I’ve read a few different posts on this assignment, but April’s stood out to me as possessing many of the same observations. The mistakes they encountered mirrored many of my own, perhaps due to common shortcomings of Apple’s dictation software. One thing April said that stood out to me is how oral story telling takes longer to consume than a written story.
Two of my best friends live abroad, and we’ve gotten into the habit lately of sending multiple lengthy voice-note diatribes. We’ll go through phases where its our only form of communication. They take so long to listen to that I often find I put off listening to them – opting instead to let them build up and listen to them all in one go. Whereas if they were in text form, I would likely read, or at least scan through them, immediately.
Its entirely subjective, but I find oral storytelling easier to produce, but more tedious to consume. While I find written storytelling more difficult to produce, but easier to consume.
Carol’s take on the Golden Record assignment is very much in-line with my interpretation, but I think she articulates it more effectively than I did. Dr. Smith Rumsey’s discussion on “What can we afford to lose” was echoing through my mind throughout the course of the assignment, and Carol mapped Rumsey’s points to the case of the Golden Record perfectly. Namely, Carol emphasizes the following points:
- The importance of diversity in archiving and preservation activities
- The ethical considerations that should be taken into account when performing said activities
Though I discuss Dr. Smith Rumsey’s ideas in my version of the Task, I don’t think I captured these points well. While I aimed for global and temporal diversity in my selection, and was acutely aware of my biases, Carol ties these considerations in with Dr. Smith Rumsey’s for her selection.
I have also been reflecting on the ethical considerations of the Golden Record’s creation. Based on Timothy Ferris’s account, it doesn’t sound as though it was compiled by committee but instead was a quickly assembled piece of art with a small number of contributors. These small number of contributors were: Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Alan Lomax, Ann Druyan, Jon Lomberg, Robert E. Brown, Timothy Ferris, Jimmy Iovine (“Voyager Golden Record”, 2024). Not a diverse group by any stretch. One could argue that such a group, comprised entirely of – mostly white, mostly male – Americans, should have no authority in selecting what to preserve of humanity for distribution to the wider universe.
Yet the resulting tracklist is undeniably diverse, not only geographically but temporally and culturally, to a degree that it would be difficult to accuse the curation committee of outright bias. I could see an argument for accusations of euro-centrism, with an emphasis on classical music between the Bach, Mozart, and Stravinsky offerings, yet Timothy Ferris, the record’s producer, explains this inclusion as:
In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the record were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They’d look for symmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between compositions. We sought to facilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full of symmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed from it.
Counter to Ferris’s justification is this piece by Cultural Equity, which suggests that the start of the project saw an evident bias towards western Classical pieces, pointing to Carl Sagan’s account in “Murmurs of Eath: The Voyager Insterstellar Record” (1978). They suggest that it wasn’t until Sagan brought Alan Lomax onto the committee that diversity was imbued into the project. Lomax’s vast knowledge of global music, music history, field-recordings, and other ethnomusicologists, all served to broaden the horizons of the committee’s track selection. In quoting Carl Sagan (1978), Cultural Equity state:
…it was Lomax “who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipes and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax.
Did Alan Lomax save the Golden Record project from the precipice of monoculturalism? There seems to be some evidence supporting this, with Lomax having proposed 15 of the 27 selections (Cultural Equity, 2024).
From an ethical standpoint, would the record have ended up differently had it been curated by a different group, or without Lomax? I think the answer is an inevitable yes. As I’m sure we’ll see once the quiz results are shared, our custom tracklists will be all over the place, with varying emphases and thought processes. But from an outsiders perspective at least, it seems as though the committee were ultimately successful in capturing a vast array of humanities musical history – a monumental task.
One last tangent – the Cultural Equity article cites a letter of Lomax’s to Sagan that outlines his thought process around some of his suggestions, which is a very compelling read, as he aimed to chart the evolution of human culture through music.
References
“Voyager Golden Record.” (2024, July 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 9, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record#Contents
Steph’s interpretation of the network analysis really served to validate my conceptions of the network graph. The graph produces strong connections between different students, but the meaning of these connections are, themselves, indiscernible – if there is shared meaning at all. In reference to discerning this meaning, Steph states – “Without additional information, it’s impossible to make such inferences accurately.“
Does TikTok’s recommendation algorithm have this “additional information”? Not necessarily, but its safe to assume that they have infinitely more “edges” and “nodes” in their network graph. These edges and nodes are composed of thousands of data points, creating an incomprehensibly dense graph. With such density, the weighted groupings they can create tend to have much more convincing connections. Does this mean the inferences being made are accurate? That the groupings are meaningful, or based in reality? Not necessarily.
My guess is that TikTok would have no greater insight into why I actually chose as song as our class’s network graph in Palladio, they just have so much more data with which to base their “inferences” on.
References
Hyde, S. (2023, May 20). How TikTok leveraged the interest graph to redefine social media. PUSH Group. https://www.pushgroup.co.uk/blog/how-tiktok-leveraged-the-interest-graph-to-redefine-social-media
I think Robyn’s take on the User Inyerface game contrasts quite distinctly with my experience. I went into the game expecting many of the common “bad UI” tropes. As such, I was able to “see past” many of the deceptions and red herrings employed in the game, and complete it relatively quickly. Meanwhile, Robyn describes an experience much different than mine. She found herself falling into practised web navigation habits, clicking highlighted buttons, following directions, and ultimately getting caught by the continuously presented traps. The password requirement barrier ended up impeding her entirely, and with the stress-inducing countdown timer, caused her to question whether the game had an achievable end at all.
