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Welcome, everybody. For the next talk,
when algorithms fail in our personal
lives, it is a one hour
talk. Our lovely speaker with us today
is Caroline Sanders.
She's a user researcher for IBM.
She's also an artist, a researcher
and a video game designer.
She's from the States.
And I should also mention that she is a
member of the NYC Resistor
Hackerspace.
And, oh, I see some fans
over here. Cool.
We already learned in a bunch of talks
over the course of Congress what
algorithms do when they fail.
Yesterday, we learned about how
algorithms can discriminate or not
discriminate in the hiring process.
And Caroline is going to tell us a little
more about when
it's better not use algorithms because
there are some things that algorithm just
can't do that humans can do.
So please give it up for Caroline and
enjoy the talk. Thank you very much.
Hi, everyone, I'm Caroline Senders.
I should probably first specify that I'm
speaking here of my own accord and on
behalf of IBM.
So just FYI
and that this is actually a presentation
also on a very strange
and specific art project I did
back in late November.
So when algorithms fail in our personal
lives, this is probably the best way to
describe me because I live on the
Internet.
I've spent the past two years studying
online fandoms, communities, Internet
culture and online harassment.
And this is what I do for fun outside of
work.
I think a lot about language and
conversation as identifiers,
and I spend a lot of time reading the way
in which conversations unfold on
different subjects on Reddit, 4chan,
H.A., Wikipedia, the way Wikipedia
is used as a conversational tool not just
to upload information and obviously
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Instagram.
And the one thing I've sort of learned
from all this is that each of these
different platforms have a very different
identity and have a very different way in
which conversation sort of has evolved
linguistically to that platform.
The way we talk on Reddit is a lot
different than the way we talk on
Twitter. And I think that that is due to
the infrastructural design of
the platform itself, as well as
the ways in which the platform identifies
itself to users.
So like a code of conduct
two years ago, I are actually like
a year and a half ago I really started
focusing on online harassment.
I specifically focused on GamerGate
as a video game designer.
I saw GamerGate sort of affecting the
community around me.
I didn't necessarily I'm
not driven to study harassment by why
it happens, but rather how
how does harassment unfold on different
sorts of platforms and how do you
platforms allow for different kinds of
communication?
And really, how open is the general user
on a platform?
How connected are they to the privacy
policies and how aware are they
of how exposed they are and how permeable
their data and information is?
So, Tildy, are I explore complex emotions
and emotional reactions within systems
and I'm going to briefly cover some of
the anti harassing research I've done.
So sometimes I write things the Internet
doesn't like them.
Last April, the Internet sent a
SWAT team to my mom's house.
If you know what swotting is, it's a very
popular online harassment tactic that
manifests itself.
URL oftentimes
a fake violent phone
call is placed to a local police
department. That violent phone
call triggers the militarized police to
be deployed. And this is what happened to
my mom.
Sometimes panels I'm on get canceled
because maybe they're kind of
controversial.
I submitted a design panel to South by
Southwest and it was canceled due to
harassment and threats of violence.
So I guess my work seems kind of
contentious.
I think that it's pretty straightforward.
It's generally design.
I don't know why anyone have a really
massive opinion around it.
But the thing I sort of want to talk
about actually is and what I care about
exploring is how do systems
affect behavior.
So I said earlier, I'm here now as an IBM
representative, but
I spend most of my day job actually at
working on Watson, working in artificial
intelligence as a user researcher around
conversational analytics for chat robots.
That's kind of a mouthful.
So I mean by that is I spent a lot of
time working with software that allows
users to set up chat robots.
So I think a lot about the ways in which
I'm designing software to help people
design conversations that robots have
with people.
So when I say I believe that systems
affect behavior, I live that every day.
And I think about the ways in which
the structure of an interface actually
will lead people to to converse and what
that would look like.
So in the past two years of doing
just, I guess, broad heuristic
ethnographic research, what I've come to
realize is users have
a myriad of different problems that can
be solved in similar ways, but yield
radically different results mean that we
can sort of start approaching ways to
solve problems of harassment through
either new kinds of algorithms or a
really flexible UI on top of
an algorithm, i.e., what if we
gave people more robust privacy settings
and allowed users to start to articulate
the ways in which they're reachable and
how their data, really their
conversations are read?
And I think this because algorithms
really aren't that smart and language
within an algorithm is a
it's decontextualized into data.
We as sorry we as users,
we provide context to language.
Language. Language is what we make it.
But in a system, it's not simply just
bits of data.
So I was driven by this thought, how can
I make a flexible system to solve a
variety of different problems for a
variety of different people?
So I did what I do best and I
made a low res
wireframe and
I created sort of speculative wireframe
to sort of focus myself on what
I thought could be achievable.
And then I decided to test it against 20
different users I had interviewed had
been affected by GamerGate, as well as a
handful of gamer gamers themselves
who would interact with me on Twitter.
And I would ask them questions about the
ways in which they organize
themselves, the ways in which they talk
to other people, what conversations they
were hoping to get out of interacting
with me on Twitter.
And what I sort of
started to learn is that we need to
focus on privacy and social media
needs to be as prevalent and as
important as writing content itself.
So do you see that gray box at the top
that is a placeholder
for a button that sends you to a redesign
privacy page?
So from interviewing these 20 users, I
got a really robust sense of different
kinds of needs and wants users wanted
out of Twitter.
I interviewed people that had over 100000
followers that absolutely wanted to
remain completely public and they want to
be reachable at all times.
