Observing Micro-Futures
- Live-streaming, live-chatting, and and the meta-memetic zeitgeist.
As livestreaming becomes an increasingly popular form of media consumption, fascinating sub-cultural habits are emerging from their accompanying live-chats. Popularized most notably by Twitch.tv, a games and entertainment streaming site, livestream chats are home to simultaneously some of the most repulsive hive-mind hate speech on the internet, and some of the most bizarre and inexplicably choreographed group inside jokes and performances:
I’m interested in exploring what happens as this behavior grows, as entire personalities and cultures emerge out of these chaotic sess-pools of messaging.
2. A/B Testing, Rhetoric Analysis, Context Collapse
I’m very interested in the increasing prevalence of machine learning applied to writing and rhetoric, in generative or optimization algorithms, and how this can be seen as both a utilitarian and unsettling solution to digital context collapse.
For example, when I deliver a statement to someone in person, I cater that statement to a certain vernacular, style, or context in which I know that person. In an online context, this affordance is gone, my speech as given to one person reaches all people the same way, I do not have control over the delivery of that message. However, many advertising and content companies are already optimizing content to cater to specific user trends, demographics etc., so what if these same techniques were streamlined and applied to everyday social media posts?
Rather than author a post explicitly, I write a proto-post, that is then translated and delivered via analysis and content optimization to every member of my network. The message falls correctly on the ears of each specific listener. This is in many ways attractive and more ‘honest’ in how it’s analogous to how we communicate offline, but raises interesting questions about authorship, authenticity, and conceding control of our voices to algorithms.
3. Self-Identity through Non-Identity: Social media presence for a post-ironic generation
— coming soon —
