of the couple will have met online. With the development of new communication media, it seems that is has never been easier to have relationships between humans. The applications like Her, Tinder, Grindr, Hornet or the french Happn are the most used in the world.

However, according to an American survey, from 1991 to 2017, the pourcentage of high school students who had sex dropped from 54% to 40%. For Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, she notes that "today’s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.” Many researchers argued that it could be the consequence of economic crisis, anxiety rates, environmental estrogens leaked by plastics or the vibrator’s golden age.

The reign of the individual

With the applications, many young people engage in meaningless sex. André, a 35-year-old homosexual, admits in the Obs that since he has been using Grindr he “will no longer flirt in bars" because now he can "organise parties at home, with boys selected in advance". Applications have made modern man insensitive to chance, love encounters now seem to be an activity where everything must be calculated, prepared and organized to reduce the uncertainty of an encounter or the time spent finding the rare pearl. It looks like an episode of Black Mirror, where individuals in a fictional society trust an algorithm to find their lover.

What is also questionable is the ability of applications to determine which individuals would be likely to please us. The Tinder application, for example, chooses the different profiles according to a “ulgy/handsome" algorithm: those with the largest number of "like" profiles have a choice among their counterparts, while those with more "dislikes" have a limited choice. In addition, it offers paid services to increase the chances of a "match" between two users. Worse, the price of these monthly subscriptions is based on your sociological profile and is therefore more or less expensive, according to criteria defined by the application (from 10€ to more than 40€ per month!).

In Japan, which is a case study of sexlessness, 43% of the people between 18 and 34 years old were virgin in 2015. Yet, we have to consider that Japan is one of the first producer (with whole new genres such as bukkake) and consumer of pornography. It is also a global leader in the design of high-end sex dolls and they invented recently, onakura shops where men pay to masturbate while female employees watch. In an article, a expert says that “services that make masturbation more enjoyable are booming.” In Paris, in 2018, opened a brothel where consumers can rent silicone dolls for a few hours. It is already announced that soon, the latter will be equipped with artificial intelligence and some will be able to marry robots in 2050 according to the specialist in artificial intelligence, David Lévy.

Between 1992 and 2014, Americans men who reported maturbating in a given week doubled, to 54%, and the share of women tripled, to 26%. The easy access to porn is one of the key. For the conservative psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the “procrasturbation” as he call it, may lead young men to fail academically, socially and sexually. A similar claim is argued by Gary Wilson that masturbating to internet porn is addictive and causes structural changes in the brain.

In truth, these sexual practices are not necessarily harmful, but they testify to the gradual individualization of our societies. While talking to friends, some tell me that they use the term "market" when they use applications to find people with whom to have sex. It seems that love is intertwined with a more global phenomenon: the disenchantment of the world and the rationalization of human activities.

Love competition and the cult of performance

With applications such as Instagram, Tumblr or Tinder, we see the emergence of a phenomenon of competition between the different actors. Everyone must make their lives as interesting as possible, have a muscular body, eat healthy and consume so-called "acceptable" cultural products. We often talk about "self-management". This culture of the superficial inevitably leads to uneasiness or psychological problems for those who wish to achieve these models but fail to do so. According to a survey of 10,000 students aged 12 to 20 from Ditch the Label, a British anti-harassment association, Instagram is the leading cyberbullying network.

Although social networks are not mostly places of moral harassment, they can create deep inequalities: for example, on social networks, redheads or fat people are highly discriminated. We are seeing the emergence of many dedicated services: packages for sports halls, body care products, make-up to enable many young people to have confidence in themselves. It seems that the capitalist system produces both people who are uncomfortable with themselves and also offers the cure which is paradoxal.

Dating sites are an easy solution for people in a relationship looking for an adventure. Almost 32% of French women in couples are unfaithful, compared to 55% of French men. According to several expert groups, the Internet is one of the reasons for the increase in the number of divorces. "What the Internet creates is the feeling that maybe there is something better waiting for us," says Eva Illouz. The competition even takes place within the couple, where or before, the couple lasted several decades. According to recent studies, the vast majority of couples no longer exceed 3 years of age.