I interviewed some users that had 3000
followers that wanted to be completely
hidden, but still have their tweets
treated as media, thus shareable.
And I read some users that wanted to not
go private, which is a very public
statement on Twitter to have the lock
next to you, but wanting to have all the
affordance of privacy.
So what I've added is you can see is
allow these checkmarks to
allow a user to start to change the way
in which their written content can
be accessed and sort of really
actually change the way in which the
amount of users on Twitter could start
to read content they're posting.
So one of them is allow
followers of your followers to tweet it,
use the idea of friends of friends,
do not allow accounts.
One, do not allow
accounts with less than X followers to
follow you or don't allow accounts with
less than X days, meaning
new accounts are often created in moments
of harassment campaign.
So if an account was a week
old with two followers, that's probably a
troll account.
And additionally also allows users to
sort of say like, oh, if you know you're
not on my level, you can't tweet at me
not judging. That's an interaction
someone wanted.
And then I sort of started to think more
about what does it mean to exist publicly
as a person on a platform.
Twitter is sort of this mixed identity
and mixed emotional state.
It's both professional and personal.
It's used as a networking tool as well as
a social aid and a communicative tool.
So people either have really persistent
aliases or avatars.
They've they have followed them from
platform a platform, but they're not
using their real name.
There's levels of pseudo anonymity on
Twitter. In my case, I use my real name
and I can't really undo that.
So my needs and using Twitter, especially
the technologist, exist in a much
different way than, say, someone who uses
it as a casual medium.
And we have very different needs.
But through these different kinds of
dials, I feel that this serves
my needs as well as all the users I've
interviewed, because we're able to start
to tailor through UI and
sort of be able to pull from very like
top level of information, just mainly
around followers as to how accessible I
am at
other things, such as blocked accounts
and blocked tweets. Right now you can
only see blocked accounts.
You can't see blocked tweets.
What if you could?
And I pulled from this because within
moments of harassment, even if it's a
sustained stalker, there's often a tweet
that will trigger it. It's never going to
someone's account, at least
within a harassment campaigns.
You're not really going to someone's
account and saying today I'm blocking
you. There is often an interaction, a
tweet that will trigger that response.
So what if you could see that, start to
group them together and maybe send a
report to Twitter or to yourself and sort
of you can the user could start to
contextualize.
This is a way in which these
tweets are lame. So if there's mob
harassment campaign, a user could say, I
think all of these are linked.
And if Twitter is implementing any kind
of machine learning or natural language
processing, they'd be able to start
batching multiple reports at once and see
how they're all related.
Again, what if you could group mentions
together?
And I did this last night.
One thing that I sort of noticed from a
lot of my research is that users
don't really have an understanding as to
how how their language
is actually data and how accessible their
things are.
So I'm sure you've heard a variety of
stories around tweets going viral.
Someone tweets something and then months
later it's dug up or they tweet
something. In the case of this really
well-known incident, this woman tweeted a
really off color joke about AIDS, got
on a plane 12 hours later.
This tweet, I completely exploded.
The background of that story is that this
woman only had 100 followers and
had never had her tweets interacted
with, like, very much at all.
Not well, not in the sense of a stranger.
So for her, this was a complete moment
of the system kind of breaking.
And I wonder if there were ways to sort
of start to articulate to users how
accessible you are, even if you feel
small, even if you feel like
no one is interacting with your tweets,
you're still actually completely open.
And the information you sent out into the
system is media that can be isolated.
And shared quickly, and that's sort of
the way in which Twitter
functions additionally so
so I wondered, like, what if you could
just break something down really simply
and just sort of say follow impressions
and non follower impressions, sort of
give an idea as to who's interacting with
your tweet and who outside
of your perceived social your
decentralized social circle on Twitter.
And then I started looking at Facebook.
And one thing I also sort of learned from
additionally, I did another round of
interviews specifically for this
project. I'm getting into Social Me, a
break up coordinator where users actually
had no idea what the privacy checkup
meant. So I think this is a great
addition. You add a button, you
can say only friends can see this.
But what if Twitter added like a pop up
and then said, great, this content right
here, this comment, if your friend Jane
comments on her mom can see it sort
of start to really show like how extended
networks that you're unconnected to
second and third, second and third party
relationships can actually interact with
your your information.
So I'm really driven by this need and
this idea as a designer,
what would it look like to have a
semiprivate space in a public network?
And how how could I design that?
And I think about this a lot, because our
our our communication on the Internet
is asynchronous.
Right. But a lot of social
media creates things as a timeline.
This creates a false idea as to
how information is actually accessed and
how data is actually stored in that false
information as articulated to users.
So what feels like safer spaces, even
if you're completely public because
you're not interacted with, is actually a
lie. It's a false sense of information.
It's a false sense of safety.
So I wonder, with all these varying
levels of needs that we have as users
and as we live more and more of our lives
digitally and on social media,
what would it look like to design a
semiprivate space in a public network?
And so, like the past few years have
really hit this on home, that there's
this nebulous ness surrounding algorithms
and social media and the way in which our
data is saved.
And a lot of that happens when
Facebook, for instance, changed their
timeline, sort of algorithmically driven,
based off content
then I think it was last summer.
There is this thing called the ice book
Ice Bucket Challenge or two summers ago,
and these riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
And sort of what happened and people
realize is the ice bucket challenge, ice
bucket challenge posts being waited above
these other protests.
