Final Task part 3

Here's a mock-up of the Wiggly website

Here's a "video tour"

There's a few things I will expand on.

The number for the amount of people in an instance - 150 - is sort of arbitrary, but based on an idea by a guy called Dunbar. Based on studies on other primates he made an estimation about a "natural" group size for humans as a species. You can read more about it here: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number. I didn't do any further research than the wiki page so it might be total bullshit, but I needed some number and this one had at least some merit.

We've touched on this topic a few times in class, but it still puzzles me greatly that there's a thing called "YouTube community". There's literally millions of channels, how the f is that a community? When people say that do they mean the creators who move to LA to pursue a career in entertainment? I watch tons and tons of YouTube videos every day and I've never seen any of these videos on any YouTube rewind compilation. It seems really unlikely to me that I would've?

Is this Jennifer Aniston joining "Instagram community"? No. She had a new TV series premiere two weeks after her first post. Her Instagram presence is an ad. Orlando Bloom, Jennifer Aniston and me are not part of the same community now and I cannot comprehend what the comments and likes are for. Is is a status thing to be seen to have liked this post? Is this like getting an autograph? I don't know.

The internet was different before all the real life famous people and everyone's mom joined in, when it was just nerds and kids and everyone visited different sites. In 2004 if Jennifer Aniston had shown up in some random movie forum no one would've cared because it would've been impossible to verify that it's actually her. Content mattered in a different way.

Reddit is my favourite place because it has a nice sense of several communities about it. Different subreddits have different sorts of culture. One of my favourite internet community art pieces of all time is Place, that was a million pixel canvas where every user could place one pixel every 5 minutes. The canvas was active for 72 hours (although the duration wasn't announced in the beginning and probably not planned on either) and during that time plans were made, factions formed, people would take shifts defending pixels. The final image is a product of hundreds of different groups planning things together by themselves - only in the instance of a conflict on the borders of their plans do they need to discuss and compromise and maybe make pacts with other factions further down the canvas. 

Small communities need to exist to make huge group efforts like this possible.

What I want form Reddit is the feel of a small group without in the group needing to be into some same obscure hobby or interest. In a group of 150 random first year students across three universities, I think the diversity of interests and skills would be very high in a given instance, but the common experience of being a student would tie the group together at first.

What I also had in mind was sort of a fraternity. The people in the group would be in each other's group of online buddies, like neighbours in life, helping each other out when possible.

I think a platform in itself doesn't need to be very exciting or give its users everything they want. I think the users should build themselves a place that suits them. Not being able to leave or ban anyone just because you don't like the content of their messages would mean that you have to communicate and solve problems the old fashioned way. I sincerely believe no one would want to be the one lonely troll in a group of 150 people - if you're ignored, no one else outside the group is ever going to see how much you don't care.

I imagine people would take part and strive to create an interesting culture for themselves, playing games they made themselves, create their own stories, write their own reviews and news, make their own music. Who cares if it wouldn't be the best possible content? It would be their own.

Final Task part 1

I sort of lost focus/ got carried away with my presentation so I'll... try to go over it here.I'll go over some problems I have with current popular forms of social media and think about what sort of social media I'd consider fun to be involved in.

My first idea for a final task was to make an Instagram channel for a dog that doesn't exist. I use a lot of time thinking about social media and Instagram is the one that I use most . I don't post much though, and thought this could work as practice and a study of trying to get followers. I wasn't planning on getting any followers, just going through the motions and pretending that I might have them at some point. Basically playing a character, like everyone else.

Social media causes me anxiety. It's just normal social anxiety, but like, digital. I have a lot of neurotic thinking and in the digital realm it manifests just the same as everywhere else - as fears of destroying my or someone else's life by doing something stupid. It's been hard to post anything for some years because I'm too uncertain to press "send", and every time the machine asks me if I'm sure I want to - I'm never sure.

So what's the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could be bullied and in danger of losing your job for one completely on-brand tweet. Lindsay Ellis made a speech in XOXO festival about how she was targeted by alt right trolls on Twitter for a year and what sort of effects it had on her personal and professional life. No one can just "go offline" anymore. If your job is online, that's where you've got to be.