Porn is a reference for a younger audience, lacking in reference points. With the performance criteria it imposes. This sexual liberation does not mean an increase in relationships, on the contrary. While the French had an average of 10 sexual relations per month in 2005, they now have only 8. Because, according to Wolfgang Schmidbauer, couple therapist, it is the injunctions to sexual performance that can lead to erectile dysfunction or libido disorders. Moreover, in a few years, porn has become a means of educating young teenagers. Everyone has access to it, sometimes they are very young. The representation of women is often deplorable and the male sexual imagination is often very violent towards them. The recent Me Too scandal and the large numbers of sexual assaults testify to this big problem (32,000 assaults on average between 2012 and 2018).

Towards a capitalism of love?

Finally, the central question of digital technology and our sentimental relationships lies in the ability of economic actors to take over our love lives. Indeed, with the multitude of individuals using the applications and all the data collected on each behavior, it is possible to achieve a very high turnover by selling visibility to the most desperate people. For many people, family and couple still represent a very important aspiration for life: only 14% of French people between the ages of 40 and 54 are alone today.

Moreover, the particularity of dating applications is part of the industry phenomenon. Indeed, the creation of profiles is not so much a natural construction as a mental and social construction of oneself. It shows one or more facets of our personality that we claim. This creation allows you to see if it is possible to be compatible with other people. What Tinder induces, for example, is that a person cannot contact another person if the latter has not given his prior consent. This construction of digital avatars is not necessarily harmful: sexual minorities have been largely normalized in recent years thanks to dating applications and their ability to find specific genders or people is a boom in their relationships. Internet reconfigures accessibility, how you can access and who you can access.

Today, more and more applications are appearing to find friends. People who feel lonely can share a meal or drink with strangers. There are also websites, especially in Asia where people pay "fake friends" to go out or just chat.

In the future, it is easy to imagine how the applications could be improved. With big data and artificial intelligence, perhaps it will be possible to find love with a success rate close to 100%. Moreover, capitalism will easily be able to interfere in this market where rating systems can be set up and where consumers will pay to see their ratings increase, etc. Is it again a revolution of love as the title of Luc Ferry's famous book suggested? To be continued...

#tinder #love #digital

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dork-with-a-uke · 7 years

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for the question post: 1-15, 30-40, 65-end

holy shit uh okay why do u troll me like this

1. Are looks important in a relationship?

i think they’re fairly important in the beginning, ygm? but after you get to know the person it matters less and less

2. Are relationships ever worth it?

you tell me, man. i don’t know.

3. Are you a virgin?

yup

4. Are you in a relationship?

i’m pretty single mydude

5. Are you in love?

no.

6. Are you single this year?

i am single all the years ok

7. Can you commit to one person?

i think i would be able to, yeah.

8. Describe your crush

cannot describe something that is not woop

i mean this guy in my class is pretty cute n people ship us but i,..,. yk. we’ve barely ever spoken (is prom the opportunity? tune in in twelve hours to know!)

9. Describe your perfect mate

10. Do you believe in love at first sight?

nah. love is something you work towards.

11. Do you ever want to get married?

definitely!

12. Do you forgive betrayal?

as in, cheating? fuck no. you dont cheat by accident.

13. Do you get jealous easily?

…..yes

14. Do you have a crush on anyone?

apart from maybe-that guy i talked about earlier but nah

15. Do you have any piercings?

got both my ears pierced but like,…,the normal places

30. Have you ever considered plastic surgery? If so, what would you change about your body?

i’ve never considered plastic surgery and honestly idfk what i’d change

31. Have you ever cried over a guy/girl?

oh yes. definitely.

32. Have you ever experienced unrequited love?

how did u know

33. Have you ever had sex with a man?

nope

34. Have you ever had sex with a woman?

still nope

35. Have you ever kissed someone older than you?

yes. every person i’ve kissed was older than me

36. Have you ever liked one of your best friends?

don’t think so?

