Facebook to Instagram: A “trying” rewiring experiment

I ran a week-long rewiring experiment. Facebook is de facto, the social network I run to by default. Twitter comes second. I neither had a Snapchat nor an Instagram account before I decided to run this experiment. It turned out to be super interesting and full of personal takeaways. Since I was making up for this assignment over the break, I decided to stay away from Facebook and not necessarily de-activate my account. I thus created an Instagram account, having a vague idea of how it worked and setting as rules to not follow any page, but to enter things and people I was interested about in the “search” tab. It made me realize the ways in which our social media behavior is truly shaped by each of those platforms’ peculiarities. More importantly, I became much more aware of my tendencies and things that stimulated me to go onto my preferred platform: Facebook. Here’s how.

From the moment I landed in Dakar, I decided I was going to stay off Facebook from the 23rd Dec. until Dec. 31st. Surely a good detox idea, but also one that I took at a time where it’s challenging to stay off Facebook as activity levels peak during the festive period, and it is tempting to read friends’ posts summarizing their year, people sending me good wishes, notifications from my sports pages about English Football, which is the only league running throughout the early winter period. I thought staying off it would be easy, I was wrong as throughout the days, my fingers were constantly trying every 2-3 hours to get on Facebook. Staying off of it on December 31st proved near impossible. 

 

The time off Facebook was also my opportunity to embrace Instagram as my new go-to platform. I now understood how it made time fly by so quickly once it had zero’ed in on what my interests were and offered me scrolling stories of things related to them. I was not an archetype of the “active user” as I was not hearting things left and right and commenting on every post. Yet I would say that I was quite active in using the platform, though mostly as a consumer and not a generator of content like I was on Facebook. Whereas on Facebook and Twitter I could express whatever I felt through just words, Instagram made words an accompaniment to an image or a video. This emphasis on audiovisual material made a passive user like me feel like I was consuming entertainment non-stop. I didn’t need to think too hard about writing something, I just needed scrolling and clicking. The biggest takeaway was that I could get news from Instagram just as I could from Facebook, but whereas on Facebook things on my newsfeed came from anywhere, on Instagram they came from things that I specifically searched and were related to. Notably, I could get very reliable news about the NBA, Football, Sneakers just because I searched for people/personalities/pages related to those centers of interests. These are images of what my home screen, style section, and search bar look like. Since I focused intentionally on solely basketball, football and shoes, I got the latest of all things related to those centers of interest. Falling on something unrelated by mere luck and thus enjoy serendipity online would have been rare.

 

        

One of the suggestions Ethan Zuckermann makes in Digital Cosmopolitans is that to experience cosmopolitanism by serendipity in our ever more “globalized” and “connected” world, we need to be aware of our consumption habits. His argument revolves around our human tendency to group with those similar to us and/or enclose ourselves solely in our centers of interests. My experiment proved to me that social platforms amplify that effect through their algorithms and end up designing for us our own echo-chambers (which we could also just call our echo-stories).
Is that necessarily a bad thing? I do not believe so. But it highly impedes that option to wander like Baudelaire’s flaneur, to go online seeking serendipitous encounters of things, facts or people, to use our connected world to further our experiences of cosmopolitanism.

 

A Stack Exchange Experiment

I ran the experiment on two different stack exchange sites. I never engaged in any Stack Exchange sites before and the only times I went on one to read up stuff was a redirection from Google. The multitude and variety of centers of interest on there is impressive. I decided to engage on two of them: Sports and Interpersonal Skills. The intro tour made it really clear that the site was solely an inquiry-answer platform, not an exchange one for chatting back and forth. Known

The day following Christmas is known in England as the “Boxing Day”; in the football world the “boxing day” is what separates the English Premier League from all other as matches are played all throughout the festive period, jammed in short intervals of 2 to 3 days between fixtures, with the 26^th December featuring many derbies. It may be obvious to some where the term “boxing day” originated from but to foreign followers of English Football, not so much. I did have an idea; however I wanted to test the waters of the Sports Stack Exchange website. I asked the question below:

 

 

I wanted to keep it simple, short, since the posts I saw on there had a similar style. I knew I could have gotten an easy answer from simply looking it up on Google, but I wanted to test how lenient moderators were with a question that despite showing a lack of effort, seemed reasonable to be asked on a sports platform with the #football and #englishpremierleague tags. When I returned on there a few hours later, expecting some answers and maybe upvotes, I was disheartened to find 1 downvote and already a suggestion by a high-ranked moderator to put the question on hold for being off-topic. That stung a little bit. The moderator’s reason however, was that, the question looked to pertain more to the realm of English Language stack exchange (see below). His explanation did not satisfy me but I decided not to engage further. Five days later, the post had been viewed 21 times and received another downvote. A quick look around at the other questions asked on the site made me realize that the site was not really active…so there was no point in engaging further.

