Here's a device to shock you out of your Facebook addiction

It’s a regular affair now. You get home from work or to work from home, switch on the PC and fire up your browser and your fingers will start typing “Facebook.com” like it has a mind of its own. We’re addicted to Facebook and we know it; there’s no denying it.

While most people are comfortable in the skin of being Facebook addicts, there are a few who wish to rid themselves of the habit. Here’s a unique idea that will help you do exactly that. It’s a device called Pavlov Poke that will literally shock you out of your habit of logging in to Facebook.

Created by MIT Media Lab partners and friends Robert Morris and Dan McDuff, Pavlov Poke is a conditioning tool that will administer you with mild shocks as you try to login to addictive social networking websites. While the shocks are not always a great idea, the guys had yet another trick up their sleeves.

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Get shocked for your addiction

Morris writes that while they were testing the device, they realised that the shocks were too aversive. Sometime later they read about a man who hired someone to slap him every time he logged on to Facebook. Now while the idea is great, it’s not exactly the best for a professional environment nor is it scalable. Morris and McDuff hit on yet another bright idea that could replace the shocks.

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, you could essentially have someone stop you from getting onto a social networking website. If you exceeded your Facebook quota, a code written by the guys would post a job on to the Turk service. A worker would then call your number and yell at you , reading from a pre-written script, designed to be extra humiliating.

While the idea was supposed to be somewhat of a joke, Morris says that he realised he had stopped frequenting Facebook out of sheer habit and would only end up going to the site if it was required by him. In all seriousness though, says Morris, social networking websites are designed to be addictive “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. 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),” Morris writes, explaining the need of a Pavlov Poke like mechanism to drive you off the websites, for your betterment as well as your productivity’s.

At the moment Pavlov Poke is not a product – and for the sake of our addictions we hope it’s never available for retail purposes – and is meant as an art project. However, anyone who knows what Facebook addiction feels like would want to see how this mechanism works. Just know that this isn’t a legitimate intervention method and you can definitely not use it on your FB-addict kids!