Data Art Project - Global Village Or Self Reflection?
My project focuses in on what we do on the internet. It is often argued that we live in a global village, however most of our internet usage is geared towards ourselves. Sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter use information they’ve gained about you to filter the information they show you. Everyone then subsequently filters that information to fit their own needs. For example, when you’re scrolling down twitter, are you likely to read through every tweet thoroughly or are you likely to scroll through and pay more attention to tweets that connect with your interests? Going through each tweet thoroughly would take much longer and be a bigger strain on our brains. Also, it’s generally fairly obviously to tell when something like an ad pops up on the twitter feed, that you do not want to read it. Therefore, we use our own subconscious filters to wade through all the information. Thus, our internet usage is likely to result in a reflection of ourselves, instead of a reflection of the globe as a whole.
The first portion of my project symbolizes the information overload. The user must then “put on their reading glasses to look at their timeline”. The timeline is made up of roughly 50 tweets from my own personal timeline. I then went through those tweets on twitter and paid close attention to the things I actually look at and the things I skim over. Everything that I skimmed over is blacked out. This gives an idea of how much information we’re really taking in and how much were avoiding. The blacked out Twitter feed also reflects me. You can now take a good guess at who my reals friends are by looking at the similarities between who posted the tweets I looked at most, and what my interests are. The video inside the glasses also represents this kind of self reflection that happens when using sites like Twitter.
Citations:
Roughly 50 tweets from my (Kayla MacDonald’s) Twitter Feed from Nov. 27 at approx. 7pm.
Image citations:
"Index of /Kutuphane/reklamlar/images." Kpssrehber. Accessed November 30, 2015. http://www.kpssrehber.com/Kutuphane/reklamlar/images/.
"Where's the Down Key?" Microsoft. Accessed November 29, 2015. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-excel/wheres-the-down-key/e7eb2a81-ad2b-49cd-b654-634be60fa04d?db=5&auth=1.
