Adaptation is one of the basic phenomena of biology, and is the process whereby an organism becomes better suited to its habitat. Also, the term adaptation may refer to a trait that is important for an organism’s survival. For example, the adaptation of horses’ teeth to the grinding of grass, or the ability of horses to run fast and escape predators. Is this change in information consumption enough reason for our brains to adapt? It appears our brain is in fact capable to easily adapt itself. Blind people reading braille use the area of a human brain normally allocated to visual input. From another research it appeared that the area that gets activated when we listen to piano notes is approximately 25% larger in musicians than non-musicians. Did two centuries of ever increasing information consumption had the same effect on our brains?

Sociologist James Flynn might has an answer to this question. In 1980 he discovered in a routine check of historical IQ scores that these IQ scores were rising in a linear way. Flynn compared more that 7500 IQ tests between 1932 and 1978 and it appeared that the average IQ rose with three points per decennia. Off course could this rise in IQ scores be the result of a better education. But in that case the biggest improvements should have been in language and general knowledge and far less in problem solving skills. Problem solving is often seen as a cultural and education independent skill. The biggest improvement however wasn’t in language and general knowledge, it was in problem solving.
We could conclude that the increasing complexity in our environment accompanied by a growing information overload had a positive effect on our problem solving skills and resulted in a growing IQ score. Our brains adapted and will probably keep doing this in the future. But will this linear change in IQ scores be enough when information appears to be increasing in exponential ways?

Designer Damjan Stanković came up with a concept where a timer is added to stoplights. Stanković promotes this stoplight as an eco solution in the following ways: If you’ve got the amount of time you’ve got to stop in front of you, you can shut your engine off, wait, be calm, and turn it back on again when the time is almost up. This not only lessens the amount of gas you use sitting still, but it lessens the amount of crazy madness you have wondering if the stoplight is stuck, or just really, really long.

When you think about it, you don’t need this information counted in seconds, you just need to see the speed of the progress bar to give you an estimate of the time.

Oour innate desire to see the bar creep forward runs deeper than our slow entanglement with computers. I wrote about this topic in another blogpost: The Psychology Of Waiting

We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We don’t just compare things but we actually compare things that are more easily comparable. If given the following options for a honeymoon – Paris (with free breakfast), Rome (with free breakfast), and Rome (no breakfast included), most people would choose Rome with the free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Rome than it is to compare Paris and Rome. Ariely also explains the role of the decoy effect in the decision process. The decoy effect is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated. This effect is the secret agent in more decisions than we can imagine. Back to the example with the honeymoon options, Rome without free breakfast is the decoy. It makes Paris look inferior when compared to Rome with the free breakfast.

In another example from the economist.com you have the following three subscription options :

When Ariely did a little test with this ad, these where the results:

As you can see, most people would choose the ‘combo’ deal. And nobody would choose the inferior option. But when we remove the second options the results were quite different:

Thanks to the useless option in the middle the combo deal looked like a fantastic deal and most people choosed it. But in fact it wasn’t the option we really wanted. The general idea is that we don’t know our preferences that well. And because we don’t know our prefereces that well we are easily manipulated by external forces.

In our first day we managed to reach about 100 of our own friends on twitter. But for it to be really successful we needed to reach some people on twitter with a huge following base. We used our own share this button a number of times on all sorts of people. And after a few tries @michielveenstra, 2500 followers, picked up our message and reposted our website on his own twitter stream on a friday night. Overnight we reached 1500 hits. But as it turned out our biggest traffic came from a porn-blog! Apperently a webmaster from this well know porn-blog picked up our site after seeing it in the stream from @michielveenstra. In the weekend we managed to get around 8000 hits from this porn site. But on monday morning it really took off. Hordes of time wasting desk workers measured their body part. From that point on it really became a trend on twitter. Our ‘twitter this’ button was used a few times every few minutes now. Because people often measured the popularity off well known people they eventually couldn’t help but brag about it too (Cough @stephenfry, 336.599 followers). This caused Great Great Brittian to swarm our website and spread it even more. At this point North and South-America just woke up.

Btw the website was at this moment stll being hosted on Boy van Amstel’s server, placed at his parents’ home. Utilizing almost all of the “massive” 1Mbit bandwith. Thank god his little brother didn’t complain. The reason this was even possible is that epenis.nl has no server-side scripts. It’s all jQuery, HTML, CSS and (small) images. We actually reduced the size of the website by half, by grabbing jquery.js from google.com.

At monday around 4 pm, CET, we finally managed to get the word Penis into the Twitter trending topics. A huge success because now people twittered about why the word penis was even in this list. Generating even more traffic to our site when they found out we were causing it.

Some people saw a connection between Spring Break, which probaly helped accepting the fact the word penis was a part of the list. Twitter however didn’t agree with that. After a few hours we saw some messages from people who were complaining about their posts disappearing, not much later penis wasn’t trending anymore. Did Twitter screw with us here? We can’t be sure. But the damage already had been done, we had already spread to the American continent. A couple of big American Twitter users like @MrsKutchers, thats Demi Moore (257,150 followers) posted it later in the evening, that really generated lots of traffic and added a large amount of females to our users.

The next morning we had almost 40k hits. At this point we called our viral a success, we expected it to die out rather soon. But we were wrong! To our suprise it kept on going steadily. Around 14:00 there suddenly was a huge spike in our traffic. As it appeared, @Guykawaski (92,399 followers) was giving a keynote during SES New York about ‘Twitter As A Tool For Social Media’. Lots of people posted live messages during his talk and as it turns out also about our little project…

‘@Searchcowboys: Guykawasaki shows epenis.nl and says it’s more powerfull then twittercounter #sesny’

Some other stuff made us laugh too:

‘@PaulIAm: Darwin just backed the car up to his grave, connected a hose to the tailpipe and took a deep breath…http://www.epenis.nl/’

‘@Retecool: There’s lots of stuff out there that figures out your Twitter ranking, value, mojo, etc. But let’s cut the crap it’s all about who’s has the big swinging dick, right?’

‘@Vatikan: Scheiße, @satan ‘s ePenis ist länger als meiner http://www.epenis.nl/’

At this moment we’re still trying to figure out what the hell we’re are going to with it. To conclude, here is a list of the things we learned:

1. Use Sneezers, find Twitter users with respect and high amounts of followers. (Seth Godin’s Purple Cow)
2. Post your viral at the right time. We had Spring Break, the SESNY Keynote by Guykawasaki and the usual monday morning boredom going for us.
3. Maximize sharability. Our ‘Post on Twitter” button was used extremly well.
4. Make it simple. There are no lists, links, pages. It does only one thing verry well. (KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid)
5. Sex Sells

Thanks for reading,
Barry Borsboom & Boy van Amstel