Make something “Cool”
Does this count?
Haaaah.
My Project for Idat 210: Strategies for Digital Art has gone far less than smooth. While I feel my original ideas were solid and workable, it just doesn’t seem that getting people to say what gives them hope or happiness is something that is so simple to achieve. While responses were sparce to begin with, they were often cynical or blasé, both on and offline. Given that we gained an extra week until the deadline, I thought that I could still get the feedback I needed, however had no success.
So I fall back onto the brief for this project, which as memory serves, was delivered to us thusly: “Make something cool.” I can’t get the idea of my original propostition for this project out of my head, so I guess I’ll just have to run with what I have, but from a different angle. I ended up working in After Effects, using paper and other mediums to physically visualise the low number of returns I got.
“There are so many people who lack confidence in, think poorly of, and are negative about themselves. A simple look at the statistics for the UK alone is enough to get depressed about.
However. There is always the bigger picture, filled with those little things that make you happy.”
GivesMeHope.com has been a very active motivator behind this project for me. It has made me realise how much the smallest of gestures can have a big effect – or like with PostSecret.com, the power that a message can hold.
What I have done is taken the sparce feedback that I got for my initial idea, and worked it into a short video, visualising the information. Rather than communicate them in a solely digital form, I chose too write some of the responses out into physical examples, somewhat akin to what you would see at PostSecret.com.
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Going back to my proposal, my aim was to “compare… for their differences, similarities and associations” – the comparison being between both the physical(offline) and the digital(online) responses – to better understand the social personality applied between these two forms of interaction. Essentially I have done this, where offline there were no takers to a girl asking for a minute of their time, online there were nowhere near the number of responses you would find on either of the previously mentioned sites – however, there were responses within the online community. Evidence of this can be found here and here, hopefully these links are still live (the other threads died very fast) and the threads haven’t been deleted. What this shows is that socially, it would seem that people are more likely to contribute online than in the offline world to a kind of survey or interview. Naturally, the online world type survey would be much less time consuming and more likely to be oriented around predetermined answers, but there is more to it than that. In the real world, a survey, questionnaire or suchlike would be accompanied by the idea of confrontation – dealing with someone face to face outside can seem much more daunting than answering questions from within the closed security of your own home. This can tie in to ideas of being judged, even cause people to think they are being accused or being convinced into buying something. The idea of public humiliation or criticism in any shape or form must be very strong for this to be the case, which is interesting to note, the lead that societal influence has put into our lives can have negative connotations – it can be limiting, or restricting, where online there were by comparison many more returns in terms of feedback, the offline world remained almost untouchable. Whether it is down to social heirarchy through authoritative measures (Should I have tried to get a response in a police uniform, and would that have made a difference?) or just that they were too busy and had places to be (perhaps a trade would have worked, if they let me ask them two questions and came back to the same place the next day I’d give them a cookie?) I was avoided almost entirely, and as such can much better appreciate the work charity volunteers do in a similar situation.
What I wanted to avoid most was manufactured information: asking friends and colleagues to provide is like asking leading questions during an interview, the result is no longer quite true, and the applied demographic is always more limited. This is why I tried to use feedback from the internet, despite the limited return still erred in attempting to continue. My whole interest was designed to better understand how much people are different on and offline, and it has been somewhat detrimental in this case. I cannot create my installation implementation simply because I could not garner together enough material to work from, however despite this, I did learn about the ways in which social interactivity operates on and offline. In the online environment, people are more open, perhaps due to the lack of face to face – less confrontational – or due to anonymity, as anyone and everyone can operate under an alias of their own discernable choosing, but it is obvious that in both eventualities there is an obvious lack of social interaction, given that either party of an online community cannot actually see the person on the other side of the monitor, nor can they discern who they are or appear like. This shows that despite the popularity of the online community and it’s success, it is also very limiting, better known as the developed lack of social skills.
Concerning this project, were I to do it again I would have approached it much differently, and probably avoided contact with concepts of the psychological, regardless of my interest in the subject and associated material. This is not because it is a hard subject to get to grips with or work on, but to create a proper project out of the sheer amount of theory you end up working through and trying to understand, it is very, very hard to turn that unquantifiable data into something digitally visual or impressing. Finally, my personal criticism would be to better handle my time and pay attention to the how the information return was not going well, had I realised sooner that I was not going to get the return I had wanted, I would have been able to rearrange my project for a better purpose and utilised my resources adequately, but as such, the end result of this project for me is that I learnt a huge amount of things, that sadly can be condensed into a heap of sentences. The online world is a more prolific and open environment to work within, however, it leads to trends of social influence that reach out into the real world too. People are afraid to be caught bucking the trend or be singled out, especially when confronted with the inability to remain a part of the anonymous group in the offline world. The general trends are slightly different, online, more digital mediums are naturally favoured, and so too the reverse is true.
Additional Links:
Social Theory
University of Cardiff notes
