Keyboard add-on shocks users when they try signing on to Facebook

After studying the amount of time they spend on Facebook each week — and coming to the conclusion that it is way too much — Robert Morris and Dan McDuff, two doctoral candidates at MIT, went ahead and created a device to help curtail their social media habit. 

Dubbed the “Pavlov Poke” after Ivan Pavlov's famous conditioning experiment, the device sends an uncomfortable shock through the computer's keyboard whenever it detects the user trying to access Facebook.

Four main components make up the Pavlov Poke’s relatively simple design: a UI inspector watches over the user’s website browsing, processing code monitors the user’s behavior and determines if a particular site (beyond Facebook) is visited too often, an Arduino that is hooked up to the computer via USB and runs the shock circuit, and of course, electrodes, which are placed on the keyboard and deliver the punishment as necessary.

“It monitors application usage and if you spend too much time on a particular website or application, it will give you a shock,” McDuff explains, adding, “The shock is unpleasant but not dangerous.” 

 
A schematic of the Pavlov Poke.

Both Morris and McDuff admitted that their invention was partially made in jest, but they did point out that it addresses a pretty important debate surrounding social media today; that is, whether sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., serve any real purpose.

Morris wrote the following on his website addressing the issue:

All too often, people assume they use a given technology because they want to and because it is in their best self-interest. Unfortunately, this assumption does not align with how these technologies are designed. Sites like Facebook are crafted on the basis of something called engagement metrics, which measure the number of daily active users, the time people spend on the site, etc. Unfortunately, these metrics are not designed to assess well-being. A product can have incredibly high engagement metrics, and yet be extremely bad for its users (cigarettes, for example).

Check out the Pavlov Poke in action in the video below:

Story via: robertmorris.org