37. Have you ever liked someone who your friends hated?

sdfkj yes

38. Have you ever liked someone you didn’t expect to?

absolutely. it’s kinda weird.

39. Have you ever wanted someone you couldn’t have?

if u mean like…….brendon urie, then yes

40. Have you ever written a song or poem for someone?

no. i have, however, written stuff about someone.

65. What is your favourite foreplay routine?

i ,..,,. uh. im not sure how to answer this

66. What is your favourite roleplay?

you know im starting to think i might be too inexperienced to have reblogged this shit

67. What is your idea of the perfect date?

a nice cafe and then a walk? or like, movie night.

68. What is your sexual orientation?

im figuring it out? but possibly bi

69. What turns you off?

bad.,.,,. mouth hygiene?

70. What turns you on?

lmao notsorry

71. What was your kinkiest wet dream?

strangely i do not have those dreams

72. What words do you like to hear during sex?

huh. i’d like to know.

73. What’s something sweet you’d like someone to do for you?

remember little details about me and act on them

74. What’s the most superficial characteristic you look for?

their teeth. oops.

75. What’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for you?

does the fact that i can’t remember make me a terrible person

or does it make this thing really sad

76. What’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever done for someone?

i.,.,,.dont remember that either

77. What’s your opinion on age differences in relationships?

no adult-minor shit

78. What’s your dirtiest secret?

i should keep that one to myself

79. When was the last time you felt jealous? Why?

one of my closest irl friends is just.. ditching me for other people. yeah. i get friend jealous.

80. When was the last time you told someone you loved them?

three days ago? on a livestream?

81. Who are five people you find attractive?

ryan ross

brendon urie

dallon weekes

that guy in my class

eddie redmayne i love eddieredmayne

82. Who is the last person you hugged?

my friend fred. it’s cool.

83. Who was your first kiss with?

a guy i’d known forever! it was at 4am during an anime marathon. tasted like coffee.

84. Why did your last relationship fail?

what last relationship

85. Would you ever date someone off of the Internet?

i highly doubt so

#ask #anon

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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“Take it off,” Bradley Cooper supposedly said to Lady Gaga.

“It” refers to the tiny bit of makeup Gaga was wearing at the screen test for what became her starring role in the latest reboot of A Star Is Born, according to a widely circulated story in the LA Times.

The story, which has now been repeated by its stars several times and elevated to lore in only a few short weeks, goes like this: During the screen test, Cooper, who is the producer, director, and lead actor in the movie, whipped out a makeup wipe and dragged it down Gaga’s face from forehead to chin. He then told her, “Completely open. No artifice.”

This narrative thread continued this past weekend, when Gaga and Cooper went on The Graham Norton Show in the UK. There, she told a tale about trying to sneak some makeup onto the set, according to the Evening Standard, “but Bradley wouldn’t go for it.” Cooper apparently jumped in and said, “It’s how the character is.”

Gaga’s character, Ally, is an unknown singer-songwriter who has pretty much given up on her dream to be a performer. She is also plagued by self-doubt because of her appearance. This no-makeup story has been getting so much attention in part because Lady Gaga has built her persona — multiple personas, really — using props that are sometimes purposely jarring. Makeup, wigs, shoes, facial prosthetics, a giant egg, and, yes, a meat dress have all been part of her repertoire. She likes to challenge what we consider norms for women’s looks and fashion, so seeing her with her natural hair color and no makeup is jarring in a different way.

View this post on Instagram

#AStarIsBorn

A post shared by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Sep 27, 2018 at 11:01am PDT

But does not wearing any makeup mean a woman is more authentic? It appears to be what Cooper and his character, Jackson Maine, both believe. In fact, it’s what a lot of people believe. As a society, we claim to value what’s “natural” when it comes to women and their looks, but when you dig a little deeper, that’s not really what we want. We want them to look beautiful without any intervention at all, which is an unachievable goal considering that society’s idea of what is beautiful is so narrow: young, skinny, conventionally pretty, light-skinned. It’s impossible for women to win, so celebrating Gaga’s makeup-free face as the ultimate sign of her authenticity is more complicated than the sound bites would have us believe.

