Magpies have a reputation for being drawn to shiny things. This seems to originally stem from a 19th century French play in which a servant is accused of stealing silverware but, in reality, it was a magpie that nicked it. This lead to a Rossini opera that retold the story. The 1982 animated Secret of NIMH film also depicted a crow that was drawn almost hypnotically to "sparkly" things. 

The truth is... corvids (crow, magpies, that kinda bird) don't care for shiny or sparkly things any more than any other kind of thing, reflectivity notwithstanding. 

Me, on the other hand? The shinier... the better. On today's episode we're looking at the new, the shiny... we're talking novelty.

(Intro)

So, in light of the topic today, what do you think of the new intro music? Not bad, eh? 40 episodes... mid-pod crisis, maybe? Who knows. Anyway.

Welcome back! It's a brand new academic year, already just a few days into fall semester. Though, to be honest, it feels like we should already be in week 2 or 3. I've been done with the updates to classes for a while now and websites are open and available, but the process I use has changed considerably, which may or may not be the inspiration for this episode. 

See, it's true: I'm a sucker for novelty. I get bored easily so I'm always seeking out that new hobby, that thing I haven't tried, that solution to a problem that I didn't even know I had until it presented itself. Does that sound familiar? Do you 

So... what is novelty?

In short, "novelty" simply means "something new." And we'll get to other definitions in a bit, but why are we talking about novelty? It's everywhere and it shapes our very existence in this consumer culture we find ourselves in. Interestingly, our openness to new things may even point toward our relative intelligence. In "Psychology Today," Satoshi Kanazawa states, very simply, "Intelligence is correlated with openness to novel experience." He has a whole write-up on evolutionary familiarity and evolutionary novelty and how they interact with intelligence, which is well worth a read, but I want to mostly focus on one particular aspect of novelty: tech.

Clive Thompson, in a piece in The Message, describes his four-part "adoption curve" for new tech. I want to read it and you tell me if this sounds familiar to you.

1) I stumble across an intriguing new piece of software, hardware, or social service.
2) It offers me some curious new ability—a new way to communicate or get work done—so I give it a whirl.
3) The new behavior is awesome! I’m using it all the time. I’m having a blast! Then …
4) … at some point, maybe weeks or months or even years later, I suddenly drift away. I find myself picking it up less and less. Eventually I stop entirely, and the app or gewgaw grows dusty with disuse, until I delete it out of its misery.

I mean, Clive couldn't have been describing *me* any better if he'd tried. 

I used to be an utter junkie for Lifehacker's highlighted tools and tech. I thought, 'If I can just find that one perfect piece of the system, everything will fall into place and I'll float into my golden age of productivity, effortlessly producing the most innovative and groundbreaking work I have ever, and may ever, come up with."

In truth, what it got me is a wasteland of fragmented information and content strewn across dozens of abandoned or broken services, that work being mostly lost to me forever, the precise opposite of what I was trying to accomplish in the first place.

...also, "gewgaw." What a great word. Huh.

Okay, so do let's back up a bit and talk about the psychology of why we're the fiction of the magpie. Why are we drawn to the shiny new thing? (And, if you're not this person, I commend you for your stick-to-it-ed-ness. Still, this may be useful for the magpie in your life.)

Now, I'm not a psychologist, but from what I gather this actually starts in infancy. 

Put two different things in front of an infant and their attention will be on the one least familiar to them, basically. When I first came across that, I thought, "Well, yeah. Evolutionarily speaking, we're better off paying attention to the unfamiliar thing that COULD hurt us than the familiar thing we know won't." Makes sense, really. It is quite literally in our best interest to put more cognitive effort into understanding new and unknown things than it is to re-analyzing the familiar. This is known as the "stress response," and a higher stress response to unfamiliar situations is perfectly normal.

Little sidenote here: if the infant does NOT pay more attention to the new thing, that can be an indication of a developmental issue. Huh.

Let's stick with childhood for a second. In another life I was actually intending to be a high school English teacher. I moved in another direction, which should be obvious, but I did keep up with tech in schools and how every new tool was, for some time (and, in some ways, still is) seen as the holy grail, the panacea for all education's woes. Stick the right tool in the kids' hands and, voila, MENSA members, the lot.

