Author Archives: Eva M.

Observe #4 – option 1

Posted on by

My topic for this Observe is an email that I got from YouTube. Here’s a screenshot:

So basically, YT is telling me that it’s going to get rid of some of my subscriptions–only that sounds bad, so instead those subscriptions “will soon move.” The last sentence of the main paragraph is a better summary of what’s really going on: “Your current secondary artist channel subscriptions will become inactive.” But don’t worry, YouTube user! YT is doing this for your sake! Deleting your subscriptions without your permission isn’t a violation of your freedom as a user, it’s just to make it “easier for you to keep up with your favorite artists and their music!”

I realize that I’m making this sound pretty dramatic, when in fact, this probably is going to make things easier for users. But it sure does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Observe 7 – option 1

Posted on by

A couple days ago I was looking through the apps on my phone’s homescreen, and I noticed that Instagram had installed itself.

This was an understandably alarming development. At first I wasn’t sure what to do–delete the app immediately and hope it wasn’t a virus? That probably would’ve been the safest move, but I chose to open it instead. When I did, I got this screen:

Pretty standard login screen to be greeted with the first time you open an app you’ve downloaded–except for how I didn’t download this app.

Later on, I decided to search my phone for the app–just for kicks, and to see what happened. Except apparently I didn’t have it?

I still have no idea why this happened, but whatever the cause, it’s a pretty unsettling example of software constructing my experience as a user, definitely without my consent.

Observe 6 – option 1

Posted on by

Usually I kind of struggle to find a subject to do an Observe on, but this week I knew immediately.

On Thursday, I got a Google News notification on my phone; in the past, these notifications have usually been about political headlines (which is a nice way of saying that Google occasionally lets me know when Donald Trump does something stupid). This notification informed me that filmmaker David Lynch had released a game called “David Lynch Teaches Typing.”

My first question was why google thought I’d be interested in that. I know I haven’t done any recent searches on Lynch, or typing, or even computer games.

My only guess is that Google knows I’m into Nine Inch Nails, and that the group has collaborated with Lynch multiple times in the past. I guess? Honestly, this one’s beyond me. The game itself is a topic for another day, and deserves to be the topic of its own Observe.

Observe 5 – option 1

Posted on by

I ended up watching a lot of TV on Amazon Prime over the weekend, and I noticed a couple of new things. The first was that sometimes there’s an ad before an episode begins, which looks like this:

When you move your cursor, a tiny little button with the word “Skip” in dark gray text appears in the lower right hand corner:

Clicking the button skips the ad and takes you straight to the actual content. . . but you can only click it if you can see it, and Amazon makes it really hard to see. I couldn’t see it in the screenshot even when I turned my brightness up all the way. This is, undoubtedly, because Amazon doesn’t want you to skip the ad. In fact, you don’t even know it’s an option unless you happen to move your cursor around. Jeez.

Observe 8-option 1

Posted on by

I almost never use twitter. And apparently twitter has noticed this, because this morning I received this message in an email:

This is confusing for many reasons.

  1. Since when is Twitter’s theme color orange?
  2. I made a twitter account under the username @TheGreaterBelow?
  3. Apparently, all I used the account for was to retweet subpar memes and stuff about Nine Inch Nails?
  4. Also, it looks like–for some reason–I used my real name? What??
  5. If I can barely even remember making this account, it has to be at least kind of old, so why am I only getting an email about it now?
  6. I understand the social media strategy of luring in users by proclaiming that they have “notifications” (the true meaning of which is a topic for another time). If I looked at my tumblr account and it said “Look! You have 20 notifications!”, that would be one thing. But to send me an email just to tell me I have one notification? As well as calling it the one notification–as if to make absolutely sure that I know there’s only one. That’s just bad marketing; no one wants to use an app that goes out of its way to tell you you’re not very popular.

So why did twitter do this?

My only guess is that the email was sent to all users who had been inactive for a certain amount of time, its creators making the assumption that, since the users been inactive, they’d probably have lots of notifications to look through. If that’s the case, I think that in most instances, the email was probably successful; it would read to users as “look at all the cool stuff you missed! Come check it out!” However, when I received this email someone who generally Does Not Use Twitter, it was saying something more along the lines of “literally one thing happened while you were gone. That’s it.”

If my theory is correct, all I can think to take away from this is that apparently my lack of online social connection is beyond the comprehension of both man and machine. Sorry?

Project 5 brainstorm

Posted on by

replace images on Playboy’s website with images from Target’s website

replace Target’s images with Playboy’s

replace images on the NRA’s website with headlines about gun violence (from https://www.theguardian.com/world/gun-crime, maybe?

replace a website’s “comment” button with a button that says “complain,” or “scream into the void,” or “beg for validation,” etc. Maybe the text on the button changes?

replace every image on Amazon’s homepage with a photo of Nicholas Cage

every link on the Oscars’ website takes you to google search results for “who is oscar”

replace headlines on a news site with headlines from Mad magazine

replace the subject line in every email in your inbox with google’s privacy policy

Project 3

Posted on by 

j('.yt-simple-endpoint').prepend("xxx");

j('.yt-simple-endpoint').append("rox69xxx");







j('span b').append(" BCE");







j('h1').append(", Bitch.");

j('h2').append(", Bitch.");







j('a').prepend("Like, ");

Project 4

Posted on by 

// ==UserScript==
// @name Playboy2
// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version 0.1
// @description no pictures!
// @author You
// @match *://*.playboy.com/*
// @include *://*.playboy.com/*
// @grant none
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// @require http://arts445.courses.bengrosser.com/files/ready-vanilla.js
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
<%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%> 'use strict';
<%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%> var j = jQuery.noConflict();
<%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%> j('img').css('display','none');

})();

OBSERVE #3 (option 2)

Posted on by

For this Observe, I focused on a certain feature of Tumblr. Sometimes when I open the mobile app, there’s a message at the top of the screen telling me that some person or organization is now taking questions. I always assumed that this notification meant that the Q&A was going on right then. However, at least in this scenario, that was not the case. When I clicked on the banner, it took me to the page in the second screenshot, and only there, did it tell you that the event was actually happening on February 26th. So why did I assume that it was happening as I was seeing the notification? In the past, I’ve seen similar banners that I think might have specified that questions were currently being answered (something like, “[person] is taking questions now“). If I did see banners like that, then my assumption makes sense, but there’s a chance that there was no such specification, and I was just making assumptions about the events’ timing in the same way that I am now. If that’s the case, why did I make that assumption? It could have been based around the idea that, originally, tumblr organized content based on the time it was posted/reblogged, so whatever I was saw first (at the top of the screen) on my dash was the most recent post. The fact that the banner was located above that first post may have made it seem even more current than what was on my dash.

There’s a decent chance I’m the only one who made all those assumptions. But if I’m not, did tumblr deliberately place the banner to be misleading about the event’s timing? Or is it just at the top because it’s been promoted?

The banner on my dash

The page I got when I clicked on the banner