Cooper Journal: One free interaction

Cooper Jour­nal: One free interaction

I noticed two friends who use their mouse to repeat­edly select and des­e­lect text in web browsers as they read pages online. This is absolutely crazy­mak­ing for onlook­ers, but really sat­is­fy­ing for them.

De-Re-Selecting from Chris No on Vimeo.

I do this all the time (my favorite way is to triple-click the para­graph) and, yes, it dri­ves peo­ple look­ing at my screen crazy.

Prob­a­bly the other big one I do is to draw selec­tion rec­tan­gles on my desk­top or in a file man­ager window.

It’s inex­plic­a­ble to me, but Chris men­tions some pos­si­ble reasons:

When I talk to each per­son about these behav­iors, there’s not a lot of con­scious decision-making going on here. The web-page-highlighters aren’t intend­ing any­thing when they do this, it’s just some­thing they enjoy doing. But even though these behav­iors don’t help move any tasks or goals along, they’re sat­is­fy­ing. And because they pro­vide a release for ner­vous energy and/or let us be expres­sive, they become an exten­sion of our­selves to which we have some small emo­tional connection.

Ulti­mately, I don’t really care why, but it’s an inter­est­ing thing of note.