Month: March 2026

Task 10: Attention economies

User Inyerface

The first thing I noticed when I opened User Inyerface was the ticking clock. This immediately caused me to flashback to playing Mario Brothers on Nintendo where each level had a time limit. When I saw the clock on User Inyerface, I automatically assumed there was a time limit, which increased my stress level. The next thing I noticed was the irregular wording of certain elements. For example, the terms and conditions box was labeled “I do not accept the terms and conditions” (Bagaar, 2019), which was checked by default and needed to be unchecked (a double negative). What I expected to see based on previous experiences filling out forms online was clearly not going to help me with this task. I needed to concentrate, and the flashing lights, ticking clock, pop-ups, and confusing wording, were making that extremely difficult. 

Online businesses use some of these similar tactics to deceive their customers. For example, about three years ago I opened Outlook, and was met with an alert that my email inbox only had 84% storage space remaining. I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to get new messages so I started deleting old emails and anything with a video attachment, to try to free up space. I then refreshed the page and again saw that I still only had 84% storage remaining. 

I then clicked the button that said “free up space”, and it took me to a page with three paid subscription options. I decided to forget about it for the time being and revisit the issue when I got closer to completely running out of space. Over time I realized that the 84% wasn’t changing. Three years later I’m still getting the alert, and it still says I’m at 84%. 

Outlook is clearly using a dark pattern (Brignull, 2011) to deceive its users into buying a subscription they don’t need. Why do I accept this? The email company that I trust with personal and private messages is essentially telling me a lie everytime I visit their site, but even though I know they are doing it, I ignore it. I recognize myself in Brignull’s (2011) article as a customer who knows the company is subtly deceiving their customers, but does nothing about it. Probably because they don’t always know what to do. 

It was refreshing to learn from  Brignulls’s (2011) article that there are communities of concerned consumers who call-out companies for their deceitful practices. And in some cases, it has resulted in the companies changing their practices to being more honest and transparent (Brignull, 2011). 

Lastly, the good news is that our brains are adaptable. Once we know what we are looking for, we can pick out these deceptions and not be fooled by them. For example, I tried User Inyerface a second time. When I knew what to expect, the pop-ups, flashing lights, ticking clock, were hardly able to capture my attention at all. This is why groups like the deceptive patterns community are so important. The more of us are aware of the dark tactics used by online businesses, the fewer of us are likely to be deceived by them. 

References: 

Bagaar. (2019). User Inyerface [web game]. https://userinyerface.com/game.html 

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.

Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data

When I first loaded the data into Palladio, I found the graph to be fairly dense. A dense network graph, according to Weingart (2011), is a network where “almost everything is connected to almost everything else” (p. 1). The more dense a network becomes, the less useful it is (Weingart, 2011). 

Figure 1: Graph with large amount of density

Sizing and highlighting helped to make the data much more meaningful. Sizing the curators didn’t reveal much, as each curator chose the same number of tracks (except one who either missed a question on the quiz or was adamant that only 9 of the 27 tracks were qualified to be shared with extraterrestrial life). But sizing the tracks helped in visualizing which tracks were chosen most compared to least. 

However, I didn’t find sizing the nodes to be as clear as I would have liked it to be for visualizing the data. I decided to view the data in Palladio’s table function, copy it into google sheets, and then create a bar graph showing the frequency each song was chosen as well. 

Figure 2: Network with the frequency of tracks chosen highlighted 

Figure 3: Same data as above (frequency of tracks chosen) in a bar graph format

The limitations of the bar graph are that it doesn’t show connections between the tracks and the curators. However, I like the linear and step-wise nature of the bar graph in order to see a clear progression from the most chosen to the least chosen song. 

I found the facet filter to be the most useful analyzing function in Palladio. By selecting myself, and one other person in the class, I was able to easily identify which classmate I had the most (7 out of 10 tracks), and least (2 out of 10 tracks) matches with. 

Although there is no information in the graph itself as to why I had more matches in common with a certain classmate over another one, I would use this information to determine which classmates post I would read to get a better understanding of the criteria they used to choose their songs, and to find out what makes our choices either different or similar. 

Figure 4: Seven tracks in common

Figure 5: Two tracks in common

Is the visualization able to capture the reasons behind the choices?

The fact that we were able to make our own criteria for choosing songs makes it hard to create meaning from the connections in the data. If we all had the same criteria for choosing songs to follow, the data would have been more meaningful. If we all followed one set of criteria for chosing songs, there could have been opportunities for interpretation (i.e, what is a more technologically advanced instrument, a panpipe or a drum?). These could have been analyzed based on the variations in our song selectionsl. When we are all working with different criteria on the other hand, the same song could have been chosen by two different people for completely different reasons. As Weingart (2011) states, “as the sorts of things a node can connect to increases, the utility of simply counting the connections a node has decreases”. 

Reference

Weingart, S. (2011). Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II. Journal of digital humanities, 1(1). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/demystifying-networks-by-scott-weingart/

Mode Bending: What’s in your bag?

Express meaning through a different mode of output 

In my redesigned version of “what’s in your bag”, I categorized items into groups. I then weighed each category separately by kilogram (kg). For example tshirt, gym shoes, shorts, and hand grips were grouped together into the category workout gear. This category weighed a combined total of 1.09 kg (25.8% of the total weight of the contents of the backpack). 

