Dee Blind Mice

This week we read from Book of Lies.

Grant Morrison:: “Pop Magic!” All about how to do magic.

Best quote: “If I’d stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music?”

Mark Pesce:: “The Executable Dreamtime” All about how language obscures reality.

Best quote: “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilisation.”

Hakim Bey:: “Sorcery” All about sorcery

Best quote: “A poem can act as a spell and vice versa – but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature – it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies.”

Hakim Bey:: “Media Hex: The occult assault on institutions” All about Immediatist organisations and their attack on traditional organisations

Best quote: “Let the bastards produce their own bad luck out of their inner sadness at being evil assholes, out of their atavistic superstition (without which they wouldn’t be such media-wizards), out of their fear of otherness, out of their repressed sexuality.”

Super stuff that made me happy in the middle of finals.

For our final for technologies of persuasion we are building a technology of persuasion: a website with a model for rating website privacy policies that makes it easy for people to share their ratings to create a community resource that is a watchdog for privacy.

The very practise of rating sites will convince people of how little their privacy is valued or protected online and if enough people are persuaded to start caring about these issues there will be an incentive for companies to take more care of our personal data.

It’s currently still being built. Will be available in the next week as it’s in the ITP Winter Show.

NeuroPop White Paper – this is the White Paper of a company that claims to be able to affect your brain with their sound design. Sciency.

Sonic Weapons – an interesting Fortean Times article about the myths related to the use of sound as a weapon.

Neural Noise Synthesiser – another company that claims to be able to play with your brain through sound. This one seems both less threatening and less silly than the NeuroPop crowd.

NeuroPop Website – this website is funny for having the worst ever intro with the most annoying music. When you finally reach the home page you are assaulted by more annoying “brain wave” sounds. It’s fun to look at though – especially the big sound-nerd list of all their equipment.

This stuff if fascinating. That sound can have profound physical and emotional effects on people I have no doubt. I remain to be convinced that it is even theoretically possible to codify those effects and how they could be reproduced and don’t believe anyone has figured it out. From our class discussion it seems that pre-cortical responses can be elicited using sound – by playing different frequencies of sound in each ear. Ben knows all about it. Is it useful to be able to make a person look down? Useful if you sell shoes I guess. Beyond that though I feel the effects of sound aren’t unchanging – sound that you once loved can become annoying, you can phase out sound once you get used to it. Although perhaps when you’re not aware of it it’s having it’s greatest effect a la Muzak. Lots of thought fodder anyway.

The Overload – Sonic Intoxicant CD from NeuroPop is worth a listen. The third track did nauseate me as promised. I’m no stranger to being made feel ill by certain kinds of droney music – at least this time I didn’t throw up everywhere. The other two tracks are just spacey stuff that makes you feel a bit spacey. It’s funny.

McQuarrie and Mick, Visual Rhetoric – this is a long and pretty boring paper about a set of experiments to prove that people are affected by visual rhetoric. A field must really be in trouble if its writers need to be this turgid in their writing. It does contain the following gem in describing how people from different cultures won’t get “tropic” rhetorical devices:

That [croissant] looks like a foot, [while the other] is obviously a smiley face. . . . Is it because they have the almond on it so it becomes a happy face, and if you don’t have the almonds, then you’re not happy and you become a stinky foot? (Informant no. 11, Taiwanese, with respect to the visual pun in the almond ad)

Hee hee.

Direct and Indirect Approaches to Advertising Persuasion by YouJae Yi – this is a little easier on the sleep muscles. It’s a study that looks at the relationship between direct and indirect messages in advertising, both visual and verbal.

Here is my example of visual design intended to influence:

I think this is clever because the images of the blood clots echo the images of the cranes and scaffolding, which clearly dwarf the man. This supports the assertion of the text that the man is less strong than the clots, because the clots are associated with the machinery.

I read the start of Media Virus by Rushkoff. It’s very excited about the possibilities of media viruses.

To me it’s a little troubling because a culture based on viruses spreading information is likely to be sensationalistic. I can’t see a lot to be optimistic about in a world where being the next big thing to hit on the Internet is the best way of spreading your message. Worship of the new and of fads is the basis of consumerism: viruses are as likely to be used against us as in our favour. Still, understanding the ways the Internet and broadcast media work together to create short-lived hype for something is useful in terms of both guarding yourself against it and using it to your advantage where you can.

Some activist/artist organisations are doing some interesting virus/guerilla work:

Moveon.org – run grassroots political campaigns, mostly though letter writing or petitions or calling of elected representatives. No good to me as a non-citizen, but a nice mix of the old methods of registering opinions with politicians and new ways of using the Internet to organise.

RtMark – these guys are really funny. They suggest artistic and activist projects for people to do and have spoof enterprise software and put trademarks on everything.

The Thing – I used to spend a lot of time reading stuff on Thing a couple of years ago. I saw Ricardo Dominguez, who is one of the editors of the magazine part of the site, speak at MediaLab Europe before it went tits up. The site is based around activist art and humorous resistance to mainstream culture. It’s pretty cool, if a bit incomprehensible at times.

eToy – a bunch of artist/activists from Austria who act as though they are a corporation. They got in a fight with eToys.com

This fight is documented in InfoWars, a documentary about various fights against mainstream culture and politics by various satirists, smart arses and pranksters. There’s a great bit when some guy goes to a conference he was invited to by people who thought he was from the WTO. Funny and though provoking.

