Web Elk

I’m a Web Elk according to the BBC’s latest LabUK project which accompanies the fantastic Virtual Revolution series which focuses on how technology is changing the way we view and interact with the world around us.  The Web Behaviour Test was launched during episode 4 of the series.

The interactive game concluded that I am…

Slow-moving – Web Elks like you take their time finding exactly the right morsels of information – just like the real-world elk who carefully browses for shoots and leaves to eat.

Sociable – Real-world elks are social and stay in herds to protect themselves from predators. When you browse the web you are also a social creature, often using social networks, or other sites whose content is created by its users, as sources of information.

Specialised – Web Elks perform best when they focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to multitask. Just as the real-world Elk is perfectly specialised for its environment, you have learned that while the web makes it possible to multitask, it’s not always the best approach.

I have to say that it’s actually quite accurate and describes typical RaxRaxRax on a lazy Sunday morning afternoon.

What’s the motivation behind the test?

Scientists are trying to understand the impact the World Wide Web is having on our brains. They want to know whether people who use the web a lot are different to people who don’t (a question I’ve always wondered about myself).

At the core of the new science of ‘web behaviour’ lie some interesting questions:

• How able are we to filter the enormous amount of information delivered to us by search engines?
• How confident are we in our ability to find the ‘right answer’ when looking for information on the web?
• How much do we concentrate when we’re using the web, even when we’re using it to make potentially life-changing decisions?
• What is the role of memory in shaping what we do on the web? (How much of today’s online journey do you actually remember?)
• How influential are ‘super brands’ in defining the choices we make online?
• How do we decide on the reliability or ‘authority’ of information provided by others online?

The test was designed by Professor David Nicholas, Dr Ian Rowlands and Dr David Clarke, all from University College London. The multitasking games were designed by Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University, California (for full experiment credits, see the Web Behaviour Test credits page).

Two of the Flash games used in the Web Behaviour Test have been used by Lab UK before, in the Brain Test Britain experiment. If you also participated in Brain Test Britain, you may already have seen or played these games.

According to the website:

Adaptable or specialised?

The internet allows us to do lots of things at the same time. You might be listening to music and updating your blog while receiving news alerts and chatting online with friends. Then an email arrives. Can you switch seamlessly between different tasks? Or are you actually less efficient?

Indeed, a study from Stanford University in California suggests that people who spend their time multitasking might actually be less good at juggling tasks than non-multitaskers.

If you are an ‘adaptable’ web animal, then you scored highly on our tests that measured your ability to multitask. If your web animal is ‘specialised’, then you are probably better suited to taking on one task at a time.

Fast-moving or slow-moving?

The internet helps people find information fast. Practice makes perfect, and its possible to learn techniques for getting to the information you need quickly. But speed isn’t the same as accuracy. The first answer you find isn’t necessarily the right answer.

We measured the time it took you to complete a series of search tasks. If you are a fast-moving web animal, you took less time than average. This maybe because you know exactly what you’re doing, but could also mean you missed important information. If you are a slow-moving web animal, this could be because you’re less confident, that you focused on getting the rightanswer rather than the first one.

Social or solitary?

The internet has radically multiplied the ways in which we can meet new friends and stay in contact with existing ones. (Internet guru Clay Shirky once said that before the internet came along, the most recent technology that affected the way people sat down and talked to each other was the table.) So how social are you online?

If your web animal is social, you probably told us you spend quite a lot of time on social networking sites and that you tend to trust sites whose content is created by its users. If your web animal is solitary, you probably don’t socialise as much online and are inclined to trust sites whose content is produced in a more traditional, ‘authoritative’ way.

Social behaviour online is a fascinating area of study for our scientists. They would like to understand the relationship between time spent online and the type of information sources users choose to trust.

When Dr Ian Rowland and his colleagues started designing this experiment, they talked about web behaviour in terms of ‘fox’ and ‘hedgehog’ people. Why? Strangely enough, because of a cryptic fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Archilochus, which reads:

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

This seemed like a good way of describing two broad groups of web users: spophisticated, social web users adept at skimming for information and multitasking (foxes) and less-sophisticated, non-social web users who focus on one task at a time and have a slower, more methodical approach to finding information (hedgehogs).

However as the experiment took shape it soon became apparent that there were more than two types of web users, so the number of species in the web ecology has now multiplied to eight.

The full list of animals:

The new science of Web Behaviour is a discipline which we should all keep an eye on as it will undoubtedly become more and more important as the web continues to impact on every aspect of our lives. Scientists and psychologists will rely more and more on gathering insights into how real people behave online.

How effective are we are at gathering and evaluating information and turning it into action?

What do I know? I’m an elk.

Click here to take the test yourself.

The whole test takes about 10 mins, so make sure you have enough time.

(Thanks to the great @Luke_Oatham for the tip-off!)