User:Rita Graca/gradproject/text references

About persuasion and interfaces – First Topic

Shaw, T. (2017) Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind., 20 April.
Available at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/kahneman-tversky-invisible-mind-manipulators/ (Accessed: 11 November 2019).

This article reviews The Undoing Project, a book about two psychologists’ work on human behaviour. It’s important to study this field because behavioural techniques are used to influence our daily lives, focused on human irrationality. A good example is the idea of the Libertarian Paternalism, the way of framing certain choices but without impeding the person to do differently. However, the scandal of Cambridge Analytica made people realise that these persuasive techniques rapidly fall on the manipulative, deterministic side without supervision or any ethics guidelines.
It’s also interesting to understand the shift from the term “propaganda” to ‘“a behavioural approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results.”’ (Amy suggested the documentary The Century of Self)

Belsunces, A. (2015) The Commodification of Everyday Life.
Available at: https://www.academia.edu/25422188/The_Commodification_of_Everyday_Life (Accessed: 8 October 2019).

The graphical user interface became the framework to track and understand the user’s profile, the pivotal figure of the cultural ecosystem. Interfaces reduce user friction by providing a “usable, engaging, simple, and social” experience, which at the same time removes agency from the user. By delegating tasks we give more control to interfaces, and we start living in their logic. This happens when we engage with algorithms which quantify our online life, a lot of times through gamification strategies.

Hollanek, T. (2019) Non-user-friendly. Staging resistance with interpassive user experience design. APRJA, 8, 184–193

Hollanek explains how interfaces have been designed to be organic for the user, allowing intuitive and seamless operations. However, this immediacy of comfort also hides what goes on behind the interface. The author questions the manipulation that we may be under, disguised as personalisation to allow better performance.

To encourage resistance the article argues for alternative design practices such as cognitive glitching and interpassive interfaces. These are ways of exposing the power structures of platforms through glitches, imperfect features, disturbing or illogical processes.

Lialina, O. (2018) Once Again, The Doorknob. On Affordance, Forgiveness and Ambiguity in Human Computer and Human Robot Interaction.
Available at: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/affordance/ (Accessed: 17 September 2019).

Lialina offers insight over articles, projects and people for and against the mainstream thought on User Experience Design.

The author reflects on Don Norman's idea that “the computer of the future should be invisible”, meaning that the user would focus on the task they want to do instead of focusing on the machine. Much like a door, you go through it to go somewhere else. But Lialina reminds us that computers are much more complex devices, and that closed or opened doors allow different degrees of agency.

This keynote also reflects on affordances, questioning if forgiveness is still a feature on contemporary interfaces and how this influences AI machines.



Williams, J. (2018) Stand out of our light: freedom and resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Williams explains how the technology industry fights for our attention with their tools, products, and platforms. There is a lot of information available to us, but this can weight on our attention span and self-regulation.
 The author opposes to the idea of a neutral technology because all design holds intentions, goals, and values. Design has the power to shape society, managing identities, framing interests, changing habits. It is interesting how the author frames the threats of these problems as global, far from a first-world problem. The consequences of tech manipulation can be larger for underprivileged people who lack knowledge and willpower.

This book section evolves around persuasive design, but not as new or unique to digital technologies. However, with today’s technology, the users can be tightly controlled: page views, search queries, location, clicks, and so on. This provides huge feedback that boosts better strategies of manipulation. Some of these features we recognise in our daily lives browsing the web, it’s the infinite feed, the pull-to-refresh, the likes.

Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011) Code/space: software and everyday life. Software studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 3-21.

Instead of being pessimist and determinist about the controlling aspects of technology, or too positive about the benefits, the authors choose to see software as a generative force that makes things happen. This introduction explains how the interest for the authors is software itself and not the technologies working with it.

Software is found on diverse objects and systems but is not always perceptible or understandable. Indeed it can seem to operate through magic, an idea shared by several authors. This is often a problem when things cease to work but the system became too opaque to understand. In this way software studies try to open the “black box”, looking for its methods and routines.

It is explained the concepts of coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes and coded assemblages. Although different all these categories expose how software influences socio-economic routines and is embedded in everyday life. This universal presence is referred to as “everyware” (Greenfied 2006). How software changes space and gives it new meanings is explored through examples such as the supermarket that relies on machines to register the products. This is an example of a code/space because it depends on software-driven technology.

An interesting part for my own research is the mention of alluring software and how people enjoy the logic of technology. This means people happily overlook the downsides because of the benefits software can provide.

Television Delivers People (1973) Film. Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman.

About alternatives and resistance — Second Topic

DNL# 13: HATE NEWS. Keynote with Andrea Noel and Renata Avila (2018) Film.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2z6jP0Ynwg&list=PLmm_HP_Sb_cTFwQrgkRvP8yqJqerkttpm&index=3 (Accessed: 12 November 2019).

Andrea Noel is a Mexican journalist talking about hate, trolls, influencers, bots and money. In this keynote, Noel speaks about her experience with harassment and how sharing her experience resulted in more harassment and awful threats.

Through her investigation, the journalist obtained access to internal emails from a Mexican troll farm from 2012 to 2014. This shed light on strategies of distraction, such as the fabrication of trending topics on Twitter. Publishing huge amounts of noise in social media precludes other conversations to happen.

The solution to these manipulative actions is hard to conceive, as the lack of credibility of the media casts a shadow on genuine social movements and mobilisations online.

Verborgh, R. (2019), Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time, in Seneviratne, O. and Hendler, J. (Eds.), Linking the World’s Information: Tim Berners-Lee’s Invention of the World Wide Web, ACM. Accepted for publication.
Available at: https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web/ (Accessed: 21 October 2019).

Gives a useful overview of the first decentralised and then centralised networks online.
This article also points out the lack of conscious consent in some features of social networks which bridges nicely to my research on persuasive media.

Dubrofsky, R.E. and Magnet, S. (2015) Feminist surveillance studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 221–228.

In the beginning, the idea that online networks could be a place for performance promoted the possibility of avoiding physical discrimination and surveillance by imagining new identities for ourselves. However the majority of social media platforms today impose name verification and other forms of authentication. So, just like in the physical world, minorities continue to face online harassment, threats and overall control.
The alternative seemed to be to leave the surveilled platforms, but is exactly ‘the vulnerable populations who are the least able to “quit Facebook.”’ To fight back, users created blogs (e.g. Fat, Ugly or Slutty or Not in the Kitchen Anymore) that collect and display racist, sexist and homophobic comments that female and queer gamers have received. This polices online spaces with the user’s own rules.