The IPS Family

The second step of my investigation looked at engaging on the “Interpersonal Skills site. A quick overview was enough to see that people wrote lengthy and detailed questions equally answered in lengthy and detailed fashion. I used the opportunity of new year celebrations being a current happening to ask a question related to gift giving in a relationship. I detailed the scenario as much as I could, and asked three questions in the end, of which the main one was well formulated. The accompanying two were the following :

• “How do I approach the situation?”
• Is it that I am fearing to break something in our relationship?

These ended up being edited out by a moderator within 10 minutes. In this case, however, the moderator offered me to re-edit and re-add those questions to my post if I wished.

 

 

It felt really good to see that the post was sparking comments and discussion within its first few hours of being up. Within 24 hours, I had garnered 5 upvotes and someone even offered a long answer to my problem, bringing up things that I least suspected about love, one that got 10 upvotes. Needless to say, my reputation rating went up from 1 to 36, whereas it had stalled on the Sports One. People were sympathetic to a personal problem I was exposing to them and one of the first comments even read: “Welcome to the IPS Family”. That honestly made me feel like if I one day have a real inquiry, I ought to come back to this site one way or another.

I am going to engage back into the discussion it generated and see where it takes us. The reputation system point, however, is very enticing to keep us in it. What even impressed me more was that some of the moderators that commented on my post, also commented on a dozen other posts, all of whom were new, in the same day. This made me wonder how much time those anonymous individuals had on hand and question what real benefits they reaped from helping people online throughout their entire day without even being sure those were real or made-up questions. The level of depth of knowledge in some Stack sites was wowing, especially ones that had a technical component to them. It was a nice experiment and really showed me how online communities have fabricated this entire ecosystem where random individuals are both the content creators and moderators, similar to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody recounts on the power that lies behind those thousands of connected screens.

Emojis are unique. They are helping in universalizing languages through emoticons and at the same are changing ways we communicate via text. Resorting to the Unicode Consortium for harmonization of all the emojis that could exist is a useful solution that puts an approval protocol for every emoji that’s proposable, therefore discarding ones that do not make a strong case. Yet, it also comes at the expense of discarding many other creative emoji ideas that one could defend some legitimacy for.

Designing emojis that were infused of a local flavor was slightly at odds with this. As put by Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, for each new emoji possibility, him and the group ask themselves: “Does this break new ground … or is it going to be extremely popular?” The fact that emojis are permanent additions to the language once approved, goes to show that those careful considerations are worthy of being taken.

I am from Senegal, a country home to many peculiar things I wouldn’t find anywhere else. For the emojis I chose, I decided to focus on things that every Senegalese person would recognize right away.

My first emoji was: the ‘gaal’. Gaal is the Wolof term for a pirogue, a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk used by artisanal fishermen in Senegal. The name ‘Senegal’ itself stems from the Frenchization of ‘Sunugaal’, which means: Our Pirogue. Senegal is a coastal country and fish is our first export. I myself grew up in a neighborhood that used to be a fishermen dwelling, not far from the Atlantic Sea shores.

The people I showed it to recognized it immediately, the bright motifs of the little boat gave it away soon enough. Aphee Messer, who designed the “Person in Lotus Position” emoji uses a framework for emoji-creation that emphasizes one thing: it has to be something that a lot of people do. It twisted that framework a little bit in my case: it had to be something people knew instantly.

My second emoji looked to illustrate the most popular sport in Senegal: wrestling or as we call it in Wolof “lamb”. Assisting to a wrestling match is a cultural experience to take on its own as the actual combat is the end of a series of pre-events including traditional dances called “baku”, mystic baths, taunting, praise singing in the wrestler’s ethnic tongue and so much more. This plus the large difference in style and dress up is what separates Senegalese wrestling from Greco-roman-like wrestling. It is not uncommon to see anything from 4-year old kids to grown adults wrestling at the beach or at local tournaments organized in most neighborhoods called “mbapatt”.

On this emoji, I used an original picture of a wrestling contest, lasso’ed the background out and increased the contrast and blue settings to get a darkened image that resembled that allows focussing on the wrestlers’ embrace as and common silhouette as a whole. The cone-like speakers on each side symbolize the cheers and weight that each wrestler has on them as they most of the time defend the honour of their entire neighborhood or village.