Let’s unpack this Bradley Cooper makeup removal situation a little bit more: 1) Why the hell was Cooper carrying makeup wipes on his person? 2) Did he give Gaga the opportunity to cleanse her face properly, at least? Makeup wipes are not great for the skin! Next time you invade someone’s personal space to impose your beliefs on them, please offer them an oil or a gentle cleanser instead, Bradley.

All kidding aside, the reaction to this moment has been decidedly mixed. While some thought it was sweet, it was also perceived to be paternalistic or downright controlling. Nylon deemed it “weird as hell.” In a piece for NBC, Jennifer Gerson called it another example of someone policing women’s looks. Daily Beast entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon called it “gross and creepy” on Twitter.

The incident was repeated ad nauseam throughout the entertainment and popular press. It may have been a calculated anecdote because, as some pointed out, the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, starring Judy Garland. featured a scene in which her male co-star James Mason removes her makeup (using a nice-looking cold cream, I’d like to point out):

To be fair to Cooper, he ostensibly did this because that’s what he envisioned the character of Ally to be; he is hopefully not in the habit of whipping out makeup wipes on unsuspecting women at random red-carpet events. (But I’d also like to point out how he was not willing to be “completely open” himself, at least on the press junket, as this cringeworthy interview with Taffy Brodesser-Akner at the New York Times demonstrates.)

And, importantly, Lady Gaga was on board with it. She said ditching the makeup helped make her a better actor, helped her inhabit the role. “It put me right in the place I needed to be, because when my character talks about how ugly she feels — that was real. I’m so insecure. I like to preach, but I don’t always practice what I preach,” she said in the LA Times interview. Gaga has publicly stated that she’s been plagued with doubt about her own attractiveness since the beginning of her career and has addressed it on many occasions. For many women, makeup imparts confidence, and the vulnerability of a bare face is real.

In case you are not aware of Gaga’s extensive beauty canon, she loves makeup and uses its transformative power masterfully. She has been working with makeup artist Sarah Tanno for almost a decade, and the two have collaborated on some of the most clever and unique makeup looks in recent memory. They make art together. The looks are not natural — metallics and sequins and bright eyeliner figure prominently. Gaga’s signature look is that she has no signature look. She is also working on a makeup line of her own, called Haus of Beauty, as Recode reported in July.

In the movie, Gaga starts out makeup-free and her character later dyes her hair red and piles on more cosmetics. Cooper’s character pushes back against this pop star-ification, arguing that she is losing her authenticity. This is the opposite of Gaga’s career trajectory; she started out embracing full-on caricature, and toned down her visual statements a lot with her most recent Joanne tour, taking on a folksier image (including lots of floppy hats).

Lady Gaga in 2009 and at a Joanne photo call in 2016. John Shearer/Jun Sato/Getty Images

Which brings us back to the idea of authenticity. Gaga isn’t the only big pop star who changes her looks frequently and unabashedly uses makeup to craft a persona. Three of arguably the most authentic performers on the planet — Dolly Parton, Rihanna, and Cher — do as well. Cher and Parton have also been open and unapologetic about their plastic surgery.

Their characters and messages have been consistent through their careers, and surely most people would agree these three are not fake or superficial when it counts the most. But we still somehow think makeup means you’re faking something, conflating fake color on someone’s face with a superficial personality. Real authenticity, however, is intangible.

Cooper’s use of the word “artifice” in the LA Times interview is very telling, because associating makeup with artifice advances the narrative that women who wear it are trying to trick people.

