Group-work tasks: fill in the empty parts as group

Team-members

Ahmed ZAOUI

What is a supportive tool landscape for writing hybrid narratives?

What tools are in use in your team? Does the tool-use change during the experiment and why?

- Flikr
- Facebook
- Brightkite
- Twitter

Through this project will try to see how those social tools are connected.

Illustrate the information flow at your hybrid narrative ecosystem.

The main information flow is for the moment:

- First you post a photo on Brightkite and add tag #narrativeecology,
  Second you tag it also on Flikr and blog it to wordpress blog and add description,
  Third you look at the blog : HERE IS YOUR PICTURE !

- If you want to update your "mood" or "status" you can do it via the Brightkite 
  which will update it on Facebook and then in Twitter.

What are the the needed technical improvements to develop a well-functioning hybrid narrative ecosystem?

In this experiment we will use a joint blog for the narrative, and various individual tools. It is important to add tags to your posts in the joint blog to filter certain narratives, or certain collaborative narratives, or certain group activities. Every person can use individual tools the way he/she feels the most appropriate. Document the problem issues and ideas for improvement!

How do the topics of individual and collaborative narratives emerge?

What narratives you would like to write?

Discuss: a) if you need to define joint topics, or b) if the joint topics will emerge in the course of action.

Guiding questions... Why do you want to bring out these elements? What can be described and what can not be described about the place? What comes from your own life into the narrative? What can a photo tell about ...? Why people choose or dont choose places. What is the difference between a narrative and documentation? How and why some places change and evolve?

Locations

In this experiment you can freely choose any locations in the world.

Document your locations using the map functions (eg. Flickr map, Google map)

Tallinn

Tartu

Helsinki

DESIGN PART

What are your objectives?

Here you list some questions about hybrid ecologies and narrative storytelling.

Some examples: What are the most used technical possibilities to write a hybrid narratives and how they can be improved? What are main security issues when writing hybrid narratives and how they can be solved? What triggers people to collaborate on certain images and narratives? How can people use hybrid narratives in business, leisure, gaming, education...? ...

File:Mashups.jpg

Interconnecting tools

Why do we have to use several tools that are interconnected ?

We have to use several tools, because it improves the concurrency between them and they should offer a better final product. In the last few years, Facebook became very well known and a lot of companies made the same type of product trying to take part of the market. The ones we are using now are the ones who survived in time and because each developed its specific functionalities. They started to work together to allow the users to link different tools together depending on their needs(writing blogs, sharing photos, chatting...). Moreover, in some countries some social tools are not often used, for example hi5 is much more popular than Facebook in Romania.

Why do people choose to take this instant and not another?

Because each person has a different vision of seeing things. This different vision is based on our differences: experiences, social life, sex. Beauty is a subjective subject : "The beauty is in the eyes of the beholder", English dramatist John Lyly in his Euphues and his England.

Do we have to transform reality?

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Transformed picture

On one hand, yes, because by using the appropriate we can fix the small imperfection that our camera has. On the other hand, no, because modifying a picture means spoiling the artistic point of view and the general emotion that the pictures transmit. Moreover, the first filling that the one who took the picture can be changed and will not respect the photographer's point of view.

What are the danger of using social tools?

First of all, when you upload a picture on a tools like Facebook you loose the control and the intellectual property of it. Then people or companies can have a log of what are your habits and your interests. With all that informations they will use it in a marketing purpose and against you. Then you will transform the initial purpose of a social tool (sharing emotions with friends,...) into making money.

How those tools should protect the users against data mining? Those tools should be able to warn the users about the data mining by showing some warnings regarding the danger and consequences of this action. Let's take the example of our experiment. Whan we uploaded a picture on facebook we could decide who could see it. When we interconnected facebook with twitter or brightkite we couldn't assign rights for the photo(who can see it, who can leave comments, who can tag it). There is annother issue with the robots used for scanning the internet in search of data(photos or other information)that is used for statistics and publicity withouth our consentiment.

How to make the process of interconnecting tools and data transfer between sites more accessible to newbies? - for example trasfer from facebook to twiter/brightkite not only the photos but also the tags and comments

One idea is to have an agreement between the concurent companies that produce such tools in order to benefite their clients. They can propose homogenous products with similar features. they can also propose interfaces so that concurency interconnect their tools with the others. For exemple Microsoft,Gmail and Firefox gave the oportunity to the development community to add more features to their products (propose plug-ins). In this case it's the concurents that should propose new plug-ins.

Why not promote face to face socializing networks instead of virtual communication?

