Most of my tweaks were just for being humorous. Although a global space exploration program would be nice… as well as auditions to Deke’s next big performance!

For this project I wanted to focus on playing with text and deletion of ads on sites to see how the mood of a site could change, below is google, youtube, reddit and discord.  For Google, I had deleted everything other than the search bar and the text asking for voice.  This I believe throws users for a loop as anyone who searches is so used to seeing “Google” at the top that seeing nothing being promoted as a search engine is rather odd.  For Youtube I had deleted the top ad that tends to take up a lot of space but also changed colors of text like the subscribe button to blue to see how a more facebooky color could change the mood of youtube.  For Reddit I had deleted the side ads and top and and changed the upvotes on the top 3 posts to be incredibly large numbers.  I also deleted any images that didn’t have an actual picture attached (so like blog posts or questions on the top page).  For discord I had deleted all user names and channels images except for one username.  In discord’s case it’s interesting to be able to play with the idea of anonymity, while the space is technically anonymous it could be made even more so.

For this project I wanted to have a lot of fun with changing text and pictures.

1. Buzzfeed

2. NASA

3. Twitter

This one to me was hilarious just because the people I showed it to had to do a double take and ask the question “Wait is this real?”  It also showed how easily fake tweets can be made and spread on the internet.

4.

For my tweaking project, I decided to mainly tweak text, and see what all I could change. I went for a bit humor but also sarcasm and fear of what each website brings to it’s users.

Turns out you can directly edit the text of tweets, so that was something I immediately tried to do. This was originally about the Super Bowl, but Kylie dropped her baby info (finally I guess) and the internet exploded. Interesting that she did that on the day of the Super Bowl? This is about what a lot of tweets looked like, only everyone knew she was pregnant.

This was more about what I feel Facebook really wants you to do when it asks you for your status. What information will it collect from each status you input? What can it figure out about each user? Does each status let it become closer to cloning us?

This one is slightly more about humor but also how we could be watched by NSA agents, more likely if we are persons of interest. There have been jokes about how they are there to take care of us, in a way, and I chose this email request to show how they might try and push you to be more careful with your information.

Ahh Ebay. This one is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to show that sometimes buying from random people like it’s a regular shop isn’t the greatest idea. It’s way more of a gamble than normal online shopping. If you buy something off Amazon, it may not be what you wanted, but at least you can really hold them accountable and possibly return it for a new item whereas with Ebay, probably not. Ebay doesn’t really care, in my opinion.

Wikipedia probably should have over 1,000+ different degrees in high school and college. It has saved many of our lives and I just wanted to reflect it’s gold status in our lives. “Don’t use Wikipedia as a source” they said. “I’m not going to” I say, as I source all the references at the bottom of the Wiki page. I changed the background on this one for fun, mainly thinking of Jeopardy and how we use it to solve the little trivia in our lives. I’ll take, “Baseball history” for 500 Alex.

I just wanted to show what we really wanted to see this Super Bowl; the winner of the Puppy Bowl.

Many news websites would not cooperate even with the internet turned off. I spent a long time plugging in content into the NYT’s structure only to have one wrong click erase all my snarky comments. The first alteration I made took a while…they all took me a while I’m getting better at reading the code. 

My alteration of The Guardian home page was a dumping of my most impulsive and angry thoughts which should never be shared out loud. Most of these bitchy comments are what might be found in the comment section of any platform containing the news, but I tried to provide some levity that points back to the unhinged and unproductive nature of the commenter.

The facebook alteration is a little more bitter. I imagined the program actually being designed to truthfully reveal it’s entire infrastructure again in an unproductively grouchy way.

My last two alterations were just efforts at silliness and elegance (and I was struggling to place images in the correct locations in my other attempts so I just wanted a big dog tick to take up space and remove the productive uses of the google search).

1. The front page of Teen Vogue, with the headlines and articles from Wired and a larger emphasis on STEM. I would love to see a world where learning about technology and science is encouraged for girls as much as they are encouraged to learn about makeup and fashion.
2. The front page of the Washington Post with the headlines and articles from the front pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair. I was very surprised to see that an article about Chris Hemsworth’s moisturizing regimen was the first thing on the front page of Vanity Fair, and I doubt that would ever appear on a leading newspaper.
3. Replaced the light-hearted “Trending” hashtags on Twitter with headlines and topics from the political section of the New York Times.
4. How I really feel about the statistics and sharing culture on LinkedIn.

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