Hopelessly addicted to email, social networking, or other online distractions? Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff created Pavlov Poke to wean themselves off Facebook and finish their dissertations.
While this project is intended to be a joke, the project creators believe a serious discussion is needed about how communication technologies are designed.
In the technical side their build uses the UI inspector in OS X and a Python script to activate an Arduino connected to one of those trick ‘shocking chewing gum’ pranks. Because shocks just aren’t extreme enough for some user, there is also one step further by invoking the wrath of Mechanical Turk users (a random person being paid $1.40 to yell over the phone for wasting time on Facebook).
2 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
We Need To Talk, Google
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002593.html
Dear Google — please don’t take this the wrong way, but, well… I think you suck.
This hasn’t always been the case.
My decision to delete my Google account is purely a matter of me being fed up of Google attempting to drive me into yet another unwanted “social” network, just for the sake of its bloody search engine rankings and associated advertising machinery.
It’s not me.
It’s you.
Sherri says:
It’s in fact very complicated in this full of activity life to listen news on TV, so I simply
use world wide web for that purpose, and obtain the latest
news.