File:Statue.PNG

Face-to-face

For shy people it's a more confortable to be hidden behind the screen, it makes them feel safe. You can act like your avatar, it does not necessarily fit to you. Nowadays, we are in a society of consommation which is based on you take, consum, throw out faster and faster. Now we can see that this kind of society is extending on the web. For example, there is many of dating websites. Then Internet allows everyone to do everything faster and quicker. Usually peoples use the easiest way, which is today the web.

What is our purpose: to get attention from people we don't know? To share our thoughts through pictures?

Our purpose is to show our feelings and emotions through the photos to the people we don't know and also to the people who might be interested in that kind of activities. Maybe also get more familiar with interactive environments like brightkite and twitter and group blogging.

Did other people pictures affected us?

We think other people pictures may affect other participants. When Maris took the picture of her dog, then Edith got inspired and took a photo of the cat. And there are other animal pictures as well. Or another example. Ottavio and Carina where taking pictures of the doors.

Animal effect

Why some pictures get more attention?

Some pictures differ from others because they might have eye-catching title or photo itself is very beautiful and interesting. Also some picture may reflect some topics which are current in media and people feel involved in a moment. It may happen that some certain pictures expresses exactly ones feeling at the moment he/she looks at it.

In the end of the course, in the report you must find answers to some of your questions.

In the end of the course you can also write down, what new important questions appeared after the experiment.

What is your theory?

From the theoretical materials and from Internet, you have to find some guiding theories that might explain what happens in hybrid ecologies and what helps to explain your questions.

surveillance issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance

hybrid place issues http://www.amazon.com/Hybrid-Space-Forms-Digital-Architecture/dp/0847822036

In the end of the experiment, in the report you must compare the known theory with your own findings. Did you discover something new?

Experience

Marc CESARI - This concept was really new for me and I didn't get immediately the idea what we should do. Despite the technology aspect of linking different social tools as brightkite,flickr, facebook and twitter. The idea of sharing things without controlling the consequences of you acts was something which I would not make. But looking forward what the others made to make those assignments helped me to find a subject. So I changed my mind and started to take care about things around me and so after that change of mind I posted some pictures about different topics. So this narrative ecology concept was a kind of good way to change my aspect of IT technology which was more psychological. At the end everybody gets used to it and take part to the game.

Bryce BERNAD - This is an idea I wouldn't get by myself, linking social networks to share pictures. But it is a good experiment. First I didn't understand why we have to use so many tools. The fact is that it is a little bit difficult to link all the tools and I'm asking myself "Would newbies manage to link every social networks by themselves?". But finally when it works it very funny because you can share things that make you feel emotions with other people and sometimes you realized that you're not the only one! And this is the most important things of sharing! Even if I have this strange feeling of loosing control of the things I was sharing, but this is another debate ! I learned a lot during those courses such as: looking a city in a different way and try to take care about details or technical settings about social networks. So the experimentation was really good.

Edith VOKSEPP - At first it was quite confusing, the concept and purpose of the course and questions we needed to ask from ourselves to start working. But later on when everything started to work (all the accounts in different interactive environments started to work for me) it became interesting. Positive side was that usually I walk from point A to point B and thinking my thoughts by not paying any attention to surroundings. But during this course I started to see more details around me, more interesting things. My days became more colorful and my thoughts went further than usually. That was great. :)

Ema HOBJILA - Putting aside the technical aspect that was a little complicated for me at the beginning, I think this experiment is interesting and it can offer a very clear ideea of how diverse people are. We all pased almost by the same buildings, the same streets but we observe different details. If we gatter all pictures maybe we can reconstruct the map of Tallinn in images. The only downside I found was the protection of our personal data. Companies that develop this kind o tools should have in mind this aspct.

Ahmed ZAOUI - I don't had any account on a network social website before. Maybe because I don't like to use Internet to share my feelings. So, I don't understood at first why I had to create an account on a social network and in addition on several website like Flickr, Yahoo, Facebook ... Today, I've created three account and I share my pictures on these website : I learn a lot of things with this project. First, When you take a picture, there is different way to take it. So you have to take the picture in order to share your feel about this moment. The most of the tourist take pictures just to have a souvenir but for this project, we had to take pictures and kept in our mind that this picture will be shared on the Internet. This is by this way that we took my pictures. I was looking for all details in the city : the best details which shown the way of life in Tallinn. (Transports, Restaurants, Houses, ...) So, this experience has develop my observation sense and I'll don't watch Tallinn or a new city by the same way as before.

Narrativestory design 7

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