This week on Monday Maps, we’ve learned that when it comes to clicking on Facebook ads, North Dakotans have an itchy trigger finger, while Hawaiians and New Yorkers can scarcely be bothered.

FB Clicks by State, via balcomagency.com

We’d also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Bay Area defunct hip-hop group The Click is awesome.

This week on Monday Maps, we’re looking at an intriguing interactive representation of where Americans are moving within the US. Click a location to see the black lines, representing an inbound move, and the red lines, representing an outbound one. Heavier lines represent more moves. The first thing I noticed is that urban people appear astoundingly mobile compared to rural ones — however, accounting for population density probably explains this. (Compare Seattle or Denver to anywhere in OK, KA, etc.) It does appear that urban people are more likely to move to another city than to a nearby location, whereas rural people seem more likely to move one county over. I would love to see this overlaid with rates of homeownership, population, and other demographic factors, but it’s fascinating to play with it just as it is.

We’re big infographics nerds here at Zeitgeist, and we love interactive maps so much we’re going to feature them on a weekly basis.  Welcome to Monday Maps!

For this first installment, I wanted to showcase a map about another of my big loves: March Madness.  Behold Google’s College Basketball Tournament Map.

Things to love about this: the way it illustrates the geography of NCAA basketball dominance (where the schools are clustered, where the schools are not); the factoidable distance tool that allows you to see how far teams have to travel for the tourney; and the nicely aggregated school and game schedule info.  There’s room for a lot more awesomeness, too: it would be very cool to see this overlayed or adjusted for population density. And, if you’re interested in recruitment and the inner-workings of college basketball, it would be great to see data on the distance between player hometowns and the schools for which they’re playing.  But overall, I think this map is a mighty interesting ‘big picture’ addition to a sporting phenomenon that’s already super heavy on maps and stats.  I hope we get to see an iteration of this next year!

And while I’m writing about cool tourney stuff on the web, I wanted to give a hat tip to the Wall Street Journal’s Blindfold Brackets, a web app that lets folks fill out a “bias-free” bracket.  Using team names like the Warthogs and the Water Buffaloes, you can pick the winner of each tournament match-up using team data and performance information.  It’s not perfect — in some cases, I don’t think they’ve picked very good or complete information and it’s very easy to identify many of the teams from their summaries — but it represents a pretty awesome approach for brackets.

(Many thanks to xtcian for the heads-up about the Google Tourney Map!)

Psychotherapy seems like surprising profession to embrace technology, mostly because our perceptions of it tend to be pretty antiquated.  (Couches and Freud jokes, anybody?)  Despite that, a growing number of therapists are using Skype and video chat to conduct distance counseling, opening up whole new therapeutic opportunities for anyone with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection.  But what’s it like to conduct counseling online?  Is it weird?  Is it effective?  We decided to interview psychotherapist Paul Fugelsang, who graciously gave us some insight into how technology is influencing his practice and profession.  We also asked him to weigh in on the debate about how social networking is impacting our relationships and well-being.

When did you start offering distance sessions through Skype?

I started offering sessions on Skype and on the phone around two years ago. My wife and I were spending the winter in a very small community while on a sabbatical in way Northern Michigan. I had a burgeoning private practice in New York at the time, and I was licensed to practice in Michigan, so it made sense to look into using Skype to maintain that practice from afar. I was pleasantly surprised from the very start how easy it was to set up the practice in this way, and my clients all seemed to agree that while it wasn’t as good as meeting in person, it was clearly an acceptable alternative.

What’s it like to do a session online?

Most of my clients comment that at first it feels strange or awkward to communicate through the computer, and of course, at first it is. This will probably sound a little obvious, but doing therapy online does not offer the same precise experience that a face-to-face encounter affords. I mean, you’re communicating with one another through a glowing screen and practicing the craft in ways that were unthinkable a short time ago. Every client I’ve seen online seems to agree, however, that the initial awkwardness fades away quickly as the therapeutic relationship takes center stage. I practice a mindfulness-based type of therapy so throughout a session I ask my clients to be curious about their experience in the moment and share that curiosity with me. Working together through our computers provides a different element of phenomena to explore, which in turn provides its own richness.

Has offering this type of counseling service changed your practice at all?

It has. When I moved my practice from New York City last fall, adding the distance component allowed me to continue with some of my clients open to working via phone or Skype. It’s also allowed me to work with anyone, anywhere; the affordability and reliability of Skype has given me reach I would not have had. I’m particularly grateful when the technology enables me to work with someone who for whatever reason is removed from the kind of help I offer. I still meet the majority of my clients in-person through my private practice in St. Augustine, Florida. However, because my in-person practice keeps me fairly busy, I can be more selective about who I work with online, and as a result, it usually ends up being very challenging, interesting work.