So, you get lots of studies like, "Hey, let's put a laptop in this classroom. Oh, look! The kids are more into the content!" And... yeah, they could be. It could also be what's known as the Hawthorne Effect, in that ANY change in environment or tools will trigger that novelty preference and folks work harder or pay more attention. Of course, the Hawthorn Effect isn't great science (link in the shownotes) but it does seem to be played out pretty readily. 

Let's do a little experiment, shall we? It's the first week of class for folks here so I know everyone's flush with free time! *rimshot* Try this: re-arrange your office or your workspace this week. Anything from flipping the location of the couch and the table to turning the entire room 90 degrees to changing the window treatments or art on the wall. Just make it feel like a new space. See if your productivity goes up immediately afterward. I bet it does. I bet it also trails back off not long after to its normal baseline.

It reminds me of something I heard on QI once: we all have a baseline. The idea people get grumpier as they get older, for example, is just a myth. In fact, grumpy old men were at one point just grumpy young men, they just maybe weren't identified as such. Even folks that win the lottery, those you'd think would have a permanent bump in happiness and satisfaction, end up going back to being just the kind of person they were before, same personality, same everything... just with more money.

We have a general baseline. Basically, we are who we are and no amount of new and shiny will change that. Of course, sure, you may find something that really, really gels with how you already think and work, and that's awesome! A well oiled machine, you are. But, in all honesty, it's less to do with you effortlessly fitting into some arbitrary ecosystem than it is about putting in the effort and having the determination to use whatever you have. 

Anyway, back to the tech.

So, any time this week or next, I should be receiving something very, very cool. At least, I *want* it to be cool. I'm fully expecting it to be and I'm really trying to manage my expectations. 

Do you remember Google Glass? That weird kind of augmented reality headset that was just a little too early for prime time? It was bulky, the design was pretty poorly thought out, and it made you look... well, recall that the nickname given to people wearing them was "glassholes." From what I understand it's still used in industry but as a broadly available consumer good... it never took off.

Fast forward to 2019 and introducing a company called North. They make what purports to be the first actually decently attractive (even unidentifiable) augmented reality glasses. The tech they use to make it work is actually really neat (link to that in the shownotes), but essentially they're just... well, glasses. You wouldn't know they're special in any way just by looking at them. Short version: there's a little projector placed next to the temple that bounces light off the glass and directly into the eye, which creates the illusion of a heads-up display hovering about two feet in front of you. Because of this, the sizing and fitting of the glasses is paramount, requiring you to travel to one of their showrooms or visit one of their traveling pop-ups for a 3D scan of your head. 

I did that in July and my glasses should be arriving any day now. Exciting times, right? Now, I don't want this to be a plug for North because a) I don't work for them, b) they haven't paid me anything to say all this, and c) I haven't even got the glasses yet (perhaps I'll do an episode on them once I do... Novelty 2, Augmented Boogaloo), but just listen to a very brief list of things these puppies can do:

* You can view your OneNote or Evernote notes
* Identify that song that's playing and have it display the artist and track
* Work with your daily to-do list with Google Tasks and Todoist
* Get your morning briefing with weather, your calendar, and even commute time
* Get your Google Fit stats and periodic reminder to drink more water
* Get live updates to your flight status
* Read your Google Slides presenter notes AND control the presentation you're currently giving
* Learn a new language 
* Get turn-by-turn walking directions and call an Uber

The list just goes on and on and keeps getting longer and longer by the day.

Do I need them? Nah. Do I want them? Oh, yeah. I mean, I can justify it by virtue of the fact that I have the job I have and I could, I suppose, actually write these off as a business expense for my research. Either way, they're new, they're shiny, and, like Jeremy the Crow, I really want them.

Luckily, they should be arriving within a week. Is it the novelty effect? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure you can really say one way or the other: who gets to decide if our desire for or willingness to engage with novelty is fleeting or not? Perhaps, just perhaps, the next thing WILL be that ultimate fix for all our problems. 

We can dream, I suppose.

(Outro)

Once again, thank you for listening to this little podcast-thing of mine. If you found it entertaining or informative or useful, please do subscribe and rate it on the podcatcher of your choice, whether that's iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or however you listen. And, as usual, I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter at newprofcast. Show notes, transcripts, and more can be found on the website at thenewprofessor.com. Until next time.