For project 1, I decided to analyze what type of information social media applications ask you when you first sign up for an account; I wanted to see how little information I could give them, how much incorrect information I could get away with giving them, and what steps the applications took to try to get me to give them more information that desired. Each day I analyzed a different application’s sign up process, and discovered that while some of the applications have age requirements, others do not, but they ask for more access to functions on your phone instead. To begin this process, on the first day I logged out and had all the applications “forget” my accounts, and then I deleted the application off of my phone. I only re-downloaded them when it was the individual applications turn to be analyzed.

Day 1: Facebook                    

For the first day, I analyzed facebook, so I didn’t go any time without having access to the application like I did for the other two applications. To sign up, it asked me for my mobile phone or email address, and I opted to use my email because it is less personal. When entering my name, I tried to only put a first name, but it required me to have one, so I made Smith my last name. It then asked for my gender, and because I couldn’t get around it, I complied and gave them the information, although there was only a male and female option, which in this point in time in history I feel is a bit unfair. When it asked for my birthday, I tried to see if there was an age limit to sign up, and you the earliest birthday I could put was February 6th, 2013. Once I clicked continue, Facebook told me they were “unable to process my request at this time”; I think it was because i gave them false information, which I find very interesting because I don’t know how it would know the information was fake.

Day 2:  Instagram

For the second day, I re-downloaded instagram and analyzed the application and the information required to create an account. I found that after hardly 24 hours of not interacting on Instagram, I felt a bit withdrawn and out of touch. I think that not only speaks to my social media habits and constant need for entertainment, but also to my desire to see what other people are doing.

It asked for most of the same information as Facebook: phone number or email, full name and password. When it asked for me to pick a username, I chose one that reflected nothing of my name or personality – user1234567891. What I found most interesting in my analysis of Instagram was that while it didn’t ask for too much personal information, it asked me multiple times during account creation to connect to my Facebook account and to sync my phone contacts with the application to “find friends”. It also asked me twice if I wanted to save my login info for quicker login in the future – I said no, both times. This speaks to Instagram’s attempt to not only have consistent users, but to gain more information on their consumers by offering to connect all social media accounts together for an easier user experience when sharing posts. It also pushes users to engage with others and “find friends”, as if they were implying that most of your friends already have Instagram. One aspect of Instagram that I found very irritating is that there is no easy way to delete your account if you want to; it’s not in the account settings, and frankly, after looking for a good 15 minutes, I don’t know if there’s a way you can delete it.

Day 3: Snapchat

Not having snapchat for almost three days was strange at first, but actually made me feel better in the end. After I got over the initial feeling of missing out, it was actually relieving not to have a way to constantly check people’s snapchat stories, which are probably most active during the weekend. After going through the same routine that I did with Facebook and Instagram (phone number/email, name, gender, and birthday), I found that I was able to sign up with no last name, and with a birthday in the year 2016. What I found interesting about snapchat is that after entering my information, they had me do one of those picture tests to prove I wasn’t a robot; I wonder why snapchat of all applications asked for this, while Facebook and Instagram did not. Similarly to Instagram, Snapchat also asked me to have access to my camera roll; however, when I tried to say not, an “Oops!” message popped up, as if I had accidentally clicked no instead of yes. The message said “Snapchat is a camera app! To continue, you’ll need to allow camera access in settings”. Not only did they encourage me to turn on access for my camera roll, but they did it for the microphone as well. I found that almost all social media applications, including the three that I analyzed, require some form of access to a function on your phone in order for it to be used properly.

I wasn’t really sure what to do as a performance nor was I confident on choosing any social media. So I decided to use the big four in the industry; Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. I posted really wack and boring pictures on each social media platform but also uploaded it to my Snap story. With over 500 friends on Facebook, 300+ followers on Instagram, 100+ friends on Snapchat, and 200 followers on Twitter, I wanted to see what response I would get, if any, to see which post gains most attention and if any can influence the other. Based of the total amounts of followers, I figured that if everyone viewed my story they would possibly view the post on instagram or facebook. I felt like using Snapchat as a spotlight for all these weird posts. With 70 views on my story, I got 1 like on instagram and one “what the fuck is this shit,” in response to my Snapchat story.

