Capstone: Entry 6

AAR: Case Studies

I looked into several projects that circled inthe general direction of my project. I am still missing one idea but the other three are almost fully fleshed out.

Klout

The first case study is Klout. It was an early attempt at codifying someone’s personal impact on social media with a single numeric metric. There were several issues with this. Critics of it came from both sides a the social media gamut. The proponents of social media said that codifying social media into a single number showed users the man behind the curtain and that metrics should be more holistic. They believed that users would modify their behaviors if they were shown how the direct impact of their actions in a “Hawthorne Effect”. Critics of social media worried that giving users the tools to enhance their social media presence would lead to things like the Cambridge Analytica incident in 2016. Of course, they ended up being right.

I also found it interesting to look at how, while heavily criticized for trying to gamify social media, Klout changed how social media giants track data and use data. Facebook and Instagram changed their timelines to increase attention. Facebook also started to offer data tracking to companies in exchange for their data. Other apps have also tried to capitalize on the void by appealing to “influencers” on Youtube and Instagram.

Deepfakes

My second case study is on Deepfakes and GAN. GAN, generative adversarial networks, were first proposed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014 as a new way of training neural networks, whereby a generator neural network is taught to try and convince a detector neural network it is legitimate. He made the analogy to counterfeiters and police. Deepfakes, a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fakes”, arrived two years later as fake celebrity porn. A Reddit user by the same name had usedGANs to mask the face of celebrities onto adult actresses. This opened up the whole conversation of what lines this crossed, what it could be used for, and if we could ever trust images and videos again. Since then, interest in Deepfakes has waned outside of porn studios.

I found it interesting to look at as it is the cutting edge of creating fakes and can be used to fool all but the most trained eye. While making a porno of the founding fathers would be interesting, it is also interesting to look at how it had a sudden spike in intest and then people forgot about it as though they couldn’t be fooled.

PhoneStory

The third case study is on informing the public. I wanted to look at PhoneStory by MollieIndustria. PhoneStory tells the story of creating an iPhone with a series of dark minigames. It was quickly removed from Apple’s AppStore but has since been added to Google’s Play Store. I wanted to look at how the public can be informed about the error of their ways in non-aggreivating ways.

Subversion

For my last case study, I wanted to look at something subversive. While most of the previous case studies can be construed as subversive, it was not their explicit intent. I wanted to look at something that subverted the commercial narrative. I looked into Garbage Pail kids and the uthors previous venture, Wacky Packages. However, the pictures were often not political and solely sold for their shock and wae. I was also ooking at other rtist’s efforts to create pieces to raise convecern about McDonald’s , The Catholic Church or others. Lastly, I am looking at other commercial attempts to high jck diasters or others to subvert the narrative. in their favor.