My third emoji set out to be the most emoji-like in style. It is very colorful and could definitely pass for an emoji if reduced to a very small pixel size. Anyone could make out that it is a car, some sort of a mini van. That, is what Senegalese have named the “car rapide” – which translates to “fast car -. It’s anything but fast. Yet its preponderance around town has turned it into a symbol of local urban transport, almost nearing a flagship status. A tinkered and welded times and again version of French car manufacturer Renault’s 1000kg model, the “car rapide” is a moving museum, sporting many inscriptions on its sides in wolof, french of arabic that praise God or the local religious figures that helped strengthen Islam into Senegal. The insides are full of photos of star local wrestlers, marabouts, local footballing glory, even personal photos of the driver. It is a cultural experience for a foreigner, yet a daily aspect of the random urban Senegalese dweller. 

Overall, the feedback I got was quite what I expected given the lines I set out for myself. Friends I showed them to recognized them right away, though they did not expect those to be emojis; they thought more along the lines of them being images.

Whilst working on this project, I came across this project by Bleacher Report called The NBA emojis we wish we had (https://thelab.bleacherreport.com/nbaemoji/). I found them pretty good and quite related and satisfying of what this homework assignment asked. To a community of basketball aficionados, many inside references could be easily understood from them and they sort of constitute a larger ecosystem of the basketball & rim emojis that already exist in the Unicode to represent the sport.

 

Y.

The readings from Tufekci’s Twitter and Teargas explores the implications and impact of modern day digital technologies on social and political movements. Through an examination of the events that occurred during the Arab Spring, she presents a nuanced analysis of the affordances and limitations of online platforms in the organization and execution of protests. An interesting highlight from Ch. 5 is the reductionist view of the role of technology that many journalists held, i.e. that of technodeterminism. In contrast, she highlights the several levels of analyses that should be undertaken when investigating the role of tech in social movements. Her discussion on the four types of causation was particularly interesting, especially when she discusses the difference between necessary and sufficient causes to an event. Ultimately, the complex relationship between technology and social behaviour necessitates a multilevel analysis of the affordances provided by technology and its design – people create technology, which in turn alters spatiotemporal structures of society.

 

The excerpt from Schneier’s Data and Goliath was intriguing in its urgent tone. He highlights the very intimate nature of surveillance which our phones provide to carriers. The personalized location tracking offers unprecedented amounts of data to companies, to be leveraged by governments and security agencies. Beyond our mobile phones, however, Schneier discusses the implicit bargain that is made between users and most modern technology: consumers get free service in exchange for their data. Often, this is done for convenience purposes, with little thought given to the potential implications. The problem, however, as Schneier notes, is that mass surveillance (as in its current form) is highly dangerous. Governments and businesses have amassed huge amounts of data, which can be used to discriminate against and control individuals.

 

A relevant example of this mass surveillance in action is explored in the documentary Citizen Four. Snowden reveals insider information regarding the US National Security Agency and its illegal tracking practices. An intensely political situation, the film reveals the reality of modern mass surveillance, raising questions on what should be done in response to the extent of data collection that occurs at the hands of powerful corporations and entities.

——– Ali, Flavia, Sharon, and Theo

To wrap up this semester’s discussions on various aspects of communication technologies, we decided to focus on some of the key psychological impacts that the current, prominent communication platforms have had on its users. We chose this topic because we wanted to delve into the ubiquitous nature of technology and its implications on our individual behaviour, our emotional well-being, and on our relationships with others and with our devices/tech.

We started by considering the two related experiences of depression and isolation that have grown in prevalence and severity, concurrently with the increased usage of social media. We explored some of the factors and evidence behind the negative effects of communication platforms on our emotional well-being, which include FOMO (fear of missing out), the act of social comparison, and the resulting cycles of envy and jealousy that feed into depression. We discussed the results of some studies that showed the correlation between popular sites (including Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and Snapchat) and their effects on users’ lifestyles, allowing time for the class to brainstorm some reasons for these effects.

We also highlighted some projects that have attempted to address these issues by offering companionship and support to users. For comparison, we introduced the class to online “therapists” like Eliza and Woebot, and designated some time for everyone to experience interacting with these chatbots. It was interesting to hear people’s feedback on these systems – most responses highlighted the limitations and lack of effectiveness of these platforms. Beyond these online platforms, we also showed a clip from the movie Her, along with an advertisement for Vector – a virtual assistant robot designed to maximize the user’s relationship and feelings towards it. Are AI powered technologies a solution, then, to the increasing amounts of social isolation that individuals are experiencing these days?