So it seems like no one really cared what they saw on my story and bothered checking it out on the social media platform. No one really went and gave it a like. No one questioned the weirdness or random posts, because I believe that I already have a long history or being random and posting literally dumb shit and hashtags everywhere. I thought it was interesting to see in total all these followers in social media and just not really interact or question what we do on social media. 

The platform I used was a chatroom service called Zobe. I hadn’t heard of it before; I came across it in a google search for “safe chat room.” I was greeted with this screen:

Right off the bat, you’re being forced to categorize yourself. The options from which you select your age are heavily indicative of this site’s intended user demographic. As the age ranges go up in years, they also increase in range. The 13 to 17 group covers four years, the 18 to 23 group covers five, and the last one is just anything at or above 24. If you’re 23, you’ll be put into a different category than if you were 24; if you’re 25, you could be put into the same category as an 86-year-old. This implies that the site’s intended audience is relatively young (around 24 years old at the high end).

The “girl/guy” question shows that the site anticipates its users to fit neatly into one of those two boxes. Either they don’t get many nonbinary users, or they just don’t care.

In terms of my actual performance, I initially had a few different ideas. I ended up deciding to ask some questions in a chat room, and then take snippets of other users’ responses and use the words do a Mad Lib.

Each time I entered a chat room, I recorded my screen for the duration of the session. I then rewatched the sessions with a Mad Lib pulled up next to them.

I would pick a place in the conversation to start, and from there I would fill the blanks in the Mad Lib with the first word of that kind to appear in the chat. In this example, the Mad Lib first asked for a noun, so I picked one from the chat. From then on, I filled each blank with the next compatible, nonrepeating word from the chat.

Note: I did these Mad Libs without first looking at the end result; I put in the words blind.

Since I needed my topic or question to be controversial enough to guarantee a response, I started with questions like, “What are your feelings about Donald Trump?” After plugging words from the responses to that question into an online Mad Lib generator, I was confronted with this:

Not all of it makes sense, but there are a couple winners (“a physique like Donald Trump” and “a profile like Hitler” were two of my personal favorites).

In a separate chat at a later date, I asked “Do you guys have anything you want to say?” I used words from those responses. The responses to that question led to this:

Overall, I was impressed by how infrequently people swore and insulted each other. My questions were being acknowledged and responded to. So far, things were going well.

Until they weren’t.

I asked the same question as the first time: “What are you guys’ feelings about Donald Trump?” But the conversation quickly devolved. Here is the Mad Lib created from those responses (warning for use of homophobic slurs by an anonymous user).

 The results were, admittedly, hit-and-miss. In general, it’s safe to say that online chat rooms (or at least the ones I was in) are not exactly a font of open-mindedness and wit. One user, out of the blue, declared that

Aside from all the negativity, chat room services like Zobe seem to be an easily accessible place for people to voice their opinion. The site never asks for an email, phone number, or for you to create an account, meaning anyone with an internet connection can use it. It provides free, anonymous interaction—something that was once highly sought after on the internet. The anonymity allows people to say what they want with little consequence.

Chat rooms can be a great place. That said, enter at your own risk.

I decided to (AB)USE Instagram. I’ve been using it a lot lately, but I’ve never really thought much about how it works beyond the posting, liking, commenting, and using hashtags to put your picture in a group with similar pictures.

Continue reading →

I am someone who subscribes to a lot of newsletters but rarely ever reads any of them.  When starting this project, I had over 10,000 unread emails, the majority of which I can guarantee were either spam or unwanted news letters.

    I decided to take a 3 day input of my emails.  So in three days I had received 279 emails.  22 of those I had read while the rest I either wanted to unsubscribe from the newsletter or wasn’t interested in the article sent to me.  So, I clicked the spam and unsubscribe bubble on google for 207 emails.  My project thus was to determine how many of these e-mails would actually get unsubscribed and which one’s would continue sending me newsletters.

Overall, I thought the project went better as expected.  And by better, I mean far more of my e-mails have stayed in the spam folder than not.  There are some persistent e-mails though.  For example above the second to last reported e-mail was from Groupon which I have in the past unsubscribed to multiple times and still receive emails from them.  Of course, this time was no different as I still got an e-mail from Groupon after unsubscribing.

