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Showing posts with the label Instagram

Post Too Many Selfies? Your Relationship May Flare Out

Admit it.  Who isn't a little sick of all the selfies? People eating in restaurants.  Pouring wine. Throwing a snowball (that's just in the Northeast).  A Real Housewife who claims she has Lyme disease posting IVs and other medical appliances plugged into her pasty body. Now a new study is finding that too many can plug up your romantic life, too. Researchers have found that too many Instagram selfies may create romantic conflict, according to newswise.com.  Florida State University researchers have discovered the more selfies an individual posts on the social media site Instagram, the greater the likelihood he or she might experience romantic relationship conflict and dissolution.   “Although we cannot directly assume cause and effect due to the correlational nature of this study, the results here show that body image satisfaction can be detrimental to Instagram users’ romantic relationships, especially when users’ body image satisfaction is prom...

Live, Don't Document

Which side are you on?   Texting at the table or not?  Taking a call while eating dinner or should that be forbidden?  According to a recent study, 84 percent of Americans say both are a no-no, and 87 percent say never, with guests.  Yet, why do we still see so many people doing it? Out to dinner not long ago, we sat near a couple, so intent on their smartphones, they only spoke to the waiter, telling him what they wanted.  Sherry Turkle writes today at The New York Times that we are so busy documenting our lives, with our selfies and blogs and Facebook posts about everything we do from brushing our teeth to listening to certain songs to what we ate for dinner (who cares?), that we don't live.   Turkle says we just don't talk any more.  " We interrupt conversations for documentation all the time," she writes. Or worse, observe.  Reflect.  Think. "A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this, it sh...

Tweeting Can Hurt Your Brain

Well, not really.  It's not the tweeting that does it, but the distraction -- and disruption -- it brings to your day.  And the Instagraming, Facebooking, iTubing, Pinteresting, etc. According to Bob Sullivan at The New York Times, each time our cell phone rings, or a text tings, or an email pops up on the screen, it interrupts the task we're working on. He noted that Gloria Mark, of the University of California, Irvine,  found  that "it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption." But worse, no one really knows the quality of work "done during these periods of rapid toggling." And what's been found to have an even bigger effect on disruption is the anticipation that a call or email or text might come in. Sullivan and his staff conducted three tests on volunteers sitting in labs to perform a cognitive skills test.  One group simply completed the test but the second group was interrupted while the third was ...