It seems like the downsides of online/distance sessions (namely, lack of personal contact) might be fairly obvious, but what are the positives?

Well, there’s actually quite a bit of personal contact through the online session – every bit as much as an in-person session, I would venture. This is to say that the integrity of the client-therapist relationship is not compromised whatsoever, in my opinion, through distance counseling. At times it can be hard to know exactly what someone is doing with their body, depending on how far or close they are sitting to the camera, but when I want to know what a client is doing with their hands in any given moment, I can simply ask. All of the other essentials – eye contact, tone, the level of empathy present in any moment, how present I am as a clinician, are maintained in equal measure during a distance session.

Other positive aspects about online therapy are more obvious: time is at a premium for many of us, and once a commute is removed from the equation, engaging in therapy becomes more attractive, maybe even more attractive when you think about doing it from your home or even your office. Also, finding a therapist who is the right fit can be a real hassle. For example, I draw from Buddhist philosophies of mindfulness and awareness as well as Western psychoanalytic tenets in my practice. You may be able to find a therapist with a cognitive behavioral approach but perhaps not someone with a less traditional background in your community. If you’re comfortable with communicating online, this type of therapy greatly expands your alternatives.

What do you think are the opportunities and challenges for this type of approach? Do you think we’ll see more therapists offering counseling services online?

The opportunities are vast: there are many people out there who are cut off from their communities for various reasons – and because the overhead is minimal for distance therapy, clinicians have the opportunity to lower their prices, which, when combined with the ease of connecting, makes therapy a much more accessible option for many people who might otherwise be struggling with their situation all alone.

And the challenges are interesting. The way we communicate online is constantly in-flux, and at times, not very desirable. I’ve been in the middle of working through emotional material with people, and lost a connection. It’s rare, but it has happened, and obviously it’s a drag. I do trust in the technology, though, and the hiccups have been so few and far between that it hasn’t deterred my enthusiasm for the work.

As we become more comfortable with the technology, we should see more therapists offering online services. However, at this point in time there’s no national licensing board for mental health professionals, and guidelines vary from state to state. Whenever a person is seeking out a therapist, unless they have a strong endorsement from someone with whom he or she has a high level of trust, it’s important to do some research into what options are available. The Internet has made that component much easier to navigate (at this point the Yellow Pages have never seemed more antiquated). As a new generation of clinicians – people who are much more computer savvy – come into their own in the field, it’s very likely that online providers will continue to expand.

Can you imagine any other type of distance therapies or uses of technology that we haven’t seen yet?

Well, to be totally honest, I’m not sure I want to imagine too many others. I know some people conduct entire sessions by chatting online, or by sending email messages back and forth, which is something that I’m not very interested in doing. A strong, personal connection is essential for therapy to be effective. I haven’t seen any long-range study on therapeutic efficacy for ‘chatting’ versus actually speaking with a clinician; it would be interesting to know this. I feel that taking the audio and the visual component out of the equation is far too impersonal for me. I have no clue how holographic technology is shaping up these days, but I imagine that at some point we’ll be able to (literally) project ourselves into different rooms with one another. I’m not sure how distracting that would be, but then again, doing therapy Jetsons-style seemed preposterous just a short time ago.

It seems like every few days I read an article saying that social networking is either the best or worst thing that’s ever happened to us – that it’s either positively or negatively changing our lives and relationships. What do you think about social networking?

Journalists are very skilled at taking advantage of the mind’s tendency to compartmentalize information into this-or-that equations. Unconsciously, we often believe that if one thing is true, then the other thing must be false, so if I read research that says that Facebook tends to make people feel sad about their lives because they’re constantly comparing their experience of sitting at home with their friend’s posted snapshots of travels in Thailand, then I may be quick to conclude that social networking is bad news and is negatively affecting my life or even society at large. But the truth is, while I may feel some envy for my friend at the beach (and if that’s the case, it is a wonderful thing to be aware of), I also enjoy corresponding and keeping up with my friends and acquaintances in ways that are not totally intimate.

So yes, social networking is probably shaping our experience with others in negative or unhealthy ways. Simultaneously, it’s enriching our lives. Ultimately, it’s a tool that can amplify what we’re experiencing if we choose to use it. I would add here that it’s always helpful to be curious about whatever it is we’re experiencing in the present moment: how do I feel when I’m social networking? What is my body feeling, what is my mind doing? Do these thoughts and feelings change depending on how long I’m on a certain site? How do I feel when I’m on this site versus that other one? Am I using technology to enhance my life, or am I using it to avoid being present with myself or others in some way? Maybe somewhere in between? Those answers are most likely always going to shift depending on whatever is going on in the moment, and actually, the answers aren’t nearly as important as the questions themselves.

