As I mentioned previously in class, I stay logged out of Facebook on my phone whenever I’m not intentionally using the app. Whenever I decide to use the mobile app I have to manually enter my password (this is enough of a pain to do that it keeps me from mindlessly scrolling my Facebook feed – something I used to do regularly, but once I realized it made me feel pretty crappy I decided to cut it out as much as possible). I don’t think Facebook likes this very much. At least once a week, after logging into the app, Facebook will pull up the window on the right to “helpfully” provide me with faster ways to log into the app. This past week I tried to log into a separate app account with my Facebook account (and consequentially, the logged-out app), but since it failed I actually received an email from Facebook encouraging me to log in. Facebook wants me to have their app easily accessible so that I will use it more. Facebook needs users to produce and consume the content on their platform, but by leaving my account logged out I am actively avoiding both producing and consuming. Facebook then tries to pester me back into using their platform. This also reminds me of the phrase where “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Facebook wants to reengage any users that aren’t as active on their platform because without those users they lose value in their company, and they choose to act friendly and helpful in order to appease their users.

i maybe obsess over my screen space? not sure how else to explain the quiet rage that i feel when i do this every day. i guess it’s more of an invasion and interruption of privacy, space, thought, etc, and that’s what really gets me. so a parallel between screen space and personal space.

My project 0 this time is more based on something that happens behind the scenes that we don’t see but can encounter without realizing it. Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, and mining cryptocurrency has become widely popular. I know of it but not too much about it. A basic run down is that it is currency that doesn’t exist, or isn’t at all physical, and isn’t regulated by any government. Computers can “mine” for it by solving equations (or something similar) and using it’s own power to find the currency. Now, when you go to websites, the owners of that website can use your processing power to mine for cryptocurrency. Amazingly smart, I must say, but that sucks as a user. Your computer slows trying to do too many things at once, which may be the first indication that someone is using your computer to mine. The only way I knew this was happening was because I use an chrome extension called Ghostery. Ghostery is really nice (this isn’t sponsored, I promise) and had an article on their website saying their the extension stops websites from using your computer to mine. The Pirate Bay is one of these websites that stated using such techniques to mine. Coinhive is one service that will mine for you on your website.

This software isn’t one that constructs a user to be a certain way, but I think that with it’s stealthy ways, innocent users will blame their own software or hardware on their slow speeds. Users would consider checking everything on their side as wrong, rather than assuming the website is abusing its power. If you think about it, Cryptocurrency is really the thing controlling people, going so far as to steal website users processing power. People are obsessing over something that is so volatile, it could crash at any minute, yet people are willing to spend so much money on equipment for it.

At least once a week, often times more, Facebook likes to notify me when it is someone’s birthday; about 85% of the time it is someone I have rarely or never talked to and know by association. I find it interesting, yet annoying that Facebook notifies me of birthdays that I do not care about. Facebook is trying to acknowledge a celebratory event for someone’s life, which is a good thing, but alerting people who have no connection to said person’s birthday just become irritated (me). I also find it interesting because this specific person is someone I went to high school with, never really interacted much with, and have not seen in almost 4 years. I feel like Facebook wants me to reminisce on the past, which I don’t particularly want to do.

For this week I wanted to call attention to the Facebook Notification menu. When you log into facebook you will almost always see a bright red number next to the icon of the earth to let you know that you have new notifications. Your eye is drawn to it and you click on it. Often it won’t even be things that pertain to you specifically, it will be things that your friends have posted or things that they are doing near you. It’s like facebook is so desperate to get you to pay attention to it that it will find the most ridiculous reasons to give you notifications.

This week I noticed how I was scrolling and scrolling (and scrolling) through Pinterest. More specifically, I was obsessed with seeing the entire picture of each pin. As you can see in my screenshot below, you can’t actually see the entire image for any of the pins. This caused me to scroll up and down the screen to view them. The scrolling caused more partial images to show. This then led me to begin the cycle again. I also noticed that a lot of the pins were the same pin, but that didn’t stop me from scrolling through to see if there were any different pins. After a while, and due to the repetitive nature of the pins, I was able to pull myself away from the screen.

