Wei Zhou’s Blog

I’m recently obsessed with human identity, perception and self-expression. In Stacie’s course ‘ Information and interaction’, I proposed to do a 6 weeks project naming “Digital Self”. The goal is quite simple: Explore the difference between your real self in the society and your digital self on the Internet.  The method is even simpler: by analyzing people’s daily browsing activities. I plan to build this piece by Processing(as usual), the final delivery will be an “artistic” interactive piece – I’m suffering with CMU’s rigorous design research, usibility tesing and seminar reading education, it’s time to have some fun.

So what’s a Digital Self and why start from a web browsing history analysis?

People may scared if they realized that their browser knows themselves more than they do. The browser traced down every single activity you do on the Internet, that somehow reflects you as a whole slightly different than you are in the real world.

For example, here are some variables that may reflects your “Internet” personality.

Your most frequent visiting sites.

- If I ask you to list some favorite sites, the answer you give me might be different than the answer given by your browser. You may not realize why you actually spend 30 hours on Facebook monthly, that conflicts with your goal – study harder.

How long do you stay at a site

- Spending 10 hours shopping on Amazon and 10 seconds to check things on Amazon reflects different personalities. If we did a long-term research, you may find you are easily obsessed with one thing, or you may like to change your focus frequently. That’s a very interesting Internet personality.

Your browsing time

- This directly reflects your schedule, how busy you are.

Sites category you visited over time

- When you are relax and happy, you will visit a lot of sites you like, otherwise, if you are hitting a deadline, you will only visit sites related to your work. However the sites people visit reflects how they release their pressure, such as watching a cartoon after a long time work.

Your search result

- Reflects your curiosity

What do you tag or bookmark a page

- This may reflect your Internet self in a social context.

What much do you comment or upload things on Internet(In versus Out)?

- If you only get, never give, does that mean you have a selfish personality on the Internet?

…

It will be interesitng to build a framework for Internet Self Study, but I think that’s phychologists’ job.

Actually I like Google products over a lot of others. But there’s something out there makes me not a big fan of it. Eventually I cannot endure it anymore and decide to write something. I think Google, being considered as one of the leading software companies in the world, has the responsibility to make their product user experience not suck, not only in terms of usability, but of aesthetics.

If everybody is using Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Doc, we begin to lose our control over our choices of web applications, just as we have to use Windows OS. So welcome to a software modernism age. Welcome Google’s fast-food web apps. Keep Google Bauhaus design doctrine in mind: “Our Web Apps are so simple, secure and fast, that’s all you need for your Internet.”

Is simple, secure and fast all we want? If design is about the value,not the truth, where can we target our values in this fast-food software culture? When can a piece of software become a form of art, bringing people altimate enjoyment?When can a web Apps functions beyond a tool, behave like a digital being or digital asistant that help us in an interesting and considerate way? Can softare have personalities, catering to their master(user)’s ever-changing needs and interests? Google basically ignores all of those possibilities and proves itself proudly: A group of engineers, make softwares, work hard to make every engineer happy, and change every Internet user to a engineer.