How do you see digital culture changing us?

I have no clue. I’m acutely aware that I spend much less time alone now than I ever have before as a result of the connectivity that digital culture provides. I think there’s something integral that emerges from being alone and quiet, and I have to work harder now to access that space. It takes much more discipline and effort than it did ten years ago and I do wonder if some personal creativity or emotional intelligence has been compromised in the process. It’s all happening very quickly, and it does seem more important than ever to take a few steps back and a few deep breaths every now and then.

—

Paul Fugelsang is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who offers in-person therapy in St. Augustine, Florida, as well as online therapy through the telephone and Skype.  Paul has been an active practitioner in the mental health community since 1996. He has worked extensively with children and families in Latin America, mental health clinics in Colorado, and at an esteemed juvenile justice organization in New York City designed to reduce temporary and long-term incarceration of adolescents. A long-time meditation practitioner, Paul received his Masters degree in Contemplative Psychotherapy from Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to his clinical experience, Paul has served as an interpreter at the United Nations. More information about Paul and his private practice can be found at: www.paulfugelsang.com

My husband is easily moved by objects such as the blue translucent Motorola pager he used to stay connected back when he first moved to Brooklyn in the early 90s.  He saves it, along with Walkmen, Diskmen and other paperweights, in a clear plastic crate we keep in our storage space labeled “Museum of Digital Obsolescence.”  Pagers, yeah, I remember those – along with urine-encrusted East Village pay phones, and 45-minutes-by-myself-in-a-sushi-place dating catastrophes resulting from missed pages.

I’ll never understand why people bestow their nostalgia on the crappiest obsolete technologies — those things we relied on in certain bridge zones, placeholders occupying a brief moment before something a thousand times better became possible or affordable.  LPs, hand-written letters, and Polaroids are compellingly romantic.  But fax machines?  Land lines?  Phone books?   I came across this article bemoaning technologies our babies will never know recently while I had just spent 20 minutes clambering around  under a credenza retrieving and subsequently washing unknown crusty substances from DVDs my toddler had had his way with.  Believe me, I will be glad to see them go.  Here are some more things I think we and ours can live quite happily without.

1. Physical data storage and its associated playback devices — DVDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, floppy disks, external drives, laser discs, slide projectors, I’m looking at you.  (Books, photographs, and LPs you get a pass for inherent niftiness, although I hope to cart around fewer of you next time we move.)  I’m not a Microsoft sort of girl, but the message of their “To the Cloud” campaign really resonates with me.

2. Closed, lost, or inaccessible data.  I don’t want to have to go to my doctor’s office to get my medical records, or City Hall to find out information about a building permit, and I would love online access to my college transcripts. We need more open data, better data standards, infinitely redundant data storage, and careful privacy practices to protect it all.

3. Ambient lack-of-awareness.  We now have the capacity to measure, track, analyze and understand our physical activity, our environmental impact, our medical conditions, and our finances in real-time and space.  Geo-location services give us instant insider perspectives on the places to visit in our own neighborhoods or when we travel.

4. Losing track of people.  Thanks, Facebook!  Now there’s no reason to lose touch unless you specifically choose to.

5. (This one may be total wishful thinking… but why not?) Built-in obsolescence.  This may be the critical factor in Apple’s climb from underdog to Big Brother, but it’s abjectly irresponsible in the amount of potentially toxic e-waste it generates by inciting fanboys and girls to run out every 6 months for the latest iDevice.

What devices or technologies would you like to bid farewell to?

Here’s a shout out to the Students for Free Culture Conference taking place this weekend in New York City.  They’ve got a great line-up with panels on remix culture, music, and the arts, open education/open access, fashion and free culture, and keynotes from Greg Pak and the Diaspora guys.  Aside from putting together awesome programming, what we really love about Students for a Free Culture is that it’s a group dedicated to getting college-age people involved in the dialogue about free and open culture – the same college-age people who belong to “the generation” that gets talked about constantly by proponents of free culture as well as doomsdayers who fret about file-sharing and social networking.  It’s heartening to see younger stakeholders challenging each other to get involved, and exploring the ways we can re-shape the ideas of ownership, sharing, and fair use.

It’s just too bad we don’t see this kind innovative thinking from groups like The Authors Guild, who prefer shoddy, fear-mongering New York Times op-eds [login alert] about how art and culture can’t survive the Web.  Sure it can!  It is! Stop shouting at young people to get off your lawn/stop downloading files, and start having a reasonable conversation with them about fair use!  We think they’re game for it.