Theo’s part of the presentation continued with the overarching theme of social interactions and the negative effects of technology on them. We delved into the effects of communication technologies such as social media, particularly the ability to send notifications and always be accessible via mobile platforms, on the ability to concentrate and carry out tasks effectively. We presented the finding of Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab on the subject, discussing key aspects such as limits to attention, interruptions, sense of urgency, and attention allocation to highlight the challenges that modern communication technologies pose on multitasking abilities and effective human interaction. Then he transitioned into some methods to overcome these social distractions and examples of technologies developed to help bring attention to this issue, if not help combat it. Last but not least, the philosophy of digital minimalism was presented as a social tendency that people are adopting to reorganize their digital lives.

The purpose of this section was to bring attention to a subconscious yet omnipresent effect of the rapid development of communication technologies and the movement to being always online and always reachable. This furthers the discussions we have had in class about the mediums of communication and their implications in interpersonal interactions.

After touching on depression, isolation, and distraction, we decided to close our presentation on the main cause that drives the previous three behaviors: addiction. Were it not for our addictive attitude towards these mobile devices, we would not have experienced such behavioral change. For this part of the presentation, we decided to focus more on UX design features across different platforms. We focused on explaining how these target our human psychology in a way that makes us keep our hands on the phone and our eyes on the screen. This section had a strong focus on Tristan Harris’s perspective. As a google design ethicist, he is considered an expert on the subject and has written multiple essays and given talks on design for addiction. After looking at some of his videos and  texts, we decided to focus on three key aspects of design addiction: variable ratio schedule, the bottomless vortex, and warm colors – showcasing how they stimulate different part of our brains based on gambling patterns, intuitive cues versus visual cues, and color dominance. In order to look for ways forward and focusing on what we can do as humans to combat these default triggers, we also proposed three alternative actions to limit the power of these features.

In order to expand on that aspect and at the same time wrap up with all topics as a cohesive whole, we showcased Humanetech, Harris’s awareness platform that talks about different ways in which technology has altered our behavior – from our relationships, our self-confidence, and our addiction. We wrap up by stating how this form of media is different from the TV, the radio, the computer, etc. in order to strain the importance of the awareness of its impacts. With this, we then focus on more tactics to mitigate social platform impact – ranging from specifically daily actions to potential apps we could use to limit us.

Resources: 

– https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html
– http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/
– https://www.forestapp.cc/en/
– https://medium.com/swlh/digital-minimalism-how-to-simplify-your-online-life-76b54838a877
– https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069841&mbid=synd_msnhealth#s3
– https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html
– https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(17)30016-8/fulltext
– https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html
– http://manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3/
– https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/learning/does-technology-make-us-more-alone.html
– https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2012/05/24/text-or-talk-is-technology-making-you-lonely/#728f96592a7b
– https://woebot.io/?fbclid=IwAR2i27cgnr54A7YoXSIT9wfCvmhdRXhl0BAz7-Zk-L6tdf-z1558yVK1c24
– http://www.tristanharris.com/
– https://www.rbcs.org.uk/headmasters-desk/revealed-the-addiction-tricks-of-social-media/
– https://www.businessinsider.com/how-app-developers-keep-us-addicted-to-our-smartphones-2018-1#twitter-uses-a-psychological-trick-to-lure-you-in-the-same-one-used-in-slot-machines-3
– https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/17053758/phone-addictive-design-google-apple
– http://humanetech.com/

Mobile smart phones have become widely accessible and with them is the access to instant messaging; Through apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger sending a message to someone from your phone takes seconds and everyone is permanently available. With the advent of instant messaging, we lost something; which was the need to log onto a platform to communicate. By looking at how instant messaging has transformed from AOL Instant Messaging and Windows Messenger from the late 90’s to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, I am hoping to examine what the possible future of messaging would be by comparing the different affordances offered by these platforms and how they have shaped communication.  For example; how the constant access we have to social media/instant messaging makes us less susceptible to phone calls but also through our continuous online status we have lost the urge to physically “log in”.