It’s an idea that’s been around for centuries. An unattractive woman uses makeup or other sneaky methods to fool a man into thinking she’s attractive, thus snaring him forever. Micaela Marini Higgs detailed this history and mindset for a Racked story in 2017:

The use of womanly wiles and feminine trickery have been blamed for many things since the Garden of Eden, and makeup is seen as an extension of this inherent dishonesty. Women, we imagine, are willing to lie to get what they want, even if that involves trapping men through the long con of contour and lipstick.

There have been more insidious examples of this recently. In 2017, a man released an app called MakeApp that allows users to “remove” women’s makeup in photos. It was roundly panned as sexist. Heather Schwedel wrote at Slate, imagining its founder’s mindset, “Why not expose the dastardly tricks these harpies are using to disguise themselves? Makeup: It’s basically witchcraft.”

In its most current sinister iteration, the idea that makeup equals deception is something that incels, or “involuntary celibates,” believe. These bitter young men believe they are being harshly and superficially judged by women, because they themselves judge women that way. “They are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud,” Jia Tolentino wrote at the New Yorker.

In the movie, Cooper’s male gaze reigns supreme. If you have seen the trailer 87,000 times, or even just once, you know that he tells Gaga’s character Ally he thinks she is beautiful. That moment when he is driving off in the car and hollers out to her because “I just wanted to take another look at you” has become a meme. She does indeed look incredible without makeup in the movie. But we, the audience (and presumably Ally), are supposed to finally believe it when Cooper says it.

The idea that a woman without makeup is a woman in her ideal form has found its way into the biggest makeup trend of the last decade: “no-makeup makeup.”

At Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry in May, her makeup was light and natural. Her freckles were visible. Her lips looked like her own lips. Prince Harry “kept saying thank you. He was thanking me for making her look like herself,” Markle’s makeup artist Daniel Martin told InStyle. Elle UK estimates nine products were used on her face. It was no-makeup makeup.

Google the phrase and you’ll get more than a billion results. Look it up on YouTube and you’ll find hundreds of tutorials. The fact that one might require a tutorial to nail this look tells you everything you need to know about it. This trend is the real scam, not women wearing red lipstick and black eyeliner. You need upward of a dozen products to get the look popularized by Kim Kardashian:

Women have been wearing makeup since before Queen Elizabeth I slathered her face with lead to cover up her smallpox scars. They do it for a lot of reasons — because of societal pressure to cover up “imperfections,” as a way to express individuality, or just plain boredom with their natural lip color. Insisting that a woman’s authenticity can only be revealed by revealing her bare skin is a disservice. Gaga said herself at a press event that not wearing makeup brought out vulnerability in “someone that doesn’t necessarily feel safe [being] that vulnerable all the time.” Why is this the ideal?

In an interview for Vogue’s October issue, in which Lady Gaga appears on the cover wearing a “natural” makeup look, the author notes, “The biggest challenge for Lady Gaga was creating a musical character that was not like … Lady Gaga.” The irony here is that the “authentic” Lady Gaga we see in A Star Is Born is a fictional character. The real Gaga — fake eyelashes, stick-on gems, and all — is authentic as hell.

Original Source -> The problem with Bradley Cooper asking Lady Gaga to go makeup-free in A Star Is Born

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explains the popularity YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

The videos that surface on the app are generated by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which takes into account a user’s search history, viewing history, demographic region, gender, age, and other individual data. The algorithm is basically a funnel through which every YouTube video is poured—with only a few making it onto a person’s screen.

This recommendation engine poses a difficult task, simply because of the scale of the platform. “YouTube recommendations are responsible for helping more than a billion users discover personalized content from an ever-growing corpus of videos,” researchers at Google, which owns YouTube, wrote in a 2016 paper about the algorithm. That includes many hours of video uploaded to the site every second of every day. Making a recommendation system that’s worthwhile is “extremely challenging,” they wrote, because the algorithm has to continuously sift through a mind-boggling trove of content and instantly identify the freshest and most relevant videos—all while knowing how to ignore the noise.

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

And here’s where the ouroboros factor comes in: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click.