And the way to work around
that was to include Ice Bucket Challenge
when you were posting about Ferguson to
sort of start to flip and change what
you're seeing algorithmically in your
timeline.
So there's this kind of idea that
users don't quite know what
and why the algorithm will wait things
over other things. So when you post
something on Facebook, the feedback is I
have no idea when it's accessible,
how it's accessible and if it will
be accessed.
So that led me to this project that
I created,
I created a fake performance
art piece.
I mean, it's a real art piece called
Social Media Breakup Coordinator, where
I turned a video game art
gallery in New York
called Baby Castles into a doctor's
office.
And I held a 15 minute
therapy consulting sessions
on social media.
I had users fill out a twenty two point
very standard user quiz around why they
were showing up.
But then when they sat with me, I
had them sign a terms of service
agreement.
I listen to them and then I started to
write down notes.
But before I started this project, I
reached out to a variety of different
people because I was sort of
from my research, I sort of started to
realize that there's a lot of different
moments where there needs to be human
intervention within algorithms, within
social media.
So how do you start to I
mean, how do you start to pull away from
different groups that you've been associated
with? How do you start to cut ties and
how do you start to cut ties between
information when you cross post against
different platforms?
So a good example of that is what happens
if someone in your family
dies and that ends up in Facebook
memories because you Instagram it.
What does that feel like to have that
emotional trigger or does it feel like to
quit a job and not and
not be sure, like if your new
coworkers can see your old coworkers
or if you post something negative about
your old job, are you still connected to
your boss and what can they see?
And generally, there's this lack of
understanding that I found that most
general users, probably not most
people in this room, have a lack of
understanding around how much their
information is accessed.
So I was curious on on a bunch of
levels if if people would actually
pay me to give them advice, if
they would trust me as a professional
and if they would actually engage with my
services. And then I was curious if I
could actually then covertly sort
of teach them the privacy policies of all
the different platforms they were on.
So when I started this project, I
realized I need to talk to a variety of
different professionals.
I'm a user researcher and so my
profession lies in talking to
users and designing solutions for
them. But as social media
starts to overtake more and more
aspects of our lives, I realize that
there are certain things that I'm not
equipped to handle.
So what happens if someone has suffered
trauma on social media as a victim of
harassment? I still can't offer anyone
feedback on that, and that's sort of not
my place.
So I spoke to a rape crisis counselor,
an engineer, a data scientist
and professor and a private
therapist and a private psychiatrist.
And the takeaway I got was mainly this.
And this is something I'd love to impart
on those social media engineers
and designers is it's not my
job to necessarily tell people what to
do.
It's my job to listen to what people need
to get done.
So an example from that is,
let's say a user
came to me for Social Me a break up
coordinator and said I
have an abusive boyfriend and he's
horrible and we have a child together and
I want to on Facebook friend him.
It's not my place to necessarily say,
OK, wait, can I know more like are you
close to this family? Like, let's start
to cut down all these ties.
And the reason I would ask that is
thinking as a designer,
if you're Facebook friends with someone
and then you're Facebook friends with
their parents, and then it says on that
person's like profile who their family
is, the system has created more ties
to that person. Even regardless of if you
unfriend them, you would need to block
them as well as unfollow all
of these other people related to them and
tied to their profile that to actually
really separate
and allow the feedback I got was.
It's not necessarily your job to let
to tell a user all of that, if they're
telling you what exactly they need, you
sort of need to listen and guide from
there and not really get into.
Well, why are you here?
What are all these different, really
specific and highly personal details?
So why would I do this?
I was just very interested
in the ways in which people live their
lives online, and I really wanted to see
if I could also gather a lot of data from
this project. I had 16 people fill
out 22 different questions
and meet with me and walk through all
their different problems.
And I was really curious if I could
provide solutions the way an algorithm
would. I outlined 10 different solutions
that I could affix to people based off
different questions that they answered in
a certain order.
And again, the covered
point of this project was to sort of
teach people about the permeability of
their posts and really how privacy is
looked at and interacted with on social
networks and with the onset
of all these different apps, particularly
in America, that are offering to
outsource emotional labor
to a person, meaning there's all these
new jobs have been created of.
We'll break up with your boyfriend for
you. I was really sort of curious to see
if people would actually engage with me
face to face.
So when I launched the project, people
thought it was real.
And
then the media thought it was real
and this was really it was really hard to
explain to, for instance, Jezebel
that this was an art project
because they were like, but you're
charging people and you made them sign
a contract.
Is the contract legally binding?
Yes, it is.
So you charge the money?
I did. Did you give them fake feedback?
No. The feedback was all sincere.
I really legitimately tried to help solve
these problems, but it's
an art project.
And the reason it's an art project is to
me, it's a massive comment on the sharing
economy that's in America.
And just this idea that I could be an
emotional mechanical Turk and I
completely made that by design and
intention.
Should people be trusting me with their
data?
Yes, because I am a professional and I
made sure to very, very
clearly articulate the ways in which I
would use their data, how they would be
protected, that I would not share any
personal information about them.
I went through all those steps, but
that's sort of the
negotiation. We have a social networks.
Do we have that kind of interfacing?
And also an even bigger comment
was no one ever commented on price.
I charged one dollar a minute and
to sort of sit and listen all day
to people and only gave them 15 minute
blocks, it was actually incredibly taxing
physically.
It was an all day event where I think I
only had I gave myself like 15 minutes
for lunch.
