Designing Interactions

While working on my recent Internet art project, I had the idea of pointing a camera outside, recording a frame, finding the average color, and then using that value as part of the project.  What I wasn’t anticipating was that the average color of the sky or a street is nearly always a color approaching gray. This wasn’t the result I was expecting, but I should have realized the result sooner; it would have saved myself some time checking my program code for errors. A net artist I was looking at over the past week seems to have been successful in taking a cross section of an Internet audience and returning a vibrant value.

Lee Walton takes status messages from his Facebook friends and acts them out on camera for his ongoing f’book project.  Status messages are short one line sentences answering the question “What are you doing right now?”.  When the feature was first rolled-out on Facebook, users could type in their answer or pick an answer from a drop-down selection box with preset responses such as “at home” or “at work”. The drop-down selection box was quickly removed after it was apparent that most users preferred to write their own witty remarks.  The videos Lee Walton creates are often humorous since the status messages are acted out literally.  For example, the video for “Jessi Stern is forgetting.” shows a pot of water boiling in the foreground as Walton relaxes on a chair while cracking open a novel.  The video for “Scott Snibbe Eating honey, the natural antibiotic.” shows Walton eating honey directly from the jar.

Although it is certain that Walton’s 699 friends on Facebook are very diverse, all the videos have a Walton behaving in a similar way.  I would imagine that at the end of this project someone could edit together all the status videos and end up with a decent short film with a linear storyline about just one odd man.  The cross section of Facebook users isn’t gray at all, but it is monochromatic.  This may have to do with how witty status messages seem popular on Facebook.  Everyone seems to be a little eccentric in their status messages.

I think it would be interesting to see how these videos would turn out if made on other social networks with features similar to Facebook’s status message.  LinkedIn has a textbox that asks, “What are you working on?”.  With the business atmosphere that is promoted on LinkedIn, the videos would undoubtedly take on a different tone.  It seems that the reason that we don’t get a gray from the cross-section of Facebook or LinkedIn users is because these networks don’t represent Internet users as a whole.  The networks instead serve as online environments that affect people’s behavior as they travel through it.  People in online environments change their behavior accordingly just as their behavior would change as they move from home to work or another environment.  The problem with this model of social networks being environments is that there is no geographical distance separating any of these environments.  Your boss at LinkedIn can just take a peek out of his hypothetical window and see that you go to Adult FriendFinder and Fubar after work.  It doesn’t matter that you just stand in the lobby and don’t do anything, your boss saw you go in the building.  Forget about privacy settings, just having an account with a social network says things about you, it’s the reason why online dating sites still have a stigma associated with them.