We’re psyched for SMWNY here at Zeitgeist, even if the term “social media” is beginning to make everyone break out in hives…   For one thing, I’ll be helping to facilitate a sort of gigantic ideation session sponsored by my friends at Luminary Labs on Health | Tech | Food, billed as an “Open Innovation Event to Solve for the Health of New Yorkers” — it’s not too late to RSVP! And speaking of “not too late,” here are more picks with space still available as of now (light on marketing /how-to’s, heavy on citizenship, social good, art, and weird and/or cool):

The Internet & Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already In A Post-Social Media World?, Hosted by Wired

No Right Brain Left Behind, “an innovation challenge asking the broader creative industries to concept ideas that will help the creativity crisis happening in U.S. schools today.”

This Is Africa… How Music and Social Media Are Re-defining A Continent

Social Media on Ice at Citi Pond at Bryant Park “Stop by and get your glide on, as the first 50 people to arrive to the party and check-in using Foursqaure will receive FREE VIP SKATE PASSES for Citi Pond.”

Part of Open UN: Engagement in the Age of Real-Time Hosted by United Nations Global Pulse

Future Library: Socializing History with Maps, Hosted by The New York Public Library

Research Gone Social: Leveraging the Web to Advance Scientific Discovery, Hosted by Mendeley

The Future of Mobile Gaming

NY Gaming & Social Media: What’s Working?

B.L.A.P.S Music Composition & Social Media

Innovation Showcase: Social Media for Higher Education presented by McGraw-Hill

The Digital Gallery: How Social Media is Democratizing the Art World?

The Rise of the Movement Entrepreneur

The New Food Reviewers: Is Social Media Making Us Savvy or Snarky? <<JEFFREY STEINGARTEN ALERT for all you foodie fanboys and fangirls!!

WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, Hosted by Personal Democracy Forum

Social Books: How Social Media is Changing the Writing, Reading and Promotion of Books <<STEVEN B. JOHNSON ALERT for all you feedmag.com fanboys and fangirls!

Keynote Presentations: “From Borges to Lost: How Narrative Went Nonlinear with Frank Rose, Author of the Art of Immersion” by Author of The Art of Immersion Frank Rose and “The New Curation Economy – Sharing or Stealing?” Author of Curation Nation Steve Rosenbaum

Open Government and The Transformation of New York City’s Digital Environment (w NYC Gov Digital Bigwigs)

Uses of Technology from a Crisis Response and Education Perspective w/ Google

Enriching the Arts Experience Through Integrated Social Media w/ Guggenheim

It’s impossible for us not to be excited by the NYC BigApps competition.  The initiative itself is great – a competition that rewards creative, meaningful, and effective development of applications using the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine – but what it represents is significantly innovative: government providing transparency into data, and soliciting solutions based around that data from the private sector, including start-ups, companies, and citizen developers.

The NYC Data Mine is already a compelling step in the right direction.  Along with several other city, state, and federal initiatives, the Data Mine increases open access to data collected by various government agencies.  But – as our panel discussion on personal informatics touched upon – such data is meaningless unless there’s a way to process, understand, and visualize it.  That’s where app development comes in – and that’s the true power of supporting private/citizen development.

While (of course!) we need government agencies themselves to analyze and develop solutions based on a wide range of data, a dynamic cycle that solicits more robust data from citizens and then gives them power to channel that data for community change – or even to make more informed decisions – has provocative implications for the future.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our second event last Tuesday evening! Big ups to our panelists, Irwin Chen (@irwin), Ian Spalter (@ianspalter), Jill Nussbaum, and Dan Paluska (@thesixmill), for some fascinating presentations and scintillating discussion, and a huge thank you to Hive at 55 for hosting us.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the event (in the context of Dan’s day, skip to 1:24 for just the event), courtesy of Dan Paluska and his handy Brinno GardenWatch Cam (see below), our cutest attendee.

Brinno GardenWatchCam

Irwin’s presentation on reading kicked us off; here are some of the highlights:

• Reading is hard!  We saw some images of what the brain has to do in order to ingest, process and interpret text, and it’s pretty complicated.
• Reading in different character sets (for example, English -vs- Chinese) uses different parts of the brain! (Mind. Blown.)
• As computers fade into the ambient environment and our pockets, the parts of the brain that are devoted to the use of the keyboard and mouse will be freed up for reading.
• According to Nicholas Negroponte (founder of One Laptop Per Child and the MIT Media Lab, which just turned 25!) books will be obsolete in 5 years.  Irwin says probably not, but they will become more of a luxury/bespoke product as device-based reading becomes the norm.
• The future of reading depends on the future of writing. Perhaps the next great novel be written in C++!