I definitely have a whole new type of
respect for therapists that I was
grilling.
So I started to break down before I
started the projects to what platforms I
would cover. These are examples of my
Post-it notes. I had covered resistor in
one evening and I sort of break things
down based off the four major platforms
that are used in America, which is
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram. And I started to break down by
what I thought were the foremost broad
and most universal
social grouping.
So friends,
family, work and romantic.
And I started to sort of think about why
your romantic partner would friend you on
LinkedIn, for example, or why they would
follow you on Instagram, or why your boss
would friend you on all of those
platforms.
And I started to attach different
emotional responses.
So should you LinkedIn connect with your
dad? Maybe.
Should you LinkedIn connect with your
lover if you want to, but you
don't have to. But then these are
connections.
If there are different parties, apps that
you don't really use like that, you then
have to break down later.
If those if those relationships
our.
Ceremony said everyone thought that this
project was real because I went through
really great pains to also make it look
real.
So when people showed up, we had a
receptionist who had coffee, there
was a waiting room, and I had people sign
in with the date they arrived.
The reason and I think even the time
and the time of their appointment,
there was then a paper
version of the quiz. If someone walked
in, you know, sometimes you get walk
ins, the doctor gets that all the time.
This is me working.
This is what my desk look like.
Everyone got their own folder
that I would write their name on.
I would write out what
I called a receipt.
So it's all the advice I'm giving them
and then I'm taking my own notes.
We both got a copy of the terms of
service agreement and then I would send
them on their way. So it looked actually.
Fairly, it looked very legit,
you know, I mean, a falling apart
building, but I'm giving you legitimate
advice and you just paid me fifteen
dollars, says our receptionist.
Lauren, this is the waiting
room.
This actually wasn't posed.
I popped my head out and saw a bunch of
people sitting and reading,
This is me providing advice.
And these are some students of mine that
showed up. I taught a class on
visual storytelling in social media and
they had showed up to observe.
So then this is also what the breakdown
of the terms of service agreement looked
like. This is the first page.
It's pretty standard.
One of my favorite lines is
my observations of this person's behavior
and responses gives me no reason
to believe that this person is not fully
competent to give conformed knowing and
willing consent.
I should also clarify a really
dear friend of mine who's my
collaborator, Fred Jenning's, works for
a law company called Tor Ekland.
They do a lot of digital law cases.
So he actually drafted this up
specifically for me, for the needs of
this project.
I told him to keep it short and I told
him to build certain things so users
could really sort of see if they were
scanning what I'm talking about.
So as you'll see,
various social media platforms are
emboldened with like what I'm with what
I'm giving.
But then I had him outline the nature of
services.
And what you'll see is that
the client acknowledges the coordinator,
the coordinator provides neither content
or materials included, such as
financial advice, counseling or therapy.
And I really wanted to highlight I am not
a therapist. This is not a therapy
session. If anything, I'm
like a really weird SEO advisor
that you've consulted to maybe talk about
your personal life with.
But I am definitely not a therapist.
And what's funny is that I actually had
so I had 12 people fill this out online
for people do walk ins.
And what's fascinating is I only had two
people show up and talk to me about
heartbreak.
This project was not inspired by a
breakup. It's actually about breaking up
with social media.
I had someone show up and ask me a lot of
really specific questions about LinkedIn
and her workplace and what's the proper
way to, like, break up on LinkedIn
with your old job.
And I was like, you should just probably
unfollow them.
I'm like, do you talk to them on Facebook?
She's like, I do. I don't do that.
And I sort of tried to gather all this
really fascinating information
specifically around the ways in which my
users were using social media.
And this is something I actually I'm
going to openly share
probably post this talk if you all want
to look at what I'm accruing.
But different things like, you know,
let's get a little personal. Why are you
here? Romantic reason, work, reason,
friend, family, general, social media.
And maybe these questions seem really
innocuous, but in the sense of the
way in which I was structuring my
personal algorithm, I had built each of
these questions, triggered a different
kind of answer that I could give someone
and I could string answers together
so I could give a combination of
answer, a plussed
answer D plus answered J
to sort of give someone a highly
personalized response
to what they had given me. But this is
sort of the way algorithms work.
It's not highly personalized.
The combination to the user just feels
personalized.
And on my end, that was sort of the art
project for myself.
And I asked a general question, do you
feel safe online?
I was slightly surprised.
Only two people said no, but I was more
surprised that actually only two people
said no.
I thought it would be less.
And then at times I thought it would be
more. Given my research and online
harassment, I was prepared
for someone to show up and sort of say,
like, oh, I'm being victimized of
harassment. And I had a whole different
answer ready for them.
But just the fact that most people had
come with very general problems, I
was actually surprised that
in general, 16 percent of
applicants don't feel safe online.
So I asked, how often do you use social
media pretty much every day, how often do
you want to be using it? Pretty much
every day. And then I found the most
fascinating was
when people described what they used it
for. And so people about
half half of users said they they
used it for socializing.
When I asked what do you want to use it
for, they said half of users replied with
networking.
So there's a sort of pull to actually be
taken off social media.
And this is what I learned from all of
this. A lot of advice I gave people was
maybe you should just quit Facebook.
And that was met with a resounding no.
How dare you suggest that?
And I was like, OK, great, let's pull
back. Let me offer something else.
Do you have a smartphone?
Of course.
Delete the app from your phone.
They're like, oh, that's brilliant.
Like, I know, right?