What caused these markedly different experiences? Initially, one may assume levels of digital literacy as being indicative of one’s ability to complete the game. I’ve collaborated with Robyn in the past though, and I don’t believe our digital literacy has any notable difference, certainly not enough to explain our game results.
My only guess is that to successfully circumvent these dark patterns requires not only existing awareness of their existence and strategies (which we both had), but also a depth of knowledge of their inner workings. I work with HTML and CSS regularly, and have used them to create user interfaces myself. Knowing the inner workings of UI design and a web-pages architecture provides an additional layer to navigate its traps. Now I’m making a big assumption here, Robyn may also be knowledgeable of HTML and CSS, in which case my theory here is completely wrong. It’s also possible that this knowledge is only a minor contributing factor. Nonetheless, knowing the intricacies of web UI must, to a certain extent, help one avoid, or at least be cognizant of dark patterns.
Jonathan’s take on the speculative futures assignment is such an enjoyable and interesting read. The assignment itself is so conducive for creative expression, and I enjoyed many of my classmates’ unique approaches, but Jonathan’s is distinct from mine while also being right up my avenue of interest.
My speculative future leverages a text-based “prop” and a short, descriptive, disembodied narrative. Jonathan instead relies purely on narrative, but utilizes the perspective of an authoritative voice. This voice, of a future continental organization, uses all the textual hallmarks one would often associate with bureaucratic governmental communication. From the comical number of acronyms, the clinical statement of facts and figures, to the underlying, ever-present tone of coercion – Jonathan manages to evoke a very convincing message from the “UGK”.
Do I want to live in Jonathan’s speculative future? It’s hard to say. The vision presented by the authoritative voice is certainly compelling, but much like my speculative future, there are hints of distopia peeking through.
Though we both use pure text to build our respective future scenarios, our use of ambiguity is quite distinct. In attempting to evoke shame and embarrassment, based on my prompt, I attempt to leave much up to the reader’s imagination. Jonathan’s text, in my opinion, undertakes the much more difficult task of explicitly explaining the intricacies of a speculated future in a very convincing fashion.
Themes of this course are weaved through Jonathan’s narrative – AI, algorithms, linguistics, and global culture all make appearances and are all integrated into the resulting speculative tapestry. If I were to redo my assignment today, I think I would aim to flesh my idea out by leveraging these themes further.
It was funny reading Jonathan’s prompt after I had finished reading his submission. I fully expected it to mention “feelings of unease” or “suspicion”. Though the scenario presented is a described as a veritable utopia, and the various organizational concepts nicely presented, I found that the authoritative presentation imbued the text with a sense of distrust. I was almost expecting a twist in which the narrator proves to be unreliable, or at least not as benevolent as they present themselves as. One line in particular raised this red flag for me:
If you choose not to participate in IRHE, please contact your placement coordinator and they will reunite you, expense free, to your country of choice. Please note that the processing time of the receiving country may experience delays up to seven years.
Maybe I’m pessimistic, but there seems to be more going on in this speculative future than meets the eye.
This task really stuck with me, particularly the game’s ability to force one to really weigh all of the different measures and suggestions in an attempt to strike a seemingly unachievable balance. Matt’s experience was similar to mine, with one specific measure exerting disproportionate influence over the decision making process. Though I had several attempts, I initially found myself torn as to which measure or suggestion to defer to. The algorithmic suggestion seemed so authoritative and clear that it was easy to simply follow its path.
Matt elegantly ties this perceived authority of the algorithm’s recommendation into the User Inyerface task, which did not occur to me at all but is so clear in hindsight. While the detain/release game does an excellent job of simulating the conflicting interests, ambiguous information, and competing recommendations a judge may encounter, Matt highlights that it also exhibits characteristics of a dark pattern.
Simple colour-coding of the algorithm’s recommendations exerts influence on our decision making (Kumi et al., 2013). It makes it extremely easy to glance at the three metrics associated with each person and have an immediate idea of what your decision should be. Considering other factors requires manually parsing the textual statements by the prosecutor and defendant, text which may be rife with ambiguity and overt bias. This ability to immediately have a preconceived notion of the detain/release decision based on a mere glance is very much aligned with Gladwell’s (2005) concept of “thin-slicing” that Matt discusses, in which our decision making often relies on a few key pieces of information while overlooking others.
Now, the colour-coding of the algorithm’s recommendation isn’t inherently a dark pattern. But we do know that humans are influenced by colour-coding, and we also know that the algorithm’s decision making process is a black box, bereft of any context. Thus, I would argue that the UI choices of the detain/release game constitutes a dark pattern simply in the way that it is positioned to exploit the “thin-slicing” we are prone to leverage in our decision making.
References
Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (1st ed.). Little, Brown and Co.
Kumi, R., Conway, C. M., Limayem, M., & Goyal, S. (2013). Research article learning in color: How color and affect influence learning outcomes. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 56(1), 2-15. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2012.2208390