We then heard from Ian and Jill on personal informatics (also called life-tracking.):

• Examples of note: halitosis tracking (only in Japan…), the Body Bugg, the IBG Star, the Fit Bit, and Nike+, of course, Jill and Ian’s baby.
• The concept of the BAN (Body Area Network) designates the body as an input device.
• Wearable lifetracking devices need to look good if they’re going to be used consistently.
• Data sets get more interesting when you overlay them with one another.  For example, tonight.im crossreferences health data with Foursquare checkins — neat!
• Design is critically important to making tracked data useful.
• The next phase is integrating data into the ambient environment.
• Huge opportunities exist for learning and innovation in healthcare, the environment, and government.
• This innovation will be greatly enhanced by open data standards.
• Life tracking can go too far — no one needs an emission detector in the back of their tighty-whities.

Then Dan Paluska showed us some of the projects he’s been working on over the last several years from his big-budget days to his current more low-budget DIY approach to adding write access to shared public devices, and he brought actual drawings ON PAPER.  He’s already thrown up a post over on his blog, summarizing his presentation way better than we can.  Be sure not to miss:

• Building a walking robot is pretty hard.  Witness, the blooper reel.
• Absolut Machines– a piece by Dan collaborated on with Jeff Lieberman. A visitor to a web site enters a melody on their computer keyboard. A very large machine (located for a time in Lower Manhattan) then uses this melody to generate an original and unique 2 1/2 minute piece of music. The web visitor also recieves a link to a webcam video of their piece being played.
• An effective way to see how you’re spending your screen time.
• Brooklyn Mobile – Dan tries out content publishing as a service with a mobile video cart

Stay tuned, we’ll be talking more to our panelists in the near future!

All Day Buffet put on a stellar day of presentations at the Feast on Good conference — “a cross-disciplinary series of programs addressing social innovation and new ways to make the world a better place” – last Friday at the Times Center.  Unfortunately, it seems that this will be their last conference – they are scrapping the format in favor of small retreats.  The day was recorded and broadcast via Livestream, and we’ve linked below to some of our favorite talks.

This year’s theme was Reinventing Industries.  Jerri Chou and Tamara Giltsoff introduced the day, with a set of (very Zeitgeist-y) observations on the forces that are compelling changes in industries and an overview of what those changes look like:

To roughly summarize, change is being motivated by these factors:

• There is a growing awareness of the impact of unlimited consumption on the environment
• Global financial crisis is motivating people to reduce consumption
• We are now networked and have begun to harness the generative power of the internet

As a result of this last factor, a big shift is occuring:

• Individuals are increasingly integrating and aligning their lives and their work with their passions.
• What was closed/top down is now networked/transparent
• We have discovered new ways to engage with big problems through the generative and networked nature of the internet.

They quote Eric Zimmerman, saying: “If the last era was summed up by cinema, the next one will be summed up by gaming, because it’s participatory,” and extend that, in effect saying that if the 20th century was about creating and selling more consumer goods, the 21st century is about unlocking human potential, and solving social problems, and in order to understand this, we need a new kind of economics that can create value from human flourishing.

The other presentations are, for the most part, well worth watching.  Here are some of the highlights:

Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE) SOFT Jetpack: Bee Blobs with Parachute and Air Pillow Crotch

1. Floating countries — Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute asks, if we can have start-up companies, and start-up organizations, why can’t we have start-up governments?
2. Mitch Joachim of TerreForm One (and one of the guys who advised the makers of Minority Report on what the future would be like) takes seriously the complaint that we should have jetpacks by now.
3. Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare reveals that Ben Franklin was interested in self-tracking and convinces me that I should be taking fish oil every day.

4. Rachel Botsman, co-author of  What’s Mine is Yours, explains “collaborative consumption” and lets on that there are now 1,905 more farmer’s markets in the US than there are Walmarts.
5. Scott Belsky talks about creative meritocracy and how we can create systems that enable the best ideas to and talents to be recognized and promoted.
6. Michael Epstein of the Unreasonable Institute tells us about getting together some of the world’s most dynamic “unreasonable” entrepreneurs to address social and environmental challenges of a global magnitude.
7. Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, says our current system of education is doing a terrible job of giving kids the skills they’ll need to be relevant in the economy of the future, and that educations is more about asking the right questions than about knowing the right answers.
8. Adam Braun of Pencils of Promise tells us about his near-death experience with a monster wave, about meeting a child in India whose dearest wish was for a pencil, and about having the passion to create an organization that builds schools while breaking all the rules about how non-profits are supposed to be run.