I read up on Groupon’s e-mail practices and I am not the only one with such an issue.

In fact, Groupon’s e-mail marketing is such a problem that the Australian Communications and Media Authority issued a warning to the company about its’ unsubscribe process.  Apparently when signing up one signs up for multiple different types of Groupon newsletters thus to unsubscribe one has to unsubscribe to each and every kind of newsletter instead of just one of them.  Unfortunately, this seems like an ordeal that I’ll have to contact customer support over.  I am happy I learned about interesting laws such as the Spam Act in Australia which regulates commercial marketing and necessitates the need for a functional unsubscribe button, informed consent, and proper identification.

Despite hangups with groupons unsubscribe process most unsubscribing and sending to the spam box worked out well, with even a couple of lists I was subscribed to sending me a confirmation e-mail that I was removed from the list.  It is possible though that I will have other groupon like e-mail problems though as many newsletters I receive only come once a week or are somewhat infrequent.  Thus it is possible by Friday I could still be receiving e-mails from sources I shouldn’t be.

For my project, I decided to take the common social media platform Instagram and use it in a manner contrary to what it was intended to be. I decided to take a black screen and post it on instagram as if it were a real photo, and add a caption to make it seem like there is content in the picture. I tagged each picture #blindinstagramproject, and wanted to see how many people would “like” a picture if there was nothing in it.

In addition, I was taking note of how many/which people liked it, because there is a trend on Instagram of liking every post on your timeline, regardless of the content.

What I found is that, with every picture I posted, the only people who liked them were members of my family. I take that to mean they will like things I post regardless of context. They’ll support me with whatever stupid stuff I post on my social media. Interestingly, I didn’t get anyone asking what the heck I was doing posting black screens on Instagram every day. It shows that people don’t take the time to question when weird things show up on their timeline, they’ll just accept the weirdness and move on.

This last picture is to show comparison between the amount of likes I got on the three pictures for the project and ones I have posted previously. As you can see, the amount of likes on the previous posts are exponentially bigger than the ones for the project.

In doing this project, my hypothesis of people just liking posts without paying attention to the content was proven to be false. However, there were people who did like my posts, members of my own family. I didn’t anticipate this, but it goes to show how family will support you even when what you’re doing makes no sense.

For Project 1 I explored with gmail for the weekend. My plan for approaching this was to look around at all the controls and widgets that gmail offers. An average user of this application just checks there inbox, and sends emails for the most part. The intended audience is students and people in the workplace who rely on communication and file sharing. I use gmail every single day and I only use it for those few functions. So the first part that I decieded to look was the chat portion of gmail which they call Hangouts. I remember using AIM back in the day through AOL, but I’ve never used googles instant messaging. There are three main buttons for this call/text function and they are Hangout Contact, Hangout Conversations and Phone Calls.

This picture is of the chat window and it’s in the bottom left area of the desktop window on the gmail webpage. This means that Google definitely still demes this a useful part of the application considering its so prominent on the screen every time you log into gmail You can add contacts, set moods, chat, and call too. For my calls they were free, but for international calls there is a charge. When you click the call button, there is a dollar sign that pops up next to an american flag.

The hangouts dashboard is put together very nicely. It is clear to see the simple and clean look of the interface. There is not too many colors or smaller buttons like an average desktop application. It has the look of a mobile smartphone like an iPhone or Galaxy. After using all of the communication functions on gmail, it is clear to see that this application has everything to offer. The majority of people at this point in time use there smartphones for calling and messaging through a carrier but this is an easy alternative if you are using a computer. All my reactions to this part of gmail show that it is basically trying to have an app for every form of networking. Email is definitely still used for school and work pretty often. And googles attempt to intertwine all these different apps into gmail sure shows that they have somewhere to store everything for you. By clicking through that chats calls and contacts, Google will redirect you to different layouts to interact with such as Google Voice, Google Contacts, and the Hangouts app which is on iOS and Android as well. Google provides an easy way to communicate in any form. It’s funny because I honestly get confused because Google has so many different sub applications that all have similar interfaces.

