Excellent, a real-life Skinner Box

Instead of rodents, they’re using journalists – and instead of a Skinner Box they’ll be locked inside a French farmhouse in Perigord for five days and only allowed to access Twitter and Facebook.

The experiment – run by RFP the French-language public broadcasters association – will discover how warped our perception of the world could become if we rely solely on Twitter and Facebook.

Like anyone would do that!

The journalists will continue to report the news as they see it – coming solely through tweets, hashtags, status updates, messages and – gulp – contextual advertising.

What a great experiment, but five days is clearly nowhere near long enough. A year would be more like it. And the floor should be electrified, with mild shocks being dispensed for inaccurate reporting, and fags and booze dispensed to the journo-rodents for getting it right. A house of correction. Could this be the model for a distributed social media version of Big Brother where contestants are placed under house-arrest and allowed only to connect with other contestants – and Big Brother – via Twitter and Facebook?

It kind of reminds me of the Biosphere 2 experiment, photos of which were posted on Boing Boing earlier this month. I’ve always thought the Biosphere story would make a great horror film, or musical comedy, or both. Imagine if a mystery virus wipes most of the Earth’s population out while they’re in there… and they have to listen to the whole world dying on Facebook and Twitter… and then use these services to coordinate the rebuilding of the human race.

Tres awesome. Starts February 1.