I use Reddit as much or even more than I use Instagram, but I don't count it as a social media. It's much closer to a forum, and it's mostly anonymous. It's one of those places that you can actually leave and start over. Sure you'll lose your karma, but following doesn't exist in the same way as in other social medias.

One of my favorite subreddits on Reddit is r/hobbydrama - it contains interesting, long posts on niche subjects that I don't know much about, and it's usually entertaining as well as informative. It brings together everything I love and hate about internet communities and culture. Often the drama involves an online community completely imploding due to some controversy involving one person, people take sides and factions form.

Here's a post that's "2 days ago" today:

That's just the start, it's a long post. So basically some 19-year-old had a lighthearted Tumblr account about fish-related memes that got somewhat successful and now his real name will forever bring up hits about these thousands of people trying to goad him into committing suicide because they heard someone say he's a pedophile. It's an interesting read. The power of a mob is insane, and the mob has no morals, it just wants to be entertained. I understand that. I want to be entertained too. But the sheer injustice and unpredictability of it all is frightening as hell. What did user i-am-a-fish do to inspire all this hate? The going theory is that he wasn't negative enough about asexuals.

Why do people share this sort of information and use hours and hours debating about it? Boredom, I guess. I think at this point it's also fear. If you don't take a firm stand that is later on decided to have been the right one, that will be used against you in the future. You're either with us or against us, so what does it even matter what happens to be the truth, if you don't react in the right way quickly enough, you're on the wrong side.

People can't be reasonable because of the bad faith actors who spread information for the purpose of causing harm. Lindsay Ellis gets nazis because she has leftist views, so it's in their interests to try to deplatform her. So the nazis do everything they can to make something stick, and all those on "Ellis's side" are ready to jump ship on a moment's notice so that they won't get canceled by association.

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet

So that would be my problem number one. Information is made instantly available and never taken back, spread in minutes before verified - so no one cares about verification. Constant reacting. Reacting and spreading information gets easier when you don't have to use actual humans for it, so you can build an army of bots to do your bidding. This is also a tactic you can use when you don't care about morals, because there's the idea that this is the "wrong" way to use social media.

 So these are what I think of as "griefer" problems - people making things less fun for others on purpose. I consider many old people griefers because the have all the time in the world to be angry online, but they may lack the desire to learn new things and educate themselves. They'll have an idea of a moment in past that was better, and the only thing they're interested in doing is constantly complaining about others moving on from that point.

Yes, I know. My sun sign is Boomer...

That's The Guardian. The text on yellow is a countermeasure to prevent one of the most common ways of spreading of false news - linking old articles. Periodically all the old news articles about, for example, crimes committed my an immigrant, will start going around again, whenever a vote is needed one way or another. For certain people it doesn't matter why the story is circling again, it's true, after all.

This leads us to my third problem - time. More specifically, time stamps. Time on the internet is pretty hard because everyone's living on a different timezone. The common design decision appears to be to show timestamps as "30 minutes ago". Now the problem I have with this that whenever a screenshot is taken or the post is archived as a picture, it doesn't show accurate time. After a year reddit timestamps have an accuracy of one year - so a post made in in December and April of 2018 will show show up the same way. You can see the accurate time on posts by hovering over the stamp with a mouse but that doesn't work on many, many third party apps. Why is this a problem? Well I HATE IT. I want to know when something happened, because the exact moment it was written in matters a lot.

Tumblr is the worst offender because by default they don't show timestamps AT ALL. That's insane! 

 

Here's a picture from Tumblr's announcement that they're changing the design of how reblogs look like, in 2015. Before that everything was atrocious and impossible to comprehend. (Could be that my unwillingness to join makes it look more confusing to me because I never learned the mechanics from within - but time moves forward, people will forget - and in a few years that picture on the left will be very puzzling to many people.)

And pictures will be all we have at some point, because it's completely opposite from what we were warned about as kids - everything on the internet will disappear forever. The Internet Archive is amazing for saving some of it for now, but it doesn't take much to destroy one non-profit. When Internet Archive and Wikipedia are taken over it's probably time to go off the grid.

