APD Week 1 - Play & Self

Interview Youtube Link - https://youtu.be/t0u-MODhAQE

Theme

The concept of self is difficult to determine from the first perspective, as physical appearance and feature can be highly subjective while personality could be ever changing and morphing through environments and time. However, there is a continuous experience or pattern for people to navigate their world as themselves. I think in order to determine a constant, ever-changing concept of 'self', we need something that is less affected by time, can measure or record events on a larger scale of time, which leads to me thinking
 
The algorithms of social medias and various apps are already doing them  It might be a description, or at least an illusion of self, that is recorded on a larger scale. But would it be an accurate reflection our real world identity, or would it be a mere echo from our past?
 

Method

Due to the scale and time limitation of this project, this project is an experimental 'play and test'.

Participants will be given [5 minutes] to access the entire downloaded Facebook data from 2019-03 to 2022-03 (Present at the time of this video) of Mohan Lei, and tasked to find out as much information as possible, as well as answer a few questions about their optinion and discovery of the differences between the online-presented identity via Facebook and the person in reality.

(None of the participants has added or viewed the provided profile before,
nor are they Facebook users themselves at the time of this video.)

Context

Participants have found that it is challenging to navigate through large amount of information at first, but did find some valuable information at last. The pattern of searching, as well as the focus on what is considered to be valuable information is different for each participant. The feedback shows that the identity information presented on Facebook are mostly aligned with the identity in reality, though lack of information such as personality, ways of interaction and other important detail that cannot be replaced by face to face conversation. The participants could conclude an overall feeling from the profile, but they have also found misinformation during their search that does not align with the person in real life at all.

Reflection

There are many ways to improve this project. Since this is one of the first time I have interviewed with people, I was not prepared with the different response people have about my questions. A lot of footage from different participants (that did not make into the video above) was confused by the different roles I have provided as an alternative option ('if you don't want to view the data as yourself, you can also choose to look from an employer/co-worker/other social roles' perpective). The challenge also appears when organising Facebook's data (900+MB), as it is nearly impossible to go through everything. The first participant was having a lot of difficulty trying to navigate through before I provided a more simplified/refined version of the profile data.

Downloads:

Download File: participants-qa.txt