These days technology like the iPhone helps us to track our own personal habits, Twitter gives us an insight into popular topics and analytics give us fascinating web usage statistics. Whilst technology has greatly enhanced our ability to collect interesting data about human behaviour, it’s important to realise that using such data to make conclusions about why we behave in such a way is unwise without investigating the differences between causality and correlation. Take for example the problematic question of whether the Internet is addictive or if addicts use the Internet.

The Relationship Between Psychology and Technology

Only thorough psychological research can investigate the motivations behind our behaviour. All of the modern day branches of psychology are governed by extremely strict rules that ensure that only legitimate and ethical research is conducted and published, and said research employs extensive statistical analyses on data derived from various methods including interviews, questionnaires, experiments, etc.

It is for these reasons that I believe that the relationship between psychology and technology needs to be much stronger. If we use psychology to understand and explain our interactions with technology today, we can help our future selves by using this information to make technology more accessible, usable and helpful for everyone.

There is absolutely no escaping the fact that one day you will be old. Most people regard getting older to be a physical decline, a frailty of the body, without considering the cognitive and social changes that occur as you age. It is for this reason that I take an interest in Irish research centres like the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology and the CASALA Centre (soon to open in Dundalk IT) who aim to improve future technologies by conducting cognitive and social psychological research with older adults and people with disabilities.

In today’s Irish Times an article describes the recent Business of Ageing conference held in Dublin, highlights some of the fantastic assisted living technologies being developed here in Ireland and suggests this country could be a leader in developing technology for older adults.

Let’s hope this prediction comes true. Not only would I love to work in this area of research and development, I for one would like to continue being an early adopter of new technologies. I would be incredibly angry if, as I got older technology slipped out of my reach, the way the majority of older adults are excluded today.

The stars of the movie have posted a bizarrely funny little cinemash online, mixing together the new movie with a scene from Sid and Nancy, they’ve also filmed a really cool bank heist/movie musical homage, you can listen to the entire soundtrack streaming online, and there are countless behind the scenes videos available online that you’d usually have to wait to see on the DVD release. Obviously there’s the website and a Facebook page but they’ve also been running some interesting hybrid engagement ads on Facebook and have a widget you can add to your profile. They’ve definitely been attempting to encourage elements of crowdsourcing and tapping into the viral nature of information and social networks online.

It’s not often that an online campaign stands out to me in such a way that it’s worthy of more than just a tweet. The difference between this campaign in comparison to the many others before it is how feature rich it is and it gives the sense that there is an understanding of the behaviour and motivations of the target user – i.e if you want a user to help promote your movie, your brand, whatever, you need to give them something actually worthwhile in return and they will be much more open to reciprocation.

Visitors to the website or facebook page have the option of creating an alternative movie poster using their facebook photos (or new uploads) or create a  a highly personalised custom mix tape – features of the campaign which are engaging, and create something worth sharing – they can also access all the free content on the website. They’re also just about to launch a microsite where you can create a Spotify playlist reflecting various stages of the movie romance (with the best playlist wining the creator a ticket to all the UK festivals next summer).

By facilitating an engaging user experience that produces user generated content, you increase your chances of the user reciprocating i.e allowing the application to access their Facebook profile, to promote the movie with a profile update, or auto-tweeting a link to their personal mix tape, or embedding it in a blog post or sidebar etc. I personally spent about 20 minutes creating a mixtape, and quite enjoyed the experience and end result (pity those tracks are only 30min samples though).

This is just a great example of integrated movie marketing that takes a step further than those boresome movie microsites that allow you to distort your face into a Vulcan, a Transformer, a Terminator etc. and I’m hoping to see much more creativity like this in the near future.