Well
well, the one thing I actually found the
most fascinating was most people
did not understand Facebook's privacy
checkups.
So whenever people talked about that,
they wanted to socialize less and be less
accessible. The first thing I always said
was, well, what is your
privacy checkup like?
Have you done one? They're like, oh, my
God, what's that?
I'm like, we have a problem.
And the one thing I actually found super
fascinating is that most users didn't
realize and this is actually hyper
specific to one user that came through,
but most users didn't realize that
you are accessible even with
very private settings on Facebook to
nine Facebook friends, chat messaging
you. And if you respond to that message,
that chat is moved into your general
stream of chat and it makes your
information accessible to that person
you have not friended.
So I had a friend who was like, well, I
want to be super private.
The reason I keep my Facebook open is
like, what if a young game developer is
trying to reach me? And I was like, did
you know that that chat does us?
He's like, Oh, I had no idea.
I was like, well, that's terrifying.
But you could maybe use it this way
if you're not concerned about harassment,
but your concern about being reached
because he was more concerned that
friends could be exposed through his
openness, which I was like, that's very,
very considerate.
Kind of the way to sort of take your
Facebook.
One thing I learned is that no one
knew anything about Instagram's
privacy policies, nor did they care.
They're like, Instagram is fine.
We don't care.
Again, most people want to use social
media as a networking tool.
But the biggest takeaway was every single
person that showed up.
And I had a variety of people that were
incredibly savvy.
They were engineers.
They actually thought that they did not
understand social media as well as they
could and that they needed someone to
help them better understand.
And they need someone to help them better
understand who they paid fifteen dollars
to and a hacker video game
space.
But and I want that story because it is a
that is a joke. But I also really think
about the fact that, like, these tools
are so nebulous that you
would go to a space and pay someone
fifteen dollars that you've never met
before. That says they're an expert to
just handle this for you.
And that, for me, was the sort of the
biggest takeaway, how how
can we make things feel more accessible
or better yet, how do we let's let's make
a new platform.
I'm putting us up here because this is
one of my biggest pet peeves.
You would probably never explain
how to estimate someone through
screenshots.
You probably say, oh, do you see that
little thing on your phone?
Right. The chat, open it up
right in a no, say something.
So I when this project launched,
a friend wrote about me and some
and some work I had been doing and
one of her followers legitimately
believed that I did not understand
Facebook and he took it upon
himself to try to explain Facebook
to me.
Which other than being kind
of insulting because I work for a tech
company and I have a masters in
interactive technology.
What I found illuminating is the
fact that this is not a weird response.
This is not unusual for someone to say,
oh, right.
Facebook is so hard to use when
it comes to privacy and
like creating list to post to people that
I'm going to screenshot everything for
you. And that is never the way in which
you should explain a communication tool
to someone if you have to screenshot
something to someone you fucked up as a
designer and.
And those are my general thoughts on
that.
I can't even I just can't.
So I guess what I impart to you and all
of us here is
let's make something not shitty.
And I know the reason people use
Facebook. And this is not a talk to get
off Facebook. I use Facebook.
Facebook will persist for a very
long time. Think of all the third party
apps that use Facebook as an automatic
login. That is a design
pattern that reinforces the need of
Facebook and everyday users lives.
But as a as a designer and technologist,
I want to make something better, even if
it's just for my friends.
We could do social media that onion
thoughts,
and that's where the future of this
project comes in is I'm actually working
on a social media co-op with two
technologists in New York, Dan Pfeiffer
and Max Vinton, and doing another round
of social media break up coordinator in
Oakland in January.
And I'm hoping to keep gathering data
around the ways users use these platforms
through my performance art piece, but
also as well as covertly,
you know, keep departing information on
privacy and what it would be like if we
lived our lives just a little less
online.
And I'm hoping to sort of eventually have
a really robust data set that could be
used as an actual data set and not as
just a sampling.
Thanks.
Well, thanks for this inspiring talk,
Caroline, if you have questions, please
move to the microphones that are in
the room and
then you can ask your question.
And we have the first person at
microphone number to ask away.
Yeah, did
you ever raise the question why those
people didn't understand the subject
on Facebook, etc.
and still used it?
I mean, it's like walking into a gun
shop, purchasing a firearm, and
you have no idea what to do with it,
right?
I think so.
What I said sort of like later in the
presentation is we have these design
patterns in everyday life that really
actually enforce this
use of Facebook.
So this
project is really sort of centered around
general users and
a general understanding of technology.
We are moving to a very highly digitally
literate and data literate society, but
we're not there yet. There's pockets of
literacy. This is a really good pocket of
literacy right here where a really
awesome community.
But one
thing I sort of strive is like the people
that are misusing or misunderstanding
Facebook, they're not like elderly
parents, their actual cohorts
of mine that are my age people, younger
and people even a few years older.
And I think the reason is that Facebook
is really easy and it's highly
addicting to use.
And it's it's like a phone book.
Everyone's there at stores birthdays for
you, which is really actually helpful.
It's a it's a fast way to talk
to people. But I think the bigger thing
is, too, is it's enforced on other sites.
So think of all the websites you go to
during a day and how many of them say
login with Facebook, sign up with
Facebook, like login
with Twitter. And those design patterns,
which seem really innocuous to us,
actually are really important.
They further enforce the
the the ubiquity of Facebook
because it makes it easy.
So then I mean, I'm shuddering.