Another function of gmail that I used was the gmail labs. These are little programs that will change how your gmail works for you. So in a sense your customizing certain functions, but the lab can be taken off gmail at any time because they are tests. I felt a little bit of freedom having this capability of using these tests. So I sent in feedback to google complaining that Auto-Advance doesn’t work so that it would get taken off labs.

Gmail allows you to have custom themes on your desktop. The background is filled with a pre downloaded theme, or an image of your choice. I took a screenshot of my page and set it as the theme. I repeated this 4-5 times, making it so that the final image was a montage of many buttons and messages. This causes a lot of confusion when navigating through the page because you kind of forget which button works and which is from the image. Under settings you can click the share your theme, and gmail will provide you with a link of your theme. I emailed my theme to 5 of my good friends with the pre written phrase that Google provides for you..

Hey,

I’m using a custom theme in Gmail on the Web and I think you’ll like it too!

Check it out on your desktop or laptop.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?tm=1#settings/themes/customlight?https%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-j4MZyksspSU%2FWm99qh-QVRI%2FAAAAAAAAELA%2FU6NH0_fHO_4MVhq2IDF7QQiiH6yW2XyXQCLcBGAs%2Fs0%2FScreen%252BShot%252B2018-01-29%252Bat%252B2.01.18%252BPM.png

I thought using the application for something it’s not meant for would be sort of funny. It’s clear to see that gmail is very easy to use and the reason for having the themes is to make it even easier and more tailored for the user. And by making one very confusing I thought that would disrupt the system of gmail. I didn’t say anything to the people I shared the theme with, I just send the one that gmail provided me with

Background, Plan:

I chose to use Instagram and their Stories feature for my performance piece. Instagram rolled out their Stories feature in 2016 but I’ve never used it before, so I was excited to experiment with it and see how it impacted both my user experience and how it reflected the experience of my followers.

I decided to play with the literal meaning of a “story” as a described sequence of events. I chose to showcase someone else’s story, challenging the convention of posting my own personal stories to my personal account.  I uploaded photos to the slideshow gallery format and used them to tell a short story piece-by-piece over three days. I used words instead of pictures or video to describe the sequence of events to mimic the action of reading a book and to stand out against the expected photo/video format of Instagram stories. I intentionally kept the pieces visually consistent to show that they were part of the same story, but I changed the background colors to differentiate between installments. I posted each installment exactly 24 hours apart so only the third of the story that I wanted to showcase would be live at any given time. I observed how people responded and interacted with it based on the number of views and direct-message responses. Because Instagram approves of and almost encourages oversharing by allowing an unlimited number of story posts, I felt comfortable posting 8-10 pieces of a story per day.  

I chose to use a song that told a story rather than a published short story from a book because the line and verse breaks allowed for an easy way to distinguish story installments. The shorter text of a song was more appropriate for the three-day time frame. I shared a verse from “Danny, Dakota & the Wishing Well” by A Silent Film (2012) every day for three days. Each line from a verse was its own post to my story.

• Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvHBvzrKIg
• Lyrics: https://genius.com/A-silent-film-danny-dakota-and-the-wishing-well-lyrics

Day 1, Verse 1 – 10 posts: 

Day 2, Verse 2 – 9 posts: 

Day 3, Verse 3 – 8 posts: 

Audience Reaction: 

• Day 1: 203 → 160 (lost 43 people, 78% finished)
• Day 2: 170 → 135 (lost 35 people, 79% finished)
• Day 3: 176 → 126 (lost 50 people, 71% finished)

From the first to last post I retained about 62% of viewers.

I received 3 direct messages responding to or questioning my story posts. These are from (in order) a good friend, my best friend, and then an acquaintance. I also got a couple confused comments from friends in person.

