Do you remember what you saw on your phone ten minutes ago?

Are you going through the news or just finished watching a few videos? In the process of doing the above, has your attention been taken away by the pop-up application push or barrage?

▲ Picture from Distel

It’s also in this ten-minute “screen time” that you, my, and his attention and thought paths are changing. Some research scholars believe that to understand the relationship between people and digital products, it is not enough to just look at “screen time”.

To this end, researchers at Stanford University and Pennsylvania State University have launched large-scale data collection and analysis projects ” Human Screenome Project “.

Just like the “Human Genome Project” aims to map the human genome and ultimately decipher human genetic information, the “Human Screenome Project” ambitions to record the precise behavior of people in an increasingly complex digital world. Combine data analysis to solve social problems caused by the media.

In short, the Human Screenome Project team developed aThe application, installed on a phone, computer or tablet, will take a screenshot every five seconds and compress and encrypt the screenshot and send it back to Stanford’s server. The team is currently optimizing the tracking software, aiming to achieve screenshots per second in the future to improve data accuracy.

▲ A demo movie composed of screenshots from Human Screenome Project

You might think, who would like to be recorded like this?

The reality is that the project team now has more than 600 people in the United States, China, and Myanmar More than 30 million screenshots were collected on the devices of volunteers.

Actually, Professor Nilam Ram of Pennsylvania State University and Byron Reeves of Stanford University started out as collaborative research people Multitasking behavior . They made software at the time to record how often students switched content while working.

No one expected that the data showed that the frequency of students switching windows was as high as 20 seconds / time, which exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Naturally, they extended the record test to smartphones.

When we start (connect the screenshots,) When we watch time-lapse videos, we realize that they can show so many different human behavior patterns.

Nilam Ram said to Digital Trends .

The project team introduced Nature to introduce two “Screenome” example of. When filling out the questionnaire, two 14-year-olds living in northern California stated that they use their mobile phones for about two hours a day, but if you take a closer look at their screenshots, you can see that they use mobile phones with very different behavior patterns.

▲ Picture from The Washington Post

In three weeks, volunteer A spent about 3.67 hours / day using mobile phone, while volunteer B spent 4.68 hours / day. Although A’s usage time is short, A’s three hours are divided into 186 uses (each unlocked to the lock screen is counted as one use), with an average of 1.19 minutes. B’s more than four hours were divided into 26 uses, each using an average of 2.54 minutes.

In the three weeks, A used 26 apps, of which more than half were social media, with Snapchat and Instagram accounting for the most time. B uses 30 apps, but YouTube accounts for 50% of the time. Taking a closer look, research shows that 37% of B’s ​​screenshots are photos of food, including food taken by himself, food in other videos, and food in restaurant management games.

In the questionnaire survey, the two teenagers may say that they use “a lot of” apps, and will list some of them, but it is impossible to describe their specific media usage.