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You almost certainly saw her on YouTube. Noah takes a picture of himself every day for 20 years (5 million views) Portrait of Lotte, 0 to 20 years (10.9 million views) Married at 12 I took a picture every day (To an astonishing 110 million views.) Even Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin from Family Guy parodyed the format. In times of selfies and ubiquitous smartphone cameras, this increasingly popular genre of time-lapse videos depicting the aging process allows people to document their experiences in a typically modern way that was almost impossible a few decades ago would.

But what if the bigger story wasnt the changing facial features of a YouTube star, but the fact that millions of us would spend minutes of our day watching it? Maybe afterwards we tweeted a link to the video we just saw. Or sent it to a friend on WhatsApp. Or we started the camera app on our own smartphone and started creating our own version. Or we just forgot what we just saw and played a quick game on Mario Kart Tour.

In a world where we live digitally, the way we consume media on our screens (and especially on our smartphones) could turn out to be the most profound way to document life in 2020. At least this is the idea of an ambitious new initiative called the Human Screenome Project. The new mass data collection, created by researchers at Stanford and Penn State University, prompts users to share information about everything they do on their smartphones.

Special software developed by the project creators takes screenshots of these mobile devices every five seconds they are active, encrypts them, sends them to a research server, and then uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze exactly what is important , The researchers want to create a multi-dimensional map of the changing digital life of people in the 21st century. They give a brief overview of the changes over the course of days, weeks, months and possibly even years and decades.

The digital media environment has made so much progress in recent years, Nilam Ram, professor of human development and psychology at Penn State University, told Digital Trends. We dont have a good idea of how people use their devices and who theyre exposed to. Usually, screen time research studies are based on self-reports of how long people have been using social media for the past week. Its a really complicated question that people have to answer. The evidence suggests that people underestimate or underestimate their own engagement by a few hours.

According to Ram, the project stems from a seven-year chance meeting between him and Byron Reeves, a professor of communication in Stanford. Reeves was interested in the media and its effects on people. Ram was interested in time series data for the behavior. A type of behavior analysis that works with regular data points that are collected in chronological order. This can be used to study and predict things about individual behavior.

First, the two set out to research multitasking. They developed software that enabled them to determine how quickly students switched between tasks while working. They found that they would change windows about every 20 seconds. It was faster than anyone thought at the time that someone was going from task to task, said Ram. From there, we developed software that made this possible on a smartphone.

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They thought that this would be a natural extension of their multitasking work. However, when a small group of students first came into data flow, they found that they had drilled a much deeper well than they thought. When we started looking at time-lapse footage of what people were actually doing on their phones, we found that there are so many different types of human behavior that are expressed here, said Ram. That could be a commitment to politics, mental health, social media, interpersonal relationships and climate change. We can see things like the gender distribution of faces that people look at on their cell phones, the racist distribution of these faces there is so much wealth in it.

If this sounds like it is too much for a couple of researchers to look at, you are absolutely right. The hope is that the Human Screenome project the name of which alludes to the previous Human Genome project will create an extensive shared database of information that is also available to other researchers. This will be a partially ongoing user survey (though without users having to actively answer questions) and a partially historical artifact, such as a digital mass observation project. The potential value of such an archive could be immense. Some researchers could use it to track the rise and fall of memes as they appear, flourish, and disappear in the cybernetic ether. Design students could use it to investigate how changing user interfaces of apps affect transitions in this particular area. Others may use it with referenced information to investigate the potential health effects of social media. Or how the screen time affects the concentration.

The idea of the human genome project was that if we could map the human genome, the way we deal with and treat diseases would change, said Ram. I think it did. In a way, were trying to make the same theoretical leap by saying that the human screenome changes the way we think about digital media and how it affects people if we can map it.

But is such a project feasible? The same thing that makes it so exciting from a research perspective also poses challenges. In short, as Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs predicted back in 2007, the smartphone has become a consolidation of all the devices that we once carried around. Its our laptop, our personal organizer, our portable music player, our GPS system and much more.

Because a smartphone requires physical user interaction and millions of apps available, it is a much more dynamic media environment than its predecessors: living room television with a choice of channels. Smartphones are the epitome of what media theorist Marshall The medium is the message, which McLuhan would have described as expanding ourselves. However, this makes them as personal as few other devices do. Allowing researchers to see everything you do on your smartphone is just a step too far for some users.

Still, Ram is confident that this wont apply to everyone. In general, when we talk to attendees, we find that they know that their data is regularly collected by big data companies, he said. It is used in a way that they have no control over. They seem to be aware of this and are enthusiastic about the possibility that this data can be used instead for research purposes to understand human behavior.

The Stanford Screenomics Lab has currently collected over 30 million data points from more than 600 participants. Although it has not yet opened its platform to those who want to get involved, Ram hopes that the number of users will eventually be able to scale that number to far more epic proportions with multi-year user contributions.

And what if smartphones are finally giving way to another dominant technology? (This is something that could) go on forever, said Ram. (This means that it has to look different) when screens change from separate devices to devices that are somehow embedded, whether its a chip or a Google Glass-style advancement. We want to share our data collection paradigm with evolving the advent of these technologies.

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The Human Screenome project wants you to share the use of your smartphone - Mash Viral