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Do not believe everything you read online – except this

11th February 2011

Telling the truth online

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Do you believe everything you read online? After all, some people do not even believe the Bible.

Trust me, this is true. Honest. Believe me. But, apparently, there are some things on the Internet which are – there is no easy way of saying this – untrue..! That’s right, some of the pages on the Internet contain material that is made up, fabricated, even a blatant lie. Well, stand back in amazement. I am stunned. Not.

A simple press release issued by the educational technology company, Pearson, has led to a range of news stories many purporting to reveal a “new study” about how gullible the “digital native” generation of children and young people can be. According to many of the news stories which have appeared in the past few days the “study” shows that people believe what they read on the Internet and “therefore” the Internet is fostering gullibility in new generations. We are all doomed it seems as we are going to increasingly accept what we read online as true, even if it isn’t.

All sounds fine – in theory. Except the real gullibility is in the journalists supposedly reporting the story. The press release was announcing a talk by an educational researcher who was going to discuss his work from the late-1990s. What he had done was set up a website about a fictional “tree octopus“. Of course, there is no such creature, but the website could make you think there is – indeed it includes a campaign to save this endangered species. However, the real purpose of this site is as an educational tool – to help children identify characteristics which might suggest online material is not as genuine as it seems. Even though the site had been used in research to show that some youngsters actually believed it to be true, the reporters who wrote the recent stories should have checked their facts and in doing so would have discovered that a) this is not “news” and b) it is more complex than “youngsters are gullible”.

But even scientific researchers are gullible. To suggest that modern children believe everything they read online even when it is untrue, without any comparisons of whether they believe everything in print, is a weakness in studies of this kind. Equally, there is no time comparison: did children 25 years ago, for instance, believe everything in the magazines and literature they read, even if it was fake? We don’t have any data on this – but my hunch is that children have always been gullible until they learn critical and analytical thinking.

You should not believe anyything you read – anywhere. Indeed, one of the skills of analytical thinking is to suspend belief for anything you are told or you read so that you can make your mind up about it. The tree octopus study was merely pointing this out. It is such a shame that journalists seem to believe that it is a new study (it is not) and that the research confirms a change in behaviour (which it does not). Perhaps we do not need to teach children that the Internet might lie to them. Perhaps we need to train our journalists better – or at least employ ones who are capable of analytical thought.

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Categories: General, Internet Psychology Tags: , , , , ,

Biased football referees prove value of website redesign

8th July 2010
The referee might miss a foul depending on the direction of play. Will your website miss visitors in the same way?

The referee might miss a foul depending on the direction of play. Will your website miss visitors in the same way?

Fact. Football referees are biased. Those players in the World Cup who cry “foul” when the referee finds against them could well be right, according to a new study of the unconscious effect of direction of motion. The research has found a statistically significant difference in the accuracy of spotting a foul depending upon the direction in which the ball is being played. If the ball is travelling from left to right, the referees are much more accurate than when the ball is going from right to left (from the perspective of the referee’s position on the pitch). It seems that video technology would not only help in deciding whether a goal has been scored, but would also determine if a true foul had taken place. Referees are not as good as they might like to think they are…!

The study tells us more than referees have an inbuilt bias – perhaps you already thought that anyway…! It also emphasises the importance of direction in our analysis of a visual situation. The study shows that for people who read from left to right, anything that travels from right to left is perceived less accurately. For countries where the reading is right to left, the reverse is the case.

Recently I showed how WordPress has design wrong from a memory point of view. The preponderance of right-biased menu options makes it less easy for people to remember what is on your website. Now, this new study on the bias of motion in football matches, adds weight to the argument. The football study confirms there is a bias in left to right writing for our brains to consider anything that goes right to left as “not quite right”.

This clearly has implications for your website design. It is not just about where you put navigation, but about the flow of the page. If things flow from left to right, your visitors are much more likely to find it “normal” – assuming your readers are all from countries where left to right writing dominates. For example, do your pictures have a left to right flow in them, or are the “pointing” the wrong way. Newspaper and magazine designers often use facial images with direction in them to move your focus around the page; but they work best if they go left to right – not “against the grain”. The flow in the photo on this page is, for instance, the wrong way (deliberately to make the point..!). It is going right to left. Traditional designers would say that’s good as it draws your eye to the text to make you read it. But this new research on directional bias would imply that it makes you think there’s something not quite right.