So, time! But because timezones fuck things up a bit, we're committing to just the one. Finland time for everyone!

Now - the last few important things that I want my social media to have. I want fun, and I want relevance, and I want to have trust that users will engage with each other in good faith. There has to be a level of privacy between completely open for everyone, and completely private just for you. (In the current media landscape no one can assume that the things they share only with a chosen group of people will stay within that group of people - it only needs one of those people to disagree with you for all of your secrets to be out.)
 
People have to be free to be creative without worrying about things like copyright or if their content is "on brand". Also - not everything in the world needs to be turned into money the moment people like it. Liking can be measured by simply what becomes common culture and what doesn't.

Any sort of "liking", voting to curate content, is just a way to solve a problem of communities getting too big to be curated by hand. A community doesn't NEED to be too big for someone to be able to read everything. A larger community doesn't mean better diversity or quality of content - for example, the biggest subreddits are always rife with reposts, because there's always new people coming in who haven't already seen everything a hundred times. This is how time gets murky, everything mixes up into this disgusting paste of nowness, where everything is always new and old at the same time, everything is news and everything's always been the same.

In next post I'll go over the basic mechanisms of my social media and an idea of how I would want the user experience to be.

Wins

On Friday evening I went to the center to get something and noticed that there were a few thousand people gathered at the square, staring at huge screens. I didn't know what was going on and went to see what was on the screen - football, apparently. The very minute I was there, Finland scored their first goal against Liechenstein in the UEFA Championship qualifications, and the crowd cheered. 

I'm what you might call a bandwagoner. If someone is doing exceptionally well, well enough to become a meme or news outside of it's main audience, then I'll care for a short while. I didn't stay to watch the game, but on the bus on the way home I listened to the radio broadcast of the game anyway, and I thought how nice it would be for all those people at the square if Finland won. If I hadn't seen all those people be so excited, I wouldn't have known about the whole thing or cared at all.

This is generally considered to be the wrong way to care. You're supposed to earn the wins by sticking with your team through the hard times, disappointments and losses. A bandwagoner is only there for the wins.

I'm interested in good stories and seeing what makes people excited and interested, but I don't have teams that I follow. I don't care about sports or competitions if I don't personally know someone playing or if I'm not playing myself. I didn't have any normal sports hobbies when I was a child so that might explain part of it. (The voluntary fire brigade and folk dancing are both surprisingly competitive but so niche that it's hard to follow as just spectator sport.)

Despite all that, here are some games / battles / wins that I remember seeing on TV and for a very short while intensely caring about the outcome of it just because of the story. (Not included are elections that have actually meant something to me.)

Hockey Championship -95
Of course; where it all starts. I was 5 years old and it was past my bedtime. I had to go to bed but I didn't want to fall asleep before the game ended. I could hear the TV in the living room, excited voices. My mom came to the door to whisper that we won. I was so happy!

Mika Häkkinen wins his first Formula 1 race in -97
My dad has always been a Formula 1 fan, he watches all the races every time. It's the only "sport" anyone in my childhood family was ever interested in. Many weekends as a child were spent watching the qualifications and races, and the rivalry between Mika Häkkinen and Michael Schumacher was the stuff of legends. It was obvious to me then that Schumacher was the bad guy and Häkkinen was the good guy.
Formula 1 is the weirdest competition, because the drivers compete in pairs and some cars are so much worse than others that with the equipment available it's impossible to win a race anyway, let alone a whole Grand Prix. Behind this win there's actually a lot of controversy because a crash with Villeneuve disqualified Schumacher from the whole season and a whole conspiracy between the teams of McLaren (Häkkinen, Coulthart) and Williams (Villeneuve, Frentzen) to help each other went unpunished.