This is, in essence, how all algorithms work. It’s how filter bubbles are made. A little bit of computer code tracks what you find engaging—what sorts of videos do you watch most often, and for the longest periods of time?—then sends you more of that kind of stuff. Viewed a certain way, YouTube Kids is offering programming that’s very specifically tailored to what children want to see. Kids are actually selecting it themselves, right down to the second they lose interest and choose to tap on something else. The YouTube app, in other words, is a giant reflection of what kids want. In this way, it opens a special kind of window into a child’s psyche.

But what does it reveal?

“Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

You can find some high-quality animation on YouTube Kids, plus clips from television shows like Peppa Pig, and sing-along nursery rhymes. “Daddy Finger” is basically the YouTube Kids anthem, and ChuChu TV’s dynamic interpretations of popular kid songs are basically inescapable.

youtube

Many of the most popular videos have an amateur feel. Toy demonstrations like surprise-egg videos are huge. These videos are just what they sound like: adults narrate as they play with various toys, often by pulling them out of plastic eggs or peeling away layers of slime or Play-Doh to reveal a hidden figurine.

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

The vague weirdness of these videos aside, it’s actually easy to see why kids like them. “Who doesn’t want to get a surprise? That’s sort of how all of us operate,” says Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In addition to surprises being fun, many of the videos are basically toy commercials. (This video of a person pressing sparkly Play-Doh onto chintzy Disney princess figurines has been viewed 550 million times.) And they let kids tap into a whole internet’s worth of plastic eggs and perceived power. They get to choose what they watch. And kids love being in charge, even in superficial ways.

“It’s sort of like rapid-fire channel surfing,” says Michael Rich, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health. “In many ways YouTube Kids is better suited to the attention span of a young child—just by virtue of its length—than something like a half-hour or hour broadcast program can be.”

Rich and others compare the app to predecessors like Sesame Street, which introduced short segments within a longer program, in part to keep the attention of the young children watching. For decades, researchers have looked at how kids respond to television. Now they’re examining the way children use mobile apps—how many hours they’re spending, which apps they’re using, and so on.

It makes sense that researchers have begun to take notice. In the mobile internet age, the same millennials who have ditched cable television en masse are now having babies, which makes apps like YouTube Kids the screentime option du jour. Instead of being treated to a 28-minute episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a toddler or preschooler might be offered 28 minutes of phone time to play with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a television program, too—a spin-off of Mr. Roger’s—aimed at viewers aged 2 years old to 4 years old.

But toddlers and preschoolers are actually pretty separate groups, as far researchers are concerned. A 2-year-old and a 4-year-old might both like watching Daniel Tiger, or the same YouTube Kids video, but their takeaway is apt to be much different, Kirkorian told me. Children under the age of 3 tend to have difficulty taking information relayed to them through a screen and applying it to real-life situations. Many studies have reached similar conclusions, with a few notable exceptions. Researchers recently discovered that when a screentime experience becomes interactive—Facetiming with Grandmère, let’s say—kids under 3 years old actually can make strong connections between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen.

Kirkorian’s lab designed a series of experiments to see how much of a role interactivity plays in helping a young child transfer information this way. She and her colleagues found striking learning differences among what young children learned—even kids under 2 years old—when they could interact with an app versus when they were just watching a screen. Other researchers, too, have found that incorporating some sort of interactivity helps children retain information better. Researchers at different institutions have different definitions of “interactivity,” but in one experiment it was an act as simple as pressing a spacebar.

“So there does seem to be something about the act of choosing, having some kind of agency, that makes a difference for little kids,” Kirkorian says. “The speculative part is why that makes a difference.”

One idea is that kids, especially, like to watch the same things over and over and over again until they really understand it. I watched the Dumbo VHS so many times as a little kid that I would recite the movie on long car rides. Apparently, this is not unusual—at least not since the age of VCRs and, subsequently, on-demand programming and apps. “If they have the opportunity to choose what they’re watching, then they’re likely to interact in a way that meets their learning goals,” Kirkorian says. “We know the act of learning new information is rewarding, so they’re likely to pick the information or videos that are in that sweet spot.”