What this all means is that subtle design elements on your web page could have consequences for the “stickiness” of your pages and the engagement which people have with your material. Much website design these days has a right to left bias. Maybe that’s why engagement is not as good as people might like it to be. Left to right may look “boring” but it sure appears to help psychologically.

If you don’t want you readers to cry “foul”, you might need to reconsider the directional bias of your website.

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Categories: General Tags: , , ,

Know your online rights and win a prize

12th April 2010

How well do you know your online rights? What information should you give online to commercial suppliers? And what protections should you look for in the small print? These are areas where the Consumer Affairs section of the European Commission is hard at work. Ther eare several European laws in place that are designed to protect online buyers. If you are a purchaser you can benefit from knowing these, but if you are selling stuff online, you need to be sure you understand these laws in order to protect yourself from prosecution.

So, how much do you know? Watch this video then answer the questions at the end. If you get the answers right, there’s a chance you can win a USB Memory Stick.

 

 

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Categories: General

EXCLUSIVE: Facebook to create new language

1st April 2010

April FirstFacebook insiders have revealed exclusively to me that later today they will be announcing a new language which is set to revolutionise the web. At the moment the web is mostly in English, with other sites in Japanese, Chinese, and a multitude of European languages. The real difficulty is that translation of pages either costs a lot of money to get right, or automated systems are used that provide a seemingly foolish approximation.

Facebook has discovered that the limit to its global dominance is linguistic. If all of its pages were in a single language that everyone could understand – no matter what their native tongue – Facebook would be able to expand even further.

Two years of research on the words being used on the billions of pages hosted on Facebook has led to an analysis of words which will be understandable the world over. Later today, Facebook is due to hold a press conference announcing the introduction of their new language. It is called the Facebook Open Operating Language (FOOL) and is the First new language to be introduced directly as a result of the Internet.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We are delighted to have come up with FOOL this April. Our extensive research has shown us that this new language will catch on very quickly. Not only is it completely understandable by everyone, but the humour is also translated. For years people have tried to find a common language which everyone in the world can understand. Our extensive analysis of the languages used on our site has enabled us to do this in a way that wasn’t possible beforehand. We call the technology we used to do this the Analytical Program Researching Into Language (APRIL)”.

With Facebook’s APRIL technology inventing FOOL, is there any other date they could be announcing this breakthrough than today?

No animals were harmed in the making-up of this blog post.

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Rare species killed off by the Internet

22nd March 2010

Conservationists are up in arms about the Internet. They are pointing out – ironically using the Internet – that the web is responsible for threatening more endangered species than ever. Apparently you can order a polar bear skin online, or if you want you can get a baby lion shipped to you. That’s to say nothing about the ivory trade or other rare items which are traded online. True, the Internet has made it much easier for the criminal gangs to sell their goods. But the Internet is also responsible for the impending death of another species.

Don't let your business go the way of the polar bear

Don’t let your business go the way of the polar bear

The “traditionalist”, the “old-fashioned”, the “dinosoaur” of business is on the way out; and not before time. There are several business leaders and so-called experts who are completely out of step with the modern world we now inhabit. It’s rather like the people who loved gas lamps saying “that electric light nonsense will never catch on”.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the world of Government and its quangos. Yesterday, Labour MP Ann Begg advised people never to go near Twitter. In touch with the electorate? Seemingly not. And today Ofcom has reprimanded GMTV for including a link to a commercial website on its own site. I kid you not. Ofcom reckons that having a link to Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert web site was promoting his business. And apparently, that’s bad. OK then, Ofcom, you’d better ban all advertising on GMTV as well and perhaps Corrie shouldn’t get sponsored by a furniture company. After all, they use tables and chairs in the Rovers Return – that could be a promotion for the sponsor. Ummmm!

Dinosaurs are alive and well at Ofcom obviously; totally out of touch. Many of the viewers of GMTV probably want to save money. The reason GMTV has Martin Lewis on the sofa is because of his passionate delivery of money-saving advice. Linking to his website is what GMTV viewers want…! Suggesting it’s some dastardly act is to completely misunderstand the multimedia world in which we now live.

These two stories – about real endangered species and the endangering of a species we actually want rid of – are a potent reminder that we now live in a different world; a dramatically altered one from that which we inhabited even five years ago. The slowness of businesses to respond to these significant shifts in expectations, understanding and use of Internet technologies is a threat to the very existence of such firms. It may well be that many organisations, such as Ofcom, or businesses which want to live in the past, will soon go the way of the polar bear.

Don’t be an endangered online species; understand the Internet and use it with vigour in your business.

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