The choice of layout for the pins definitely aids in my habitual scrolling, but the interesting part is that the pin sizes are largely determined by the people who upload the pins, not by Pinterest. There is a width limit of 238 px, which is determined by Pinterest, but the height is proportionally adjusted based on the image you upload.

We have talked about the “…” when texting or messaging, but this one is specific to commenting. I’m in a lot of Facebook groups and tend to post a lot of funny comments (that may be subjective but I digress). When I post something funny, or a question, or even something that may get people mad, this “…” really makes me anxious. I want someone to respond to me and I don’t know who it is or what they are going to say at all. The dots jump and change from grey to black. The box itself just comes up when anyone is typing. It used to say “a friend is typing” or something similar to that but now these dots just seem to follow me everywhere in social media. The bouncing almost mimics typing in a way but still leaves me wonder who is typing and what they are typing and if they are even responding to me. It drives me nuts it’s almost as bad as checking from “likes” or “reactions” as they are called now. If they don’t respond and decide against commenting, I never get the closure I’m waiting for. I wonder how many times I’ve done that to someone else.

To me, these dots are different from the normal dots we see when messaging personally. These are open to anyone, more “anonymous”. I feel more like a stand up comedian who can’t see the audience and if anyone laughed at the joke I just said. It’s more of an open platform and just as nerve wracking as the personal message “…”.

I find this interesting how facebook tries to make an emotional attachment with me. By showing me an older photo that I previously posted, facebook hopes for me to tie my connection from that memory into the post itself. On top of that, there are phrases like “we care about you and the memories you share” and “We thought you’d like to look back on this.” Facebook in a sense puts words in our mouth and reels you in. Obviously facebook doesn’t care about anything except using our info to make money. But instead of saying that up front, they use Your Facebook Memories to lie and make you feel happy and comfortable.

I don’t consider myself obsessed with Duolingo, but I do utilize it for keeping up on my Spanish skills. When I launch the website, however, I tend to immediately obsess about my stats. I scroll along the right side of the page, scanning my stats to see where I stand. Typically, nothing really changes.

After checking in with my stats panel, I’ll look over my practiced skills on the left side of the page. It’s interesting to note that while the skills section takes up a majority of the page, I always start by scanning the stats bar on the right.

Once I’ve reviewed my skills and their respective strength bars, I decide on my plan of action. I always start by trying to fill up at least one strength bar on my previously full skills each time I’m on Duolingo. If all of my bars are full, I’ll go on to the next skill lesson on my path (which would cause another strength bar to show up).

Below, you can see two screen shots showing the strength bars in various stages of completion. In the top image, you can see many full strength bars. The skill icon even turns gold when that skill is fully strengthened. In the bottom image, you can see mostly in-progress strength bars. The icons are in full color, which helps to draw my attention to them.

Part of my obsession with checking my stats and running through a certain path has to do with how Duolingo determines my stats. As per the usual, completing a task fills up the meter. However, my strength bars will go down after inactivity. In the top image, you can see how my Basics 2 skill has gone down — that’s only the third level on Spanish! This is because I haven’t interacted with Duolingo and the content that’s in the skill section. When I took these screen shots, I was actually compelled to fill my Basics 2 strength bar all the way up, even though that’s not my normal path. The individual meters and declining stats due to inactivity definitely has me a bit hooked to keep them filled. If anything, it gives me something to look forward to doing each time I log in.

Regardless of where I am, especially while I am just sitting around my apartment or at the library doing homework, my phone sits nearby with the screen up. My phone will light up if I get notifications and it immediately attracts my attention. Several months ago I decided muted the push notifications for the majority of apps on my phone (particularly all social media except Snapchat) in order to control what notifications are important to me and what is allowed to distract me. However, I still allow notifications for GroupMe, G-Mail, and Snapchat because they are a means of communication with my close friends or they send work notifications. This week I started paying closer attention to how I responded to these notifications, and I noticed that I am immediately compelled to open an email, group chat, or Snapchat notification as soon as it is received on my phone. Just having 1 or 2 unread messages can sometimes be too many unread messages for me. I decided to practice waiting to clear the notification, and it actually stressed me out to leave the red circle notifications uncleared on my home screen. This feeling persisted even if I knew that the unread message was unimportant. The discomfort with the unknown of an unread message is particularly bad with Snapchat because with no message preview I automatically have the mindset that every incoming message could be important. In contrast, I noticed that I do not check Instagram or Facebook frequently because there is no notification urging me to check the app and clear it.