Conclusion, Evaluation:

I had several questions before beginning the experiment:

• How many people would choose to view my story? I have a public account with 538 followers, so my story was visible to anyone who wanted to look.
• Will people be curious/interested and tap through until the end, or will they get bored and swipe away before they’re finished? Will their interest span multiple days, or will it diminish significantly by the third day where people will know what to expect?
• Will creating a “boring” story through sharing impersonal content lead to people unfollowing my account? How will it affect responses through direct-message? Will deviating from an expected posting style confuse close friends and/or strangers?  
• In a broader sense, is the unlimited Instagram Stories format effective in engaging users? How much content can you provide and still have people realistically tap all the way through? How does producing consistent, predictable content affect viewer retention? 

My first post in the first installment got 203 views (38% of followers), which dropped to 126 views (23% of followers) by the final post of the third installment. This drop in viewers over time was expected, but I was definitely surprised that 203 people were even willing to view my story to begin with. I was also surprised to see that most people (over 70%) tapped through to the end of the story once they had started the sequence, and this percentage didn’t diminish significantly over three days. I wasn’t surprised to see the amount of viewers decline over the course of the individual installations as well as over the course of the experiment. I lost two followers over the three days, but since my follower count fluctuates every couple of days because of spam/bot followers my overall follower count seems unaffected by the performance (admittedly, a relief). I was surprised that one of my acquaintances reached out to comment on my posts but I was happy to share her enthusiasm for the song. Changing my posting style from occasional, highly curated posts to a high number of seemingly random stories definitely attracted attention from the people who know me well; it’s interesting to see how much we can infer about a person from sudden changes in their online habits. 

I would be interested to see how the results changed with an experiment that used a longer, more complex story over a longer period of time or challenged the idea of an unlimited Instagram Story. I think the results of the experiment would have been much more dramatic even if I had continued it for just a fourth day. I’d also love to see the retention data for brands/artists that regularly share large amounts of consistent content on their stories – sharing content this way seems much more visible than I initially realized. 

For project 1 I chose to focus on the people who pop up on the “Needs Love” section of Snapchat.  The names who show up in this section are people you haven’t snapped in a long time and is Snapchat’s way to make you interact more with someone you may not have talked to in a while and therefor use their app longer to keep a conversation up with an old friend.  Well as it turns out nobody wants to respond to a Tindr match from three years ago.

My guidelines for this was to send the Needs Love people a random picture at any time of day.  Looking back I wish I would have set a more strict set of rules for this project such as sending a snap at a certain time of day or a specific image. However, I don’t think it would have changed the results too drastically.

Day 1

The People Who Needed Love

The Picture Sent

My sweet cat, Clarence

The Results

Observations

I’m not that surprise that Brittney didn’t respond because I haven’t spoken to her since the beginning of freshmen year of college.  Sanjel is my cousin so I was a little sad that she didn’t respond to a picture of my cat, but she also never texts me back so I guess I shouldn’t have been that disappointed about it.  Emily was the only person to respond of the three and she sent back a picture of her cat as well and suggested we set up a play date for them.

Day 2

The Picture Sent

I wasn’t even outside but there are somehow clouds. Also excited to say I made that filter.

The Results

Observations

This was the most successful day.  Richard is an old friend from middle school and even though we exchanged a few quick snaps it was still nice that he even responded.  Abby is someone I have probably had a total of three conversations with throughout high school so I was very surprised she responded which was interesting considering we never talked. I was actually disappointed Feenix didn’t respond since I was in our hometown and I had spoken to her barely a month ago.

Day 3

The People Who Needed Love

The Picture Sent

The Results

Observations

Absolutely no responses and actually Becca didn’t even open it.  Nick is an old Tindr match from fall 2015 that I quickly ghosted so no surprise at his lack of response.  Zach is someone I met during my time on the high school speech and I last saw him while we were judging a speech meet back in November, so once again it is not surprising I received no response.

Conclusion

I went into this thinking that it was going to be a lot harder than it actually was, but thats only because I lucked out on who Needed Love.  I wouldn’t mind repeating this again and trying to make it a little more personal or strange with the snaps.

I tried to implement my project in a few different ways. My idea was to show the picture of a picture, what was behind the camera. I posted mainly to Instagram, a photo platform where it would be a bit weird to show what goes on behind the scenes when what is usually shown is the final product. I commented on the posts like normal. I posted my first one also to Facebook to see if I could get any reactions from people not following me on Instagram. Since I hadn’t posted to Instagram in a while, I hoped the algorithm would be on my side and post closer to the top of people’s threads than if I had just constantly posting but I don’t really have that much control over it.