Tarja Halonen wins the Presidential Election in 2000
I remember watching the counting of the votes of the second round with my parents. I asked them who they think should win, but I didn't get a clear answer. My dad told me that it's a secret and against the law to tell who you voted for, so I had to make up my own mind.
The historical significance of electing the first female president was totally lost to me and I didn't yet know anything about political parties, so I picked my favourite mainly on looks. I chose Esko Aho because he had very sad eyes and I didn't want him to get any sadder. Unfortunately I couldn't find any of this on Youtube but here's some footage on Yle Areena:

Yle Elävä Arkisto - Suomi sai ensimmäisen naispresidenttinsä

Tatu and Eeka in Far Out(2001-2002) Season 2
Far Out was a Finnish reality show that lasted for two seasons and was a bit like Amazing Race but maybe more of a youth program, where competitors traveled in different cities doing small assignments and the audience would vote for who they wanted to stay on the show. Two friends called Tatu and Eeka became pretty famous for their funny antics. I found this clip and was sort of shocked at the casual racism against the romani in it! It was indeed a different time. Tatu Ferchen is nowadays the CEO of the Finnish branch of multinational media monstrosity Banijay Group that's responsible for all the shittiest and most watched programs on TV, like Temptation Island and Vain Elämää. It's pretty crazy that he got all the way there and it all started from this - the network offered these guys their own TV show solely based on them being so well liked by the audience in this program.
Honestly, at the time I didn't really get what was so great about them. I mostly pretended to understand because everyone at school seemed to love them.

Lordi wins Eurovision Song Contest in 2006
It used to be that "when Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest" was a saying that was used when talking about something extremely unlikely that would never, ever happen. It was used right alongside "when Hell freezes over" and "when pigs fly". In 2006 I watched the contest during a training weekend with my folk dance group in some camping center in the middle of nowhere. When it was certain that Lordi was going to win, we all went outside to see if there were any flying pigs.
For several years afterwards, the Finnish media always thought that the chances to win were pretty good, and they were always shocked the next day when we did as horribly as ever. The chances to win were the same before and after Lordi - not very good. The way probabilities work though is that something that has a 99% chance of failing still succeeds one time out of a hundred. This was that one time.

Finland wins Hockey World Championship in 2011 and 2019
In 2011 I didn't watch the game, but through the walls I heard my neighbours shouting on all sides. I had Uutisikkuna on and it said that 10 000 people were gathered at the central square, so we went outside to see people swimming in the fountain. It was madness! In 2019 I lived a biking distance away and went by myself to see the celebrations again, because a bit of anarchy on a Sunday night is always fun to witness. I had this weird feeling while there that most people were there like me - rather to "see the celebration" than to celebrate themselves. Maybe it hasn't been long enough since the last time, so winning is just not as noteworthy anymore. How many times are we all gonna go torille until it gets old?

FIFA World Cup 2014
In the summer of 2014 I spent so much time depressed and unwilling to move from the sofa that I almost accidentally got invested in the World Cup, much to the detriment of my sports-adverse spouse. I tried to care about something and tried pickinga a team and rooting for them through the whole competition. My team of choice was Italy with old man Pirlo and hothead Balotelli, based on their 2-1 win against England. Italy sadly didn't even make it out of the group stage. I kept watching anyway, because the more interesting story turned out to be the tournament as a whole. How important the event was to Brazil as a football country, the sheer weirdness of the venues being built in the tropics just to be used a couple of times and controversies surrounding their construction and the cost of the event, and to top it all off the home team was not playing very well. Brazil managed to somehow limp to the semifinals but it wasn't considered much of an achievement, and they were absolutely crushed by Germany in an unprecedented 7 - 1 loss, ending in 4th place over all. It was amazing TV because it seemed like even the German team was feeling sorry for the Brazilians.

The International 2014
I can't even remember how this came about. I don't play or have ever played Dota 2 nor do I know anyone who does. I generally don't care about esports any more than any other sort of sports and I don't follow anything or anyone. However, for some reason, I remember being intensely invested in how a Chinese team called DK and especially a player called BurNIng fared in a yearly Dota 2 tournament called The International. Maybe I saw a trending clip on Reddit or something? Anyway. I watched all the games they were in, they didn't win, and I forgot all about them and the game they play.

Iceland in UEFA Euro 2016
Like who the hell wasn't on this bandwagon. It was great! 10% of a whole country traveled somewhere just to see a part time dentist kick a ball and then we all clapped!

England vs Colombia penalty shootouts in 2018
I've found myself rooting against England so many times on this list so here's finally one where they win something.