Audience-metric continuity? : Approaching the meaning of measurement in the digital everyday

This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser's intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this article, we reflect on three kinds of disorientations that users expressed, linked to temporality, sociality and value. Relating these to the history of audience measurement in mass media, we argue that there is merit in using this methodology for further analysis of continuities in audience responses to metrics, in order to better understand the ways in which metrics work to create the 'audience commodity'.Peer reviewe

Facebook for Facebook's Sake: An Aesthetic Usage

The affective labour debate has become mainstream in communications studies. In this paper, I The affective labour debate has become mainstream in communications studies. In this paper, I suggest the Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century as inspiration for how users can use Facebook with the knowledge that their data is being used for profit. I present Facebook usage as art, creating an analog with aesthete Oscar Wilde’s essay, “the critic as artist” (1891/2010), where he presents critics as artists. Other theorists, especially Walter Benjamin provide grounding for making the argument that Facebook usage is an artistic expression. I then turn to my inversion of Walter Pater’s “art for art’s sake”, the seminal idea of Aestheticism and propose Facebook for Facebook’s sake as a method for Facebook use. While more advanced remuneration concepts have yet to arrive with such force that they could provide the proper payment to users, Facebook for its own sake is a way to appreciate Facebook’s beauty in the meantime. Baudelaire and Debord’s psychogeographic theories provide methods for navigating cities that I apply to examine Facebook as a digital city. The central claim of this paper is the following: By using Facebook for Facebook’s sake, users take back some of the dignity taken away from them in the exploitation of free labour. Finally, I turn to critiques of Aestheticism and how contemporary software might provide insight into using Facebook in an ethical manner. Users will have to consider each action differently; how would liking something affect users’ artistic expression of themselves? In this way, while the affective labour debate continues, users can use Facebook for its own sake

Cross-Reality Re-Rendering: Manipulating between Digital and Physical Realities

The advent of personalized reality has arrived. Rapid development in AR/MR/VR enables users to augment or diminish their perception of the physical world. Robust tooling for digital interface modification enables users to change how their software operates. As digital realities become an increasingly-impactful aspect of human lives, we investigate the design of a system that enables users to manipulate the perception of both their physical realities and digital realities. Users can inspect their view history from either reality, and generate interventions that can be interoperably rendered cross-reality in real-time. Personalized interventions can be generated with mask, text, and model hooks. Collaboration between users scales the availability of interventions. We verify our implementation against our design requirements with cognitive walkthroughs, personas, and scalability tests.Comment: updated. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2204.0373

The Question of Materiality: Mattering in the Network Society

While materiality is an important concept in IS research, there is little consensus as to how materiality ought to be understood. We find that the term is typically used, often implicitly, to mean physicality or the corporeal existence of objects. Grounded in a widely held folk ontology characteristic of modern Western thinking this view makes intuitive sense to us. It breaks down however when we consider typical entities of concern to IS researcher, such as software or information, or emerging phenomena in the network society, such as online social networks or virtual work. In response to unhelpful distinctions emerging from this view, such as between the “virtual” and “real” world, we put forward a relational view grounded in the emerging sociomateriality research orientation. This alternative position sees materiality not as a pre-given quality of entities but rather as an ongoing achievement of “mattering” situated in practice. We demonstrate with examples how this view enables IS researchers to grasp in more productive ways how materiality is achieved in an increasingly networked society

GreaseVision: Rewriting the Rules of the Interface

Digital harms can manifest across any interface. Key problems in addressing these harms include the high individuality of harms and the fast-changing nature of digital systems. As a result, we still lack a systematic approach to study harms and produce interventions for end-users. We put forward GreaseVision, a new framework that enables end-users to collaboratively develop interventions against harms in software using a no-code approach and recent advances in few-shot machine learning. The contribution of the framework and tool allow individual end-users to study their usage history and create personalized interventions. Our contribution also enables researchers to study the distribution of harms and interventions at scale

Aesthetic Programming

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning

Design persuasivo e motivacional : um estudo de padrões de design e práticas críticas

The present dissertation addresses the theme of persuasive technologies by focusing on persuasive and motivational design patterns and analyzing critical practices. Given the current diffusion of strategies that motivate users to modify their behavior through the use of technologies in the most varied day-to-day tasks, it becomes necessary to identify these strategies and to reflect on their implications. The study begins by addressing persuasive technologies according to the notion of cap¬tology, establishing a connection with motivational design patterns, which encompass gameful design, or gamification, as a specific focus of this research. Subsequently, ethi¬cal perspectives by different authors are presented, which introduce the lack of termino¬logical consensus and the controversy surrounding gamification. The concept of counter-gamification is then presented as a critical response to gamification. Finally, critical practices related to counter-gamification are analyzed according to the typologies of mo¬tivational design patterns. This methodology intends to assess if the criticism surrounding gamification is extensible to the remaining dimensions of persuasive design. The results of this study suggest the existence of a possible counter-persuasion, which reacts not onl