Over all, I didn’t get any responses questioning anything or even commenting on them. Most of my friends just liked it and maybe thought I was just being me. Since I noticed this, on the third and final day, I used a different phone in the final one to hopefully get a different response but now I realize I was probably fighting the algorithm and it might now have even shown up in order on people’s timelines. I think Instagram was the right platform but not this Instagram, maybe a past version without the algorithm. Maybe Snapchat would have been the better option for this. Since my account is public, random people can find me and random people that don’t follow me liked some of the photos.

Although this wasn’t as “successful” as I hoped it would be, it has given me ideas for future projects. How many steps back can I take this? How many phones can I get involved into this project? I think asking random people, whether I know them or not, to use their phone to take a picture of my phone or vice versa is a performance in itself. I tried not to explain what I was doing but they seemed interested in it once they saw me snap the picture. I think I would like to continue this series and try different ways of showing the weird perspective of taking pictures for social media.

I focused on the website Quick Draw, which is a game from google where the user is given a word to draw in 20 seconds and an AI will try and guess what is being drawn. The user is providing drawings, which gives data to this AI so that it can become smarter and learn to recognize and distinguish different things from one another. It’s typical use to be played as a fun past time and the audience is likely anyone because it was used for data collection, but I think it was mostly used by younger people since it became popular through social media like Tumblr and YouTube.

Day 1: When I started on day 1, I just had the idea that I wanted to draw what I wasn’t being told to draw. My original idea was to see my art among all of the other drawings and if other people didn’t draw what they were supposed to or how long it would be before it got taken down. After my first round of drawing, I went through the data to try and find one of my drawings and I noticed that it wasn’t organized in any particular order, and the only dates I saw were in January or March of 2017 (which maybe was just coincidence with all the random ones I clicked but I clicked a LOT.) Knowing this, I assumed my drawings weren’t shown because either all of the data wasn’t shown or it was so randomly organized I never was able to find them, but I think that’s more unlikely since all of the months were only between January and March. Instead of observing my drawings in the data sets, I changed my plan to be to test the game and the AI’s intelligence by drawing what was asked in less traditional ways. I also tried to do my best and “win” by drawing what was asked, but I was never able to win since I drew differently than how the game is normally played. For each day I played the game about 10 times.

Day 1 Example: I didn’t know what I was doing so I drew cats at first since that was the example I gave in class. Halfway through, I thought I could draw cats vaguely shaped like what was being asked, as shown by the results above.

Day 2: I noticed when looking at the data sets that most drawings were drawn in one particular angle, so to test the AI’s knowledge I would draw everything upside down. Most of my drawings weren’t guessed, but when they were I noticed that the drawing could be reversible so they would make sense upside down. To do this, I started by drawing in a sketchbook to have reference and then transferred that to the computer so that it would be easier for me and more accurate for the game to guess.

For example, the AI wasn’t able to guess snail, which to me looks pretty obvious. It was able to guess toothpaste since all of the drawings of toothpaste were drawn from all sorts of angles, and no angle would technically be considered upside down. 

This one surprised me because I feel like a sword can be clearly distinguishable from all angles, but once again all of the data collected is drawn one way so this could lead my drawing to be taken out of the picture. Out of all the drawing tests I did on the program, doing them upside down was the most fun for me. None of my drawings are wrong because they’re upside down, so if it could be found in the data there isn’t a reason anyone should report it and it’s teaching the AI to see things in more ways than one (you know, maybe, or maybe not since I’m just one person so the drawings might not do much.)

Some problems that I think could stop this test from giving the best results are drawing ability, the times given, and how the program has a limited list of things to guess from which might make it guess the right thing because there’s nothing else left.

Day 3: For day 3 I did 2 different drawing tests. The first one was based on the fact that I noticed how little the program would need to guess certain things, so I wanted to draw the words in the most minimal way possible; by using only basic shapes. This was the closest I got to getting 6/6 right out of all of my attempts, which I think shows that the AI can recognize things based on position once again and simple structure. I think what ended up confusing the AI during this the most was the extra lines and spaces since I was trying to separate the shapes so what I was doing would come across more clearly, but it still was able to guess a lot right.

