twittervision

So, I think I've got an idea of what's going on with email, and if I'm right it should provide some clues as to how I can stop myself being so addicted. The key is what psychologists call 'operant conditioning'. This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century. Many lab animals, and many person-hours, were recruited to help understand exactly how rewards and punishments could be arranged to influence behaviour. One suprising finding is that if you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn't the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.
Email is addictive because it is a variable-interval reinforcement schedule.

What would make twittervision really good (and more scalable) is if you could restrict the twtter feed to the area of map enclosed in your screen. So it could be as local as you want. Then it really would be a kind of geographically based chat space, which would appeal to a lot of people, I think. And if you could give it more local address data, a snap for stalkers and child molestors!
― Alba, Monday, 19 March 2007 13:55

All my wishes came true. Actually, I still don't geotag my tweets, out of some quaint notion of privacy. Fuck it, I'm going to start.