User:AvitalB/thesis

Research, thoughts and more

In summer I deleted facebook and instagram apps from my phone. I felt the constant scroll through different feeds is making me anxious and depressed. At first it was very liberating and I found myself having more time to do other things. Then it became lonely- I realised that a lot of people were communicating with me just when I was posting snippets from my life (mostly instagram stories). Apparently, when you live in a different country then most of your friends if they don't have a reminder of you being through social media, they don't contact you as much. I began to think about the interfaces around me and how they make me feel and how my mood depends on them. The word interface can mean many things: screens, apps, software, operation systems. It's the GUI that we interact with and it's the core concepts of the digital products we use. I often feel manipulated, most of the time too indifferent to do anything with it.

Interests

• The human component in our devices
• Emphatic and apathetic feelings toward interfaces
• The influence
• The critical approach towards the relationship we develop with our computers with the balance of evaluating technology from the personal/human point of view
• Online narratives- what is the common experience of our digital life?

Guiding terms

• Relationship
• Online behaviour
• Devices
• Communication interfaces

Optional techniques

• Bot interaction
• Chat
• Interactive storytelling
• Data collection with Mediawiki
• Web interface

Resources

Books

• Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism / Geert Lovink- The internet is effecting our emotions, behaviour and mindset
• Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Place / Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves
• The Second Self / Sherry Turkle
• Alone Together / Sherry Turkle
• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace / Janet H. Murray
• Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation / Joseph Weizenbaum
• Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things / Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp
• Seeing Like a Computer + Reading Like a Computer / Angie Waller
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion / Jia Tolentino

Articles/Journals

• That chatbot I’ve loved to hate / Sherry Turkle
• The journal of computational culture

Personas

• Eliza - early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and based on a a Rogerian therapist
• Adam Harvey - more pixel=more data ?
• Lauren Mccarthy - performance artis
• Parry - chatterbot that attempted to simulate a person with paranoid schizophrenia
• Joseph Weizenbaum
• Sherry Turkel
• Kevin Lenzo - creator of Infobot and Purl

Projects

• Chimeria:Grayscale - uses an email interface as a storytelling device
• The Mouse Holds Us / Emma Rae Norton - relates to my concept of exploring in depth one graphical element (here she explores one device)
• Anatomy of an AI System / Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler - Deconstructing the AI device and confronting it with the physical world

Terms

• Plan 9- developed by Bell Labs to replace Unix with the concept of decentralised operating systems