This was a good example to me of how little the AI needs to recognize things. I was really surprised at a lot of the drawings it got right, and I think looking at the data from these tests probably shows the most interesting results since it is so surprising in some cases.  

It was also really funny to me because I ended up drawing really similar stuff a lot of the time because I wanted to keep it simple. The ones guessed right that I drew basically the same you can kinda tell where they were coming from, but they really don’t have that much in common at all.

Some problems with this test were that some of the words were shapes, so drawing that made it easier. I also found it hard to draw the most simple form of something and definitely think that I could have drawn too much which may have skewed the answer as well. Finally I also think that the limited list is a problem once again, and I wanted to explore that idea as well.

Extra test: I wanted to try and draw other words that appeared similar to the word being suggested. The game tells you what the AI thinks you are doing before it guesses correctly, so I wanted to try and take those original guesses and draw those instead. This test was the least interesting because I was drawing a different word completely than the one I was supposed to, so the AI always / almost always guessed wrong. It did however guess the word that I was drawing each time so it did know what I was actually drawing.

I thought I’d try my hand at crowdfunding some snack money off of Facebook, but I was a little bit wary from the start as I cruised down my timeline for the first time in about a year. All this evidence is anecdotal, but I was only seeing content about monumental life events (some of which were also asking for cash: totaled cars, lost jobs, etc., which made my request feel a little trivial and irreverent). It’s hard to say whether most of my peers on the site have moved on to only sharing these kinds of things, or if the newsfeed algorithm pushes that kind of content that hard, but I imagine it’s something like both, and probably something else I’m not thinking of. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t been on here for a long time so it’s a kind of bangers-only playlist, if you know what I mean. After the third day of posting and scrolling I started to see less significant content, but the likes were also down on those (a dozen or so for an interesting photo instead of hundreds for generic babies and engagements). I intended my posts to be somewhere between so lackluster/monotone as to stand out against the usual content and extravagantly attention-grabbing, in other words, average. I have no idea how it fared algorithm-wise, or how many people actually saw it in their timeline, but I did only get one like from the series and that was when I tagged Ben. I had thought that Ryan Griffis donated to the snack fund, but when I checked my venmo account later I realized it had happened in a dream. I was interested in this project because while I was hoping for success, in my gut I didn’t really think that would happen. Which is interesting because I’m used to running these sorts of one-off barter/art-trade arrangements IRL, but I don’t think I’m too savvy at it online.

facebook recognized my call for donations

not sure if it was the “snaxxx” but I got this ad after that post, and maybe my image looked like a macro? Hard to say.

I mentioned that Instagram is the social media platform I’m probably most obsessed with, so I decided to conduct my project by creating a new account.

Background: Instagram is typically used as a way to connect with friends, family, and influencers by following them and getting a glimpse into their life via pictures and captions. You can like pictures, post your own pictures, create stories and even save a picture you like to your collection (only you can see this). More often than not, a user will usually only follow people they know along with a few accounts they’re interested in (celebrities, fashion lines, lifestyle accounts, etc.). They get likes based on their followers and like pictures with content that interest them.

Problem: Sometimes I catch myself scrolling through Instagram without being genuinely interested in any of the content because its either irrelevant or posted by a distant friend I’ve lost touch with. And while the mainstream use of Instagram has been similar to Facebook in the sense that you follow people you know and post pictures that you hope will get likes by your followers (aka friends), I started to wonder what it would be like if you used Instagram solely for it’s picture taking/editing properties.

Question: What if you used Instagram purely for your own satisfaction and as a platform to archive pictures that are important to you? What if you didn’t want to follow anyone? What if you wanted to search certain content when you were only in the mood and save it to your collection if you like it? What if you didn’t want to be subject to the posting algorithm of Instagram and your followers? Ultimate Question: If you created an Instagram account and used it in a “Pinterest” manner by not following anyone and only searching content that interests you, would it still be a social media site? Or in other words, would it still connect you with people by means of followers and likes?