Idea Virus by Seth Godin – this is a loathesome article based entirely on what happens in the world about how to use the Internet to market your ideas or yourself. To me this is really what Viral Media is = viral marketing. A standard trick in the bag of most ITP students trying to get their stuff out there when they’ve finished. I’ve no beef with people who do this, but I can still wish things worked a little differently.

Cluetrain Manifesto – despite sean’s misgivings of this being a bit early-Internet idealistic I found it delightful. A lot of the ideas from the dotcom boom days were great – treat your workers well, realise they know their job better than you do, etc. are sound. From my work with the Forum on the Workplace of the Future I know that the whole knowledge workers schtick is very cool in government policy in several countries around the world. A lot of is just lip service that won’t change anything, but the basic thesis makes sense – people who work for companies are intelligent and trustworthy and you get most out of them if you treat them like aduls. Bottom liners don’t care for this logic though – all McKinsey and “if it can be counted it can be managed”. Barf.

I read some more of The Tipping Point, this time the introduction and a case study. Both things were about shoes becoming really fashionable: Hush Puppies taking the US by storm from the hipsters in the East Village, which came as a surprise to the company; Airwalks going from cult skater shoe to high street brand with the help of Advertising firm Lambesis who used the credibility of the “early adopting” skater hipster crowd to make the shoes popular. Silly Airwalk didn’t bother to keep their cool customers happy. I had a pair of Airwalks in 2000 or so – I guess I must have been the last person on earth to follow that trend.

FINAL PROJECT:
Amit, David, Sean and I are working together on our final project.

I’m just trying to put something down about our project that we can be thinking about/develop/dismiss as stupid.

The only name I can think of so far is Scaffold. I like it because it sounds cool and also because it sounds like a supporting structure or something you put in place to build something bigger or make something stronger. I’m not attached to it though, but it might give us a place to start thinking of a name since we seem to agree it’s important.

WHAT?
We’re going to make a website/organisation that rates companies based on their coercive techniques and privacy policies/invasions.

WHY?
We feel that the Internet is becoming unsafe and unhealthy for regular people because companies looking to make a profit are behaving in ways that are detrimental to, or at best careless of, the interests of their customers.

Unfair and coercive marketing practises are practised so commonly that it is difficult for an ordinary Internet user to seek out companies that offer alternatives. We want to make it easier for people to choose companies that treat them fairly, and also let people know about the ways they are being manipulated and mistreated by the people they spend their money with.

HOW?
We are going to draw up a list of unacceptable practises and a wish list of desired practises and figure out a rating scheme.

We also need to figure out how to allow website/companies to let people know they have been approved in a way that will not be easily faked.

We are also going to get in touch with EFF and see if we can find a lawyer to help us draft a standard rights-based privacy policy that companies could sign up to, so that people using their site could know what they were signing up to.

PERSUASION

We need to figure out how we’re going to let people know about what we’re doing as this is something that works only if a number of people are on board. I guess word of mouth is ideal. What kinds of persuasive practises are we cool with? We need to think about this, because how we comport ourselves will be important in establishing our credibility and whether this thing is worth anything at all.

We should approach some companies to sign up. Which ones? I guess we need to know what we’re looking for first.

Power of Nightmares

A year after downloading this 3-part documentary I finally got around to watching it. It’s worth a look.

It’s an interesting look at the similarities and common interests of the neo-cons and the islamists.

Ubiquity of Advertising

Aliens are taking over our culture.

I wrote a paper for Technologies of Persuasion inspired by Technopoly by Neil Postman, which is my new favourite book ever.

Read my paper about relationships and efficiency

BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology sets out seven types of persuasive technology tools, or more accurately seven ways that technology tools work: reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring, surveillance, and conditioning.

I’ve only read chapters 3 & 5 so far and I’ve found it useful in terms of providing a structure around which to think about ways that computers and other technology affect the ways we behave.

He has some interesting findings from various psychological studies that prove that people treat computers as people in certain circumstances, e.g. people tend to like computers that they perceive as being more like themselves in terms of dominance or submissiveness. There is certainly some persuasive potential if you can leverage the ways that people treat computers as social actors to get them to behave in certain ways.

Of course, just because you perceive someone as a social actor doesn’t mean you’re going to like them. You might even hate them. I guess that paper clip is the global outcast in the social network made up of people and their machines. Every body hates him and ignores him.

In terms of examples of particular persuasive technologies I was particularly intersted in the first method of persuasion Fogg identifies: that of reduction. Reduction means making a task so simple that the barrier to doing it is reduced to a point where you are far more likely to do it, and likely to do it more often.

There are a lot of websites right now offering little bits of javascript that you can move onto your browser and perform an action with just one click of something that is on your browser.

An example of this is New York Times Link Generator, where you can put a little bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar and just clicking it when you’re reading an article from the New York Times will generate a permanent link to that article that you can put on your blog. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but linking things to your blog is something you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time on – this makes it a lot more likely that I’ll link ot NY Times articles.