Weekend Update

Just checking in while I know I have steady access to Internet for the day, I'll attempt to update again late tonight once I'm home. I've had a productive day with the Web Ecology folks and fellow Internet researchers. Heard a lot of interesting presentations and work that hopefully I will get to talk about after the weekend is over. With regards to my own work, I pitched my overall thesis concept and ideas for prototypes. It's amazing how succint you can be about your presentation and ideas when you have to put something together very quickly. Here's the gist of my presentation straight from my written notes:

  • Study done last year that avg. American consumes 12 hrs of media a day, a growing portion of which is online
  • We're taking a machine-centered view of technology, building things with immediacy and efficiency in mind - but is this a good thing?
  • So I'm not focusing on the content, because we know people are ridiculous in their own ways
  • Examining how we're ceding control of our interactions to the machines of the Internet, we trust them too much
    • We trust Google to give us all the answers, what books to read, where to buy from, etc.
    • Captcha systems are designed to make machines smarter while treating us like idiots
    • URL shortening services turn something cryptic beacuse we've arbitrarily decided we can only write 140 characters - we have no idea where we're going!
    • We don't need to write anything down because we assume we can always look it up online, that content is always available
  • I'm looking at what happens when we introduce irrational behavior into our interactions?
  • Make things that challenge how we're engaging the medium
  • Create unexpected or unpredictable outcomes that change our perception of how the Internet can be built
  • Ideas / Prototypes:
    • Google Search that makes the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button a serendipitous event - generates a fortune that's stored as a browser cookie (I'm Feeling Lucky button)
    • A captcha system that asks rhetorical questions (What's your favorite color? Pick a number from 1 to 30. What is the meaning of life?)
    • URL shortener that returns back the URL the previous person entered (Japanese cafe inspiration)
    • URL shortener that assigns users a single short permalink whose unpacked address constantly changes (what would the indication be? tie into delicious)
    • Create a website that only one person can access at a time

So I ran through those points and wrapped it in the context of a software company looking to introduce our irrational behavior online. The prototypes were met with a positive, and mostly humorous response, which is good because I think the overall tone is tongue-in-cheek even if all the prototypes are not. There was a lot of good discussion around the last idea in particular, about the website that only one person can access at a time. I've added some of my notes from the resulting discussion, granted most of those in attendance are social media researchers, programmers, and non-artists so they're able to offer a different perspective. On the other hand, a lot of their specific suggestions add on a lot of weight that may not be conceptually necessary as a critical design piece:

  • Biggest mind nugget to consider was the idea of the queue - what happens to people who don't get access to the site? (could the queueing experience be more engaging than landing on the site?)
  • While they're waiting, could they see the name / email address / IP address of the person currently "in control" of the site? (is IP address too abstract?)
  • Someone mentioned being able to track the site "ownership" as an RSS feed (could be an interesting subversion of RSS as an owner log rather than content log)
  • Perhaps linking it to Facebook via Facebook Connect to establish firm identities for users? (bit too heavy)
  • Have the site just display a countdown (or count-up) of how long the user has remaining in their ownership time (or how long they have been there)
  • The functionality of the site could be (and I've been thinking) would be shallow and inane on purpose - what about like a Flash banner game or something we'd normally avoid completely - when you lose the game you lose your ownership of the site (coincidentally enough someone brought up Lose/Lose)
  • There's an interesting dynamic online between wanting to be seen & observed versus our fear of our data getting out of our control, this could play on that

Given the feedback/discussion here really gravitated towards that idea, I'm working on figuring out the technical aspects of it now and hope to get a prototype up and running by tomorrow to get some further feedback from my peers while I have their attention. I tentatively decided to call it "The Highlander" for now, for (hopefully) obvious reasons.