Think about all the third party apps that
would be associated right now
with a Facebook login if you've done that
for every site.
But the common user does not
know that.
And that's sort of the issue, I think.
All right, next question from Mike
before, please.
Hi. Thank you very much for this
interesting talk.
I have basically two questions that
are the same, and they are on the
art project, part of your talk.
And the first one is
how did you make sure that people
would actually understand that this was a
piece of performance art?
Did you rely on the absurdity of your
proposition that would be recognized?
Because clearly people thought
not unlike in terms of satire,
there needs to be some element of
exaggeration or something that makes
it clear that this isn't
intended as this is intended as a piece
of art. So I was just wondering what you
thought was that in the second part was
where do you saw
the data that you get from your piece
of art you presented as a research
outcome almost.
So that obfuscates the kind of
art arsenis of your project and
turns it into Real-Life data.
And isn't that also one of the problems
why people are so careless with
Instagram? Because they see it as art
when they photograph their food.
Whether that's true or not is
open to debate, but they don't see it as
an actual act of data collection.
So yeah, right.
So I guess to sort of back up
the way in which I did, the way in which
I sort of describe myself as a
speculative designer and I think about
critical design a lot and critical making
and like, what is that line?
And oftentimes you're making something
real that is sort of making
a point in the way in which
I, like most people, seem to sort of
get that this was an art project of mine.
And it helped that I was in New York
doing this and I was doing it in an art
gallery. That's a video game gallery.
So there were arcades in the back of
the space.
But certain people, I actually realized
because I had a couple of people phone-in
that had sort of seen this and signed up
online and were not in New York.
And I realize that they didn't know that
this was an art piece.
And I kind of went
with it.
And a lot of that is they were signing a
series of service agreement.
I was I did tell them, like, this is not
therapeutic advice.
I'm not held liable for any decisions
that you make. And I said all that over
the phone to make sure that they
understood that.
And then I told them, these are just
suggestions and you don't have to follow
them and you are allowed to push back.
And that's what I tell every every
participant is I'm giving you these
suggestions based off my
best practice knowledge in this
algorithm. I have design that you don't
get to see.
So your questions are triggering certain
results. But you are also allowed to say,
I don't like that, and then I can tailor
them slightly. If you don't like the
result at all, you should take the quiz
again.
But the bigger thing is that it
walks this really weird line
and this is a weird antidote.
But I'm also a portrait photographer.
My background is actually in fine art
photography and I got a Masters
Interactive technology years later
and my work is always it was
my family and I recreating
moments post Hurricane Katrina.
So people always ask, or are these real
photographs, Caroline?
Well, they weren't taken on the fly.
I set them up, but they were real to me.
And they're saying something.
And that's the way in which I would
describe this project.
It's not real, but it was real to us
in the moment.
And it's commenting on things and also
providing a real solution.
Thank you. All right, next question from
Mike, number three, please.
Hi.
Do you know of some software that
shows how open you are to other people?
For example, a Facebook
app or something that.
Yeah, it's also a mirror of your
sinfulness.
I don't know of any sort of checker like
that. I use a variety of different
things. A friend of mine made a really
great Wi-Fi sniffer, which is
like at the extreme end of what you're
talking about.
I generally I
know that you all should do this.
I often will unfollow and follow
and unfriend and befriend people and
change my privacy settings.
And then I try to log out and get
someone else to log in and see if they'll
let me audit and then I will see what
I look like to other people.
That's a level of insanity that I don't
think most people in this room should
necessarily engage with.
But I don't actually know of a checker
that lets you sort of see that.
I know that there are analytics systems
you can download for, say, Persay with
Instagram to see like who's unfollowed
you and followed you and who's following
you. That follows other people that, you
know, which currently Instagram does not
have that analytic feedback for users.
It's a third party app you have to
download.
Twitter has started ad analytics on the
side to sort of give you an idea of how
accessible your tweets were.
But they'll never say like this is who
didn't follow you that access this tweet
today. But they give you a
more robust analytic breakdown of
your tweet about puppy dogs did really
well, but your tweet about OPSEC did not.
All right, make them before, please.
Hi.
I really appreciate your insights
on visual design and
the user experience of data at rest.
I'm really curious what your thoughts are
on temporal design
and the user experience of data in
motion. You know, because you mentioned
that one of the the the things that came
out of your interviews was,
you know, people having a sense of
just sort of not understanding social
media and feeling like they need help
understanding social media.
You know, in programing, we talk about
code smells, which are sort of features
of, you know, code and how
people use code that are a sign that
something's probably not designed right
here. Right. And it seems to me that, you
know, that sense of misunderstanding is
is a design smell, maybe
that there's just too much trying to
trying to consume user's attention.
And, you know, we need to change the rate
at which we're delivering it anyway.
That's it's an open ended question.
I'm just really curious what your thoughts
are there.
So I've actually thought about this a
lot. I actually haven't met with
any engineers at Facebook or Twitter.
But if you're here, I'd love to talk to
you.
But I met with someone that worked in
branding at Twitter and I asked him to
just sort of talk about his day job and
describe how the branding team
targeted ads, because I figured that was
a really good way to get a sense of how
the algorithm was working.
He started spouting a lot of buzzwords as
he is prone to want to do a
coworker of mine from a really old job.
But he said something was really
fascinating to me where he's like, well,
you know, Caroline, there's just so much
noise.
And he's like, you know, we have all these
different algorithms working.
He's like, there's just so much noise on
top of each other. And he's trying to
find this little signal.
