Study Task 7 - Practical Planning

I have decided to create a digital zine for my practical piece, using information gathered from a survey as well as from the research I have cumulated for my essay, to create profiles of digital users in the near future. I think this is an interesting idea as it combines my interest in character design and cyberculture. I need to work out what kind of questions I want to ask, so I can create a profile for each character. I aim to create 5 of these profiles, to look at a wide range of identities and personalities.

I have created a rough mock-up of what a page of the zine may look like - an individual mirrored with some of their online habits, maybe fabricated screenshots of messaging and a bunch of their online presences - facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.

I am thinking about using real people for this, which could lead to some interesting outcomes, rather than creating characters for the future. I am not sure yet.

COP Session 8/2/18

Practical Project - What is your work about?

• Ideas around letters, postcards, old phones, emails, methods of communication
• Cameras / facial recognition / identity 
• Online banking / fraud / hacking
• Illegal streams of films
• Dating apps
• Gaming
• Celebrity / instagram / Youtube
• Self - deprecating memes
• Deep web / black market
• Physical interaction absent online 
• VR
• Anonymous
• Advertising 
• Students / business sharing online - work
• Gifs
• Catfishing
• Look at documentaries - tech increase
• Diagrams 
• News stories / personal stories of online experiences
• Loving the idea of someone

James Bridle: Something is Wrong on the Internet

Online essay from which I pulled key quotes. Discussing the nature of Youtube in regard to children's safety and what they are exposed to.

"The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally."

"One of the thus-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer."

"I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube."

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level."

"On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers."

"I am simply illustrating how the structure of YouTube facilitates the delamination of content and author, and how this impacts on our awareness and trust of its source."

"As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content."

"What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine."

Study Task 5: Practical Approaches - Creating a digital identity

I am interested in looking at how we craft our own identity when online. I want to take a survey and examine elements such as

• Why we choose the usernames that we do
• Which pictures we choose to represent us
• Who do we speak the most to online
• Who do we meet online

By curating this information, I hope to create a few profiles of what I imagine digital users in the future will be like. I want to incorporate elements of character design and curate a digital zine with this information, with an overview of different digital users in the future, and how they will be using the internet. I think this could be a really interesting way of presenting the idea of identity and communication online. 

From my essay I have gathered information from a range of theorists and examples to help me understand the scope of internet usage.

I think a survey will also help me get a good idea of what individuals are using the internet for. After the session today, I do want to explore how we use the internet outside of the obvious services and sites (Instagram, facebook, etc.). A survey would be biased, however, as I don't think I could access as wide a range of individuals as my essay examines, just due to the nature of internet reach in certain circles.