The total weight of each category of items was then entered onto a spreadsheet, and then converted to a pie chart. The pie chart represents what percentage of the total weight of all items each category represents. 

How is the meaning represented differently?

The first time I did the assignment, the energy snacks (trail mix and protein shake) seemed insignificant compared to the ski and workout gear, which took up the vast majority of the visual space. Taking up a lot of visual space seemed to give them a large amount of importance. In this redesigned mode of representation, the energy snacks become the items that represent the category with the most weight and suddenly become seemingly the most “important” items.

What happens to meaning as it moves across modes? 

This mode of representation gives more visual importance to items that weigh the most. However, these are not necessarily the most important items in the bag. This redesigned mode of representation could start a discussion about how we determine an item’s importance. Is it by weight? Is it by what it costs? Is it how hard it is to replace? The wallet with credit cards, cash, business cards, and government issued identification is the hardest to replace, but it also weighs very little. Does that affect its importance? Similarly, something could have large sentimental value, such as a photograph or gift from an important person. How do we measure the importance of these items?

What benefits or challenges emerge from this shift? 

One of the challenges to this mode of representation (weight in kg) is that it doesn’t have any context. For example if you are planning on rucking to build muscle, then loading your bag with the heaviest items possible is a benefit. However, if you are planning to hike the pacific crest trail, then you want the lightest of everything. Weight is important in both of these contexts but for opposite reasons. 

One benefit of this mode shift is it could start a conversation about how the importance of physical items can be measured in many different ways. This could challenge students to think about the value of things in their own lives. It could help them to determine which ones are truly important, and which ones seem important even though they might just be taking up a lot of space.

Image of items in backpack from first assignment:

 

The Golden Record

Smith Rumsey (1999) provides several criteria that can help us to decide what pieces of the historical record we should keep. According to Smith Rumsey (1999) we should keep anything with a lot of additional information may not seem currently relevant but may help us to adapt to unfamiliar environments later on. In musical terms, this could mean songs with a wide variety of instruments,  or songs with many different musical layers tracked on top of each other. 

Smith Rumsey (1999) goes on to state that the value of something could be determined by an event that hasn’t happened yet. She therefore recommends collecting with as much depth as possible, and that both winners and losers should be represented. 

Lastly, Smith Rumsey (1999) recommends collecting from extremes on the right and on the left, and then find a way to link those two contrasting items together. 

I came up with the following songs: 

1. Puspawarna (kinds of flowers)
2. Wedding Song

Puspawarna is a commemoration of an Indonesian prince’s nine concubines and wives (Wikipedia, 2026). The Peruvian wedding song on the other hand is about a woman lamenting about getting married too young (Twenty thousand hertz, 2019). I found these themes to be contrasting as one is from the perspective of a man who has the pleasure of being with multiple women, versus a woman who presumably missed out on many experiences her life had to offer in exchange for the premature betrothal to a single man.

3. Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin

4. Dark was the night, cold was the ground

Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin is a bulgarian folk song about an unkillable rebel hero (Twenty thousand hertz, 2019). I found this to contrast thematically from the Southern gospel song Dark Was the Night, which contains no actual lyrics but instead “sounds of fatigue, sorrow, pain and death, and are meant to convey the anguish of Christ the night before his Cruxifiction {sic}” (O’dell, 2010). 

5. Johnny B. Goode

6. Melenesian Panpipes

I chose these tracks because of how much they contrast musically. Johnny B. Goode is played by a full rock band complete with electric bass, electric guitar, drums, piano, and vocals. Melenesian Panpipes on the other hand is played with only one type of very simple, acoustic instrument. The two songs also contrast dramatically in terms of the geographical location that they represent (the North American continent vs. small oceanic islands). 

7. Tchakrulo 

8. Flowing streams

Tchakrulo is an “ancient drinking song from the country of Georgia… [which] dramatizes preparing for battle” (Twenty thousand hertz, 2019, 15:12). I found the strong vocal harmonies, as well as the battle theme of the song to starkly contrast with the song Flowing streams. Flowing streams is played on a Guqin, a chinese stringed instrument traditionally “played by noblemen and scholars in intimate settings” (Unesco, 2003, p. 1). Thematically, Flowing Streams is intended to capture the sense of continuously moving water, an image that is much more synonymous with peace than battle. 

9. Beethoven’s 5th 

10. Navajo Night chant 

Beethoven’s fifth symphony, part one, along with several other tracks on the golden record album, consists of a full orchestra of musicians. However it also stands out because it the longest musical track on the album at 8 minutes and 52 seconds. In contrast, Navajo Night Chant is one of the shortest tracks on the album at just over one minute in length. It is also one of the simplest songs on the album consisting of mostly chanting vocals over some light percussion. 

 

References

O’dell, C. (2010). Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”—Blind Willie Johnson (1927). The library of congress. www.thelibraryofcongress.gov 

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound. 

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize? Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved August 12, 2022.

Unesco. (2003). Gukin and its music. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/guqin-and-its-music-00061

Wikipedia. (2023, December). Puspawarna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puspawarna