So I know, for instance, with Twitter,
it's exactly that problem that they
infrastructurally design themselves
incorrectly. And to combat it,
you can't. They're at a point where I
feel like they cannot shut it down and
rebuild it and become minimal, like
with a better working code base.
So they're building on top of everything.
And the reason I also think that, too, is
a lot of anti harassment initiatives that
they have. They've been rolling out for
verified users and not for the common
user base. So if you're a verified user,
what the way in which they're anti
harassment initiatives work, it works way
different and way better for you.
So they have an algorithm working where
you will never see is a verified user
certains harassment tweets,
they're catching them before they come to
you and you can look at them later.
But there's all these really highly
specific changes.
And I have not yet seen a verified
user account.
No one's let me log into theirs again.
If you have that, let's chat.
But I've seen enough screenshots and read
enough about and talk to friends who have
it. And it's like it's
like Twitter 2.0.
It's just slightly better.
So what I think they're like the bigger
issue is there's so much data and
motion that they can only isolate it for
what what they are infrastructurally
deciding who is a power
user and that power user
infrastructurally actually becomes a
better power user.
Actually, I guess the hidden question I
have there is really more more
of, you know, is Twitter eventually
doomed to tear itself apart because it's
triggering people's system one responses
instead of instead of instead of
their reasoning?
Right. So I actually
I really don't have an answer to that
question because as a Twitter user who's
thought about quitting, but I really love
the community I have on Twitter,
it's kind of a weird emotional
negotiation that I have of like I don't
know how accessible I am.
And I face harassment on
a usually monthly basis for a variety
of different things.
And it's this weird negotiation.
I have a why am I still here?
But I actually legitimately like it.
And I think that that's sort of like the
big issue is it's like maybe it will pull
itself apart.
But harassment, while affects a lot of
people, it's also affecting hyper
specific groups of people.
And I think a lot of the fear around it,
rightly so as well.
If it happens to one person, it could
happen to you because we're
infrastructurally in the same place.
We're both equally open.
But I would I I guess I'm not
sure like I'm interested to see what
happens in the next two years, next two
or three years and see because Twitter
is not gaining any new followers
at this point. They're kind of starting
to plateau.
So they are not growing at a rate in
which other social media networks are
growing. And that's a major issue.
And some of that issue could be tied
towards bad infrastructural
design or really poor code of conduct.
All right, the next person on microphone
four, please.
Last year, my brother blocked
my mom on Facebook and she still vocally
bitter about it.
I mentioned this because many times
our online social network is
almost mapped all closely
intertwined with our offline social
network. So did you look into
making changes into this social network
that's online?
How does that affect your social network
offline? As much as you meet and
following, stop talking to your boss or
your former colleagues, you'll still meet
them at conferences and activities.
So how do you deal with that change
of this network online, which does not
actually give a clear picture
of how your social network looks like the
digital interaction between the offline
and online after
that change?
I definitely thought about that a lot.
So just in general, as a researcher, I've
always been really intrigued by societal
norms and propriety and like
what? It's polite behavior across many
different cultures.
And I'm speaking as an American, but I
come from a hyper specific place in the
United States. I come from Louisiana,
which is the American South, but we're
hyper, hyper specific culture.
We speak two languages.
It's English and then Cajun, which is an
oral based language. I only know a couple
of words, but New
Orleans, where I'm from, has the highest
rate of birth retention.
75 percent of people, they're born there.
Stay there. So the ways in which I
socialize is as a New Orleanian, it's
very different in the ways I socialize as
a New Yorker.
And that's true. And I think when you
get, like even more localized,
if you look at Americans versus Canadians
versus Mexicans and getting into Latin
America.
So I thought about that a lot that like
actually a lot of the interactions you
have offline definitely
affect and influence the interactions you
have online. So a lot of advice I sort of
gave people was also having to break
down, like, how often do you interface
with this person?
And let's think of the most neutral and
polite way to, like, break things down.
So, yeah, I thought about that a lot.
Like, I, I never
I it yet with the people I've
I've given advice to said unfriend
someone oftentimes
like unless the relationship has
incredibly soured, that's usually the
advice.
But if it's in the case of a boss, for
instance, my reaction is oftentimes
why don't you reach out to them if
they're an old boss and say like I'd love
to keep in touch, here's my email, but
like, I'm keeping my Instagram
just for friends only.
All right, next question from Mike, No
one from your project.
I'm curious to know if you think
that social breakup is actually
possible or if it's
not really possible because people
end up seeing your stuff anyway.
Is it bad if my response is both,
I think that as social media users
for a really long time, we've been taught
to interact with social media in a
particular way.
And I don't think that that way is
correct.
Facebook actively wants you to
postmaster's Twitter and Instagram wants
you to share and accumulate followers.
And that's the way in which these networks
grow. You're creating content and that
content is analytics and they package and
sell that to advertisers.
I'm politically agnostic on
that. But I have my own personal thoughts
as a researcher. That's just what they
do. But I think that that
push towards sharing and cross platform
sharing that you can crosspost
perhaps in terms of like
privacy is a horrible idea.
What are you saying? When are you saying
it? How are you saying it? Or all or all
identifiers? And they're all identifiers
that can pinpoint location and who you
are and who you are offline, where you
are.
And that's something I often do try to
impart to people is what are you saying
and when and does it need to be set
online?
So I personally, I always give this
example with people that sit with me and
like I personally try to not post
location, but I have a very specific
reason I can't do that.