As society evolves, so does our technology – at faster rates than ever before. Part of this involves the expansion and progression of not only human intelligence, but artificial intelligence as well. Remarkably, AI – or perhaps “Artificial Alien,” as Kelly describes in “The Inevitable” – is making its emergence in almost every industry, including medical, manufacturing, and marketing. Of particular interest is the rise of the AI in our personal lives – as virtual assistants in our homes and cars. Beyond the help provided by these AI powered assistants, artificial intelligence is increasingly adopting human-like characteristics. Earlier this year, in May 2018, Google unveiled a demo of its most recent developments for its virtual assistant – the Google Duplex, capable of imitating a human voice to make a call on its owner’s behalf. Until this point, users have relied on artificially intelligent assistants to perform certain functions by communicating directly with their devices. Now, however, a shift is occurring, as evident by the principles behind the technology of Google Duplex. We are no longer simply communicating with AI devices, in a 1-to-1 relationship between the user and the machine. Our devices are now purporting to communicate for us, acting as their own agents to engage in intelligent, coherent conversation with others. With the release of such technology as the Duplex, it will soon be impossible to determine exactly with whom – or what – we’re communicating. 

As our devices get smarter, what are the implications and consequences for our society? How does our increasing dependence on smart, deep learning machines affect our own understanding of what “human intelligence” and purpose is? What do the ever increasing ubiquity and capabilities of AI – powered assistants entail for the future of communication? As AI becomes a formidable entity of its own, what happens to the individual, the “I”, in this process? 

Some resources:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/

Cities have been existing for thousands of years, both coming and going, but now, a new type of city has just emerged into being a city of dreams, opportunities, and innovation, and it is Dubai. A city that used to be one that embodied a traditional culture and heritage like neighborhoods in Bastakia, now it has been booming since even before the unification of the UAE. Dubai aims to be a city like no other, and it does so by creating an immersive experience for everyone. Examples include amusement parks, high-end hotels, 2020 Expo, and Aladin city. How can these new emerging attractions increase the tourism and create new communications in the UAE? Why is there always a vision of 2020, 2030, and 2050 of Dubai? What is the role of Dubai’s tourism, and what can be gained from this?

Virtual Reality has been a dream of computer scientist and science fiction writers for a long time and certain developments in the computation has made Virtual Reality a reality for the commercial user from 2010. With the release of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headsets have made their way into homes and clumsy wired models are soon to go wireless. Their use is as versatile is reality is: from education, training, entertainment, storytelling, treatment, social applications and pornography, virtual reality is here to transform our relationship with media and reality. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX promised that the landing of SpaceX’s ambitious Mars project will be streamed live in VR – making this the first historical moment that can be lived and relived without people physically participating in the event.

As VR is becoming a reality the question arises on how interactions with this new technology will transform human lives. How will our relationship with reality change? Take the medical application of VR as an example. VR has been used in medical care to alleviate chronic pain, help patients who struggle with PTSD which proves VR’s potential to change our perception of reality. However this same potential can point to dangers ahead that can create lasting psychological effects. Training doctors and pilots in VR can contribute to a better future for humankind, however training software can be used just as successfully to train soldiers or terrorists to perform violent acts. A code of ethics has to be established as we carry on developing VR and its many realities. 

Source: 
https://www.wired.com/story/prescription-video-games-and-vr-rehab/
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dangers-safety/index.html
https://www.wired.com/story/opioids-havent-solved-chronic-pain-maybe-virtual-reality-can/

Imagine a world where your interactions with technology no longer require a physical effort or mechanical input, but you control your devices, from your smartphone, your laptop, to your smart TV solely with the power of your thoughts. No more mouse pointers and keyboard clicks, just think it, visualize it, and it is done. 

The idea of controlling a machine with one’s thoughts might sound like a science fiction novel but is in fact a reality in 21^stcentury and rapid progress is made to master and commercialize this technology. This interaction is described with the fancy acronym of BCI, namely Brain–Computer Interface. BCIs are systems that allow a combination of hardware and software technologies to control external devices through brain activity. This technology has been researched heavily in the past few years because of its promising use in providing assistance to disabled or paralyzed people. Although the focus of BCI-related technology has been in medical applications, nonmedical applications such as gaming and device control have also been developed for commercial use. While the current state BCIs is not quite at the level of the seamless interaction that we imagined previously, it is a fast-growing and promising area of technology being actively invested in by the likes of Elon Musk and other visionaries.

I would like to explore this technology not only as means of communication between man and device, but a revolutionary method of collective interaction between people and machines, and argue the possibilities that it can open for person to person communication either directly or via a shared device. 

Some sources with further information on BCIs:

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/12/health/brain-computer-interface-partner/index.html

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-17534-3_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface

https://www.wired.com/story/brain-machine-interface-isnt-sci-fi-anymore/