Plan: to create a food account, in which I won’t follow a single account or like any other pictures. What I will do however, is search food related content and save it to my collection and post 4 pictures of food each of the three days. To keep things semi-interesting, in the captions of my posts I will include relevant hashtags that relate to the picture. I will also keep my account public instead of private. What outcomes am I looking for? Im curious to see if my account receives any followers or if my pictures get any likes if I don’t participate in any interaction (following accounts, liking content) except for making hashtag captions and locations.

The 3-Day Trial:

DAY 1 (Friday)- Created the the Healthy Happy Eats Instagram Account. First Post: Picture; salmon dinner. Caption; 14 hashtags. Location; The Streets of Wood-field. Outcome; received 5 likes and 1 follower. Second Post: Picture; lattes and a candle. Caption; 10 hashtags. Location; Grand Lux Cafe. Outcome; 12 likes and 2 additional followers. Third Post: Picture; fruit at European market. Caption; 13 hashtags. Location; La Boqueria Mercat. Outcome; 16 likes and 1 additional follower. Fourth Post: Picture; almond milk latte. Caption; 10 hashtags. Location; Galway, Ireland. Outcomes; 9 likes. DAY 1 REVIEW: the account has 4 followers and a total of 42 likes between the 4 pictures.

DAY 2 (Saturday)- Fifth Post: Picture; brunch table. Caption; 17 hashtags. Location; La Pain Quotidien. Outcomes; 11 likes. Sixth Post: Picture; tea in a museum. Caption; 12 hashtags. Location; Tate Modern. Outcome; 5 likes. Seventh Post: nuts at European market. Caption; 13 hashtags. Location; La Boqueria Mercat. Outcomes: 11 likes and 1 additional follower. Eight Post: Picture; carrot ginger soup. Caption; 11 hashtags. Location; Belfast, Ireland. Outcomes; 6 likes. DAY 2 REVIEW: the account has 5 followers and 75 likes between the 8 pictures.

DAY 3 (Sunday)- Ninth Post: Picture; fruit at European Market. Caption; 10 hashtags. Location; La Boqueria Mercat. Outcomes; 8 likes, 1 comment “Love this!,” and 2 additional followers. Tenth Post: Picture; banana oatmeal. Caption; 11 hashtags. Location; Carol Stream. Outcomes; 5 likes. Eleventh Post;  Picture; brunch table. Caption; 6 hashtags. Location; Galway, Ireland. Outcomes; 5 likes and 1 additional follower. Twelfth Post: Picture; quiche breakfast and latte. Caption; 11 hashtags. Location; Prague, Czech Republic. Outcomes; 14 likes and 1 additional follower. DAY 3 REVIEW: the account has 9 followers and a total of 107 likes and 1 comment between the 12 pictures.

Please View Account at this link: 

https://www.instagram.com/eatshealthyhappy/?hl=en

Conclusion: In my opinion, it’s pretty incredible that this food account I created received a total of 107 likes, 1 comment and 9 followers after just 3 DAYS and NO interaction with any other accounts whatsoever. This reveals several things about Instagram. 1) The power of the HashTag and Location: the accounts that liked or followed my account were generally in relation to my hashtag or location features. For example, user dan0964 commented “Love this!” on my photo of fruit at the Boqueria Mercat. In my hashtag I included #travel and I can clearly see from his profile that he is a world traveller and food enthusiast, who was just recently in Barcelona. Another example would be that I received a follow from Capones Restaurant Galway account after they liked the picture of my almond milk latte with the location of Galway, Ireland. 2) Instagram is meant to be a social media site. It has all the necessary features to get users to connect with one another, and on the contrary, it would actually be hard to create an Instagram account that didn’t receive any interaction at all, because thats not what its made for, it wants users to connect with one another. 3) Instagram is not just a “fun” social site, it is very much oriented to a business-driven market. The way in which users can search and interact with other accounts similar to them has a networking feel to it, in my opinion. For example, when I would post a picture of a healthy breakfast and #nutrition #healthyfood, I would have nutrition related accounts like and follow my platform. This is a great way for them to network and connect with users that are similar to them, and maybe sell a product or start a marketing contract.