“Children like to watch the same thing over and over,” says Calvert, of Georgetown. “Some of that is a comprehension issue, so they’ll repeatedly look at it so they can understand the story. Kids often don’t understand people’s motives, and that’s a major driver for a story. They don’t often understand the link between actions and consequences.”

Young kids are also just predisposed to becoming obsessive about relatively narrow interests. (Elephants! Trains! The moon! Ice cream!) Around the 18-month mark, many toddlers develop “extremely intense interests,” says Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Which is part of why kids using apps like YouTube Kids often select videos that portray familiar concepts—ones that feature a cartoon character or topic they’re already drawn to. This presents a research challenge, however. If kids are just tapping a thumbnail of a video because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they’re learning—or how different the app environment really is from other forms of play.

Even the surprise-egg craze isn’t really novel, says Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “They are relatively fast paced and they include something that young children really like: things being enclosed and unwrapped,” she told me. “I have not tested it, but it seems unlikely that children are learning from these videos since they are not clearly constructed.”

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

Researchers differ on the degree to which YouTube Kids is a valuable educational tool. Obviously, it depends on the video and the involvement of a caregiver to help contextualize what’s on screen. But questions about how the algorithm works also play a role. It’s not clear, for instance, how heavily YouTube weighs previous watching behaviors in its recommendation engine. If a kid binge-watches a bunch of videos that are lower quality in terms of learning potential, are they then stuck in a filter bubble where they’ll only see similarly low-quality programming?

There isn’t a human handpicking the best videos for kids to watch. The only human input on YouTube’s side is to monitor the app for inappropriate content, a spokesperson for YouTube told me. Quality control has still been an issue, however. YouTube Kids last year featured a video that showed Mickey Mouse-esque characters shooting one another in the head with guns, Today reported.

“The available content is not curated but rather filtered into the app via the algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a YouTube spokesperson. “So unlike traditional TV, where the content is being selected for you at a specified time, the YouTube Kids app gives each child and family more of the type of content they love and anytime they want it, which is incredibly unique.”

At the same time, the creators of YouTube Kids videos spend countless hours trying to game the algorithm so that their videos are viewed as many times as possible—more views translate into more advertising dollars for them. Here’s a video by Toys AndMe that’s logged more than 125 million views since it was posted in September 2016:

youtube

“You have to do what the algorithm wants for you,” says Nathalie Clark, the co-creator of a similarly popular channel, Toys Unlimited, and a former ICU nurse who quit her job to make videos full-time. “You can’t really jump back and forth between themes.”

What she means is, once YouTube’s algorithm has determined that a certain channel is a source of videos about slime, or colors, or shapes, or whatever else—and especially once a channel has had a hit video on a given topic—videomakers stray from that classification at their peril. “Honestly, YouTube picks for you,” she says. “Trending right now is Paw Patrol, so we do a lot of Paw Patrol.”

There are other key strategies for making a YouTube Kids video go viral. Make enough of these things and you start to get a sense of what children want to see, she says. “I wish I could tell you more,” she added, “But I don’t want to introduce competition. And, honestly, nobody really understands it. ”

The other thing people don’t yet understand is how growing up in the mobile internet age will change the way children think about storytelling. “There’s a rich set of literature showing kids who are reading more books are more imaginative,” says Calvert, of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “But in the age of interactivity, it’s no just longer consuming what somebody else makes. It’s also making you’re own thing.”

In other words, the youngest generation of app users is developing new expectations about narrative structure and informational environments. Beyond the thrill a preschooler gets from tapping a screen, or watching The Bing Bong Song video for the umpteenth time, the long-term implications for cellphone-toting toddlers are tangled up with all the other complexities of living in a highly networked on-demand world.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

Text

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

But what does it reveal?

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

youtube

Article source here:The Atlantic

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