I chose to look at Melissa’s Task 10: Attention Economy
Melissa stated how the User Inyerface game got her to think about how our actions are so automatic when it comes to the things we do online. For example, how we’re offered the option to link your Facebook or Google accounts to avoid filling out personal information to create a new account. But whenever we do this we usually don’t read the terms and conditions of what actually happens with our information.
Melissa also mentioned that she looked at the data that Google gathered and inferenced about her based on her user history and how this is used to target their ads to her. This got me curious and I also looked at who Google thought I was. They got the age range correct and the fact that I’m bilingual in English and Korean, but they got my gender incorrect – stating I’m a Male instead of a female. They did get my marital status correct and the fact that I don’t have kids correct as well. I’m personally not too surprised about the data they have on me. I am surprised they got my gender incorrect, which tells me that my Internet activity doesn’t match the average female user. This also makes sense why I get so many ads aimed at men (i.e. shaving ads).
Melissa also mentioned how dangerous it is that children (and us adults) are on platforms such as Youtube which often autoplay the next videos to keep our attentions. It’s not something that is ONLY dangerous for children. I’ve noticed it with my parents as well. I bought them ipads and I saw that they just let the autoplays roll when they are watching Youtube. We can’t always be policing what is being played for children and even adults (who aren’t so digitally literate) but there should be change in how these types of things are done. We all know sitting in front of a screen for hours is bad for us but many of us do it anyway. Youtube doesn’t care about the health of it’s users – it doesn’t say “hey you’ve been watching videos for 5+hrs maybe you should take a break”. Would that kind of thing even help I wonder. I have noticed some video games (meant for younger kids) notify the user of how long they’ve played and that they should log off to take a break i.e. Maplestory. I found that whenever it notified me like that – that I would get pulled out of the gaming zone and actually get up to take a break. I wonder how that type of thing would work out for something like Youtube.