And I had a lot of internal,
like, dialog of should I post assignments
at CCC?
What if someone's here and they want to
talk to me about something that I want to
talk about?
Or what if I say I'm home?
Like, does that make my mom more of a
target if someone wanted to try to swat
us again?
And those are extreme examples.
But it's also important to think about,
like, are you accidentally doxing
yourself?
You know, if you're saying I'm at the bar
downstairs from my apartment, let's check
in on Foursquare and then post that on
Instagram. You've pinpointed where
you live and that's information
that people don't actually need.
And so I always try to sort of walk this
line of like I think it's totally fine to
post pictures of food and family and
friends and and to do it frequently.
But I think it's important to sort of
know, like, are you highlighting where
you are? And like, are you highlighting
regular patterns in your lives?
And are you then amplifying
that to a variety of people that you
don't know and you have no idea how many
people are accessing it?
All right, we have another question from
the Internet.
I've got a question from the Internet.
Yesterday, there was a talk titled The
Possibility of an Army by Consonantal
who bought thousands of fake accounts.
What do you think about these actions?
I guess any more contacts, this person
bought thousands of fake accounts
to
actually I don't have any context for
that.
I mean, so I
in graduate school,
this woman, this fantastic ethnographer,
Tricia Wang, came to speak to us.
And the professor Clay Shirky
at the time was saying he bought her
50000 followers in a day.
And it was just I think he's paid like
one hundred dollars.
And I think it's really fascinating in
which the ways that that bumps you up
into a different sort of social strata
and how it made
her it presented her in a completely
different way online. That changed the
way in which people interacted with her
in the amount of followers she started to
accrue on a daily
basis.
I mean, I think so this
person created like a thousand different
accounts.
I think that that's what that question
movement, from what I read, that he
bought them.
Oh, he bought them.
I would be curious to know why, like if
he was looking at data or if he just
bought a thousand followers,
but I guess any more information?
All right, well, the person is not here,
so we don't know we have another question
from Mike number three.
Hi. So
my sister had an occasion
where someone who
she sort of
became a stalker and
didn't really know her very well,
but then started to send really
weird messages to her.
And it got to a point where
they were following her on Instagram
and she can't like can't really control
because this person knows who she is.
And her friends, she she couldn't control
her information.
And so this person would send stuff
based on, oh, we bought this blender and
and would deliver it to our house
along with letters about like
how they would have sex even though they
had never really interacted before.
And it got really scary and unsafe.
And it's sad for that person.
But also it became really scary for
my sister and she didn't know where
to go and what to do.
And when she went to the police and said,
I'm scared that this person might might
come and touch me, like when I'm
going home late at night, what should I
do? They said, well, until something
happens, we really can't, like, do
anything for you.
So what
I'm there may be resources out there for
for people who are facing this, but for
those watching this video,
what would you recommend them to do?
First of all, I want to say I'm so sorry
for your sister.
That's horrible.
And secondly, what I would suggest doing
is there are a variety of different
nonprofits that exist.
Crash override is one once you've been
harassed in a really specific way.
But what I would suggest is
Smart Girls Guide to Privacy has this.
It's this really fantastic book.
And they list where you can access,
I think, lawyers that are more digitally
savvy around digital crimes.
And my recommendation
in a case of that, with that kind of
persistence, whereas a regular person,
meaning a regular stalker, it's one
entity and they're actually starting to
sort of move away from social media and
moving into like letters, you
should get a lawyer and then
from there figure out ways to
assign
what's a space between you and the other
person across state lines even and figure
out, like, I don't know the particulars
of this case. If this person is in a
different state than your sister, that
gets a little bit trickier.
Are they in the same city?
So they're in the same city.
There's a lot more you can do.
My recommendation would be to immediately
find a lawyer who
is well versed in
online harassment.
But if that person is in the same city
and they're sending letters, I think
that's a pretty good reason to
move, like to start pressing charges
like that. That would be my immediate
reaction.
All right, thank you. Another question
from microphone number four.
Yes, thank you for your wonderful talk.
First of all, you one thing
I find myself personally very preoccupied
by is not just the question of how to
act on social media in the present,
but also how to clean up after my past.
Certainly things I've I've like
written or posted before.
And I actually find that the
obstacle towards doing that is frequently
infrastructural. It's really hard to
sort of have an oversight of everything
you've done in the past.
Do you what do you sort of see as
the future of design on these
platforms? Are they intentionally making
it difficult or have they coated
themselves into a corner and it's just
going to become a bigger problem?
I guess I would say to basing
off the way the design is now, I think
it's a mixture of having coded into
a corner and also trying to make design
minimal. So a lot of trends
and designer around optimization and
usability. But we're optimizing for speed
and we're making things more usable for
mobile. But we're not optimizing or
designing for safety and we're not
optimizing or designing for like
longevity of life within interacting
with and on these platforms.
So I would say it's like a misuse
of design priorities.
And I think that now there is some
pushback with people sort of saying,
like, how is this being accessed?
There's harassment persisting on on this
platform.
How is this happening or what's happening
because of these reasons, you know, etc.?
I would say that it's just a mis
alignment of priorities
within a design hierarchy and a coding
hierarchy.
All right, any other questions?
It seems like we ran out of questions or
we got them all cleared up for now.
So thank you very much for your
questions. Thank you very much for
coming. And please give it up for
Caroline again and for some time.
Thank you.