If you’re concerned about the amount of time and lack of self-control that has you constantly on Facebook, two MIT students may have a solution for you. Intent on finishing their dissertations, MIT Ph.D. students Robert Morris and Dan McDuff created a small electrical device that shocked them when it detected that they were using Facebook. The project, which they named the Pavlov Poke after the Pavlov’s Dog experiment, was designed to reduce their addictions to Facebook and force them to focus on anything but.
The device involved two electrical strips that were attached to each of the students’ keyboards, a shock circuit device connected by USB and a web page monitoring application. Morris and McDuff’s creation proved so punishing that they removed it after a few tries, causing them to quit the experiment halfway.
They instead opted for a phone-based method that involved a verbally abusive voicemail that would play every time they visited Facebook.
While the experiment was mostly designed as a joke, Morris and McDuff wanted to also comment on the addictiveness of sites like Facebook and Twitter.
“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.,” wrote the students on their project site. “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)”
The two students are hoping that in the future, site users will think twice before committing so much time and energy to browsing addictive websites. This is especially true for Facebook as recent studies have linked the social media site to a reduction in a person’s emotional well-being.