I had a disappointing experience with apple’s tech support (surprise). And i admit, while i wouldn’t say i generally obsess over it (slick and functional design lets it slip into the background), my life is pretty preoccupied with the OS X, and when things go wrong i’d admit to obsession. Anyways, for this post, while hopefully i’m not cheating by maybe avoiding the software itself, i was thinking about the feeling of pre-programmed pleasantries and flattery. Personally I hate it at all times, and it just makes a bad transaction even worse. Maybe it’s a kind of uncanny valley thing. I was talking to my friend Nicole about it and she brought up the metroPCS customer service, where the real humans on the line seem to be forced to be extraordinarily complimentary (along the lines of, when you ask them how they’re doing, they say things like “well just GREAT now that I’m on the phone with YOU!!”), which I started to roll my eyes at, but Nicole admitted that it eventually seeped into her consciousness and made her feel better.

after arguing and going nowhere:

post-chat-window email follow-up:

update: follow up email sent around 6am this morning

For this week I was most interested in the interface of Discord and how it keeps the user addicted to the discussion going on between users.  Discord does this by indicating people are currently talking on a channel by having a white semi circle next to channels you have not read up on.  For channels that have consistent discussion this can be rather addicting as the white semi circle will constantly reappear reminding you that there is new chat to be read.  Also, while typing in a channel it will state which users are currently typing.  This is to help keep discussion going as the user knows someone is reading and conducting a response.  Sometimes if multiple people are typing at the same time the dialogue will read as Several people are typing.  For channels with a lot of discussion going on it can get quite addicting due to the constant updating, however if there are not a lot of users on a channel or not a lot of discussion then the channel is mostly dead till someone starts a discussion.

What caught my attention this week was the addition of gifs for stories on Instagram and how people have been using them. This feature came out this week and when I read about it, I thought it was pretty dumb but this is likely due to the fact that I have never used Instagram stories so this feature would be useless to me. What I noticed from how people I follow have been using this new function is that there has been a trend where people “post their aesthetic in gifs,” or another one where you “search your name and the first gif describes you,” or things of that nature. I haven’t really seen anyone use gifs on Instagram in another way yet and I’m curious as to if this is just the people I follow or if this trend is on most accounts right now. Another thing that I think is interesting is that Snapchat added “animated stickers and filters” last year. Instagram has taken a lot of ideas from Snapchat, like stories for example, and the timing of animated stickers and gifs makes me wonder whether it was a coincidence or not.

Option 1: I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a sponsored post. Sponsored posts appear by accounts you don’t follow and are often trying to sell you something. In this case, the add was by an account called optimumnutrition and trying to sell me breakfast oats. Instagram is driving me to act on this ad and hopefully click to buy some product. I think they particularly chose this ad because just previously in the day, I was surfing safari on whole foods looking at different products to order (oatmeal being one of them). I don’t think its a coincidence that this product was chosen for the sponsored post.

I feel like the social media I look at the most is my school email, because that is where important messages are sent. I check it constantly throughout the day, not wanting to miss anything that might be important to my school work or something. The things that I immediately check are 1, if there are any new emails, and 2. who the emails are from, because I will pay attention to important emails, but disregard and not read the unimportant ones.

This screenshot comes from the collection of links at the start of this assignment. From the “duplicate status” link, I was drawn in and began clicking through the pictures. I realized that I liked looking at the next and previous arrows as they lit up when the mouse got near the arrow. The lighting up aspect gave the arrow an anthropomorphic quality, as if it were a loved one’s face lighting up as I walked in the room. Those happy feelings, even if they are subconscious, drive my obsession to click the arrow. The collection of intriguing images certainly enhances this obsession, as I’m curious about what witty or interesting thing I might see next. Even when the next image isn’t as wonderful as I had hoped, I have faith that there is a gem in there somewhere. It’s almost like a gambling addiction, but instead of cash, I’m gambling my life away in hopes of that “big win” in the funny or interesting image department.