“500 million people are now doing the same thing I’ve been doing for 7 years.” – An Interview with Hasan Elahi

Last week I got a chance to talk to Hasan Elahi, an interdisciplinary media artist known for his 7-year-long self-tracking project that helped him escape from the terrorist watch list of U.S government. The conversation with Hasan Elahi is a fruitful one, as it deepened my understanding towards identity and data sharing, and opened up new directions for my thesis investigation.

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Me: I really admire and appreciate the rule you have set up for yourself, and it is a very powerful statement you have made. But for me, I can’t stop thinking if there is any push-n-pull between the fact and information shared about you. How high would be the stake if you were to lie one thing about yourself with the data? And what might be the safest way to do so?

Hasan: My motivation behind the project is to create an alibi and to protect my own safety. In my case, the stake of lying can be really high. Because the data is not just my geographic location and the photos of the places I have been to, but also the account statement of every transactions I make, the ATM machine activities, the flight ticket I booked… it’s easy for someone to verify and supervise the data at any point. What I am doing, I think, should not be described as “deception”, but “hiding”.

Me: So How did you hide?

Hasan: It is about how the data is presented. You know, I could have made a stream line of the data, but instead of doing that, I made them in points and segments. The photos are displayed in a non lineage way and gathered according to the type of the activity. This makes it difficult to dig out any data in the past and piece together the actual story, because there are gaps everywhere, between each frames and that’s why the time has become extremely important for someone to study the data.

Me: How often is the tracking data updated?

Hasan:The updates happen automatically everytime it detects a change in the location, But moving around my own apartment will not result in the change of location. But if leave my place and go to the grocery store, it will interpret it as a change and logs it.

Hasan: If you think about it, you’ll find my data is exactly what trial lawyers have to deal with for years. There are, say, 1,500 pages of evidences but only 2 paragraphs of the text is valuable to the case. Most people don’t have the patience to go through all of the data, or they can’t tell the valuable data from the useless one. The sheer amount of info is valuable on one hand, but on the other hand if one does not know how to approach and use this value, much is of little for them.

Me: Is it also a statement about how little we know how to use the data being collected?

Hasan: Absolutely. When we don’t have the proper strategy of analyze the data, and we don’t understand what is meaningful and what comes out of that data, the access to the information becomes something useless. We are now in a culture of information gathering where we don’t equally understand information analysis. The more you look at the data on my tracking site, the more anonymous you’ll find I am. I have created so much noise about me that you couldn’t really tell which data points are most closely linked to me and my activities.

Me: Do you think tracking one’s own life can also be viewed as an act for privacy defense?

Hasan: In my case, it is not exactly a privacy defense, as basically, I have no privacy. But what I did is something you can call self-identification. It usually comes out of something bad said about you in the past, and you have to reconstruct your image. For example, when you Google your name and found the first result being listed is something shady. Google will not help you filter the search result and you have to do it yourself. What you can do is you create a whole bunch of new information about yourself and make that the top results of Google search. It is a process of generating information you want others to perceive who you are.

Me: I found a new application on iPhone called Path, which, actually allows people to exactly what you have been doing for 7 years. You can tag things in a picture and share them, while the software will also keep a path of the places you have been.

Hasan: That is very interesting. It reminds me of the very first day when I started the project. When I told people that I wanted to track myself, they thought I was a psycho. (One personal called me creep.) Years later, one may find that I was actually doing a pre-twitter and pre-facebook project and now there are 500,000 people who are doing the same thing.

Genres of Lies

Yesterday I had some light reading with the book “A Brief History of Lies“. The most delicious part to me is when the author talked about genres of lies, and below are the genres I think is insightful:

• Ambiguity: This is a deliberate attempt to mislead through the misuse of logic and the misuse of a talent for oratory. Syllogisms can be misused in this way. It is also a mainstay of comedy, where we can recognize it instantly, but sometimes we fail to recognize it as lying elsewhere.
• Brazen: A brazen lie is one which is told when it is obvious to the theller and to those a child who has chocolate all around his mouth who denies that he has eaten any chocolate is brazen liar.
• Fabrication: is saying something without actually knowing whether or not it is true.
• Hoax: Anything that happens for April 1st reasons.
• Jargonese: It is the same today in India where the law is in English while the majority of the population don’t read in English. This lack of understanding is devised to support those ‘in-the-know’ and extends to many spheres of activitiy beyond the law.
• Noble: A noble lie would normally cause discord if it were uncovered, but it assists the community when it is given. It maintains law and other which helps the rulers.
• Pathological: According to recent studies people who exhibit this condition have brains incapable of differentiating between the truth and fiction because of the way their synapses are connecting in the front of their brains.
• Perjury: A crime. Making verifiably false statements on a material matter under oath of affirmation in a court of law, or in any of various sworn statements in writing.
• Propaganda: Information is always propagandist and contains bias bt sometimes this bias is intended. Advertisements are an obvious example.
• Vindictive: These are aimed at harming someone, a group, organization or country. Whilst thought among the worst kind of lies, lies given to one’s lover are considered worse, at least by the lover.
• White: A white lie would cause no argument if it were found out. They avoid giving offence, such as complimenting something one finds unattractive. But be careful, a white lie in one culture may be perjury in another.

“Bits of Me” here, “Bits of Me” there

This is a study of profile management across various social medias, that involves the collection of the text data(except for their names) from 15 on-line profiles (3 for each subject) and an interpretation of the data from strangers through the portraits they draw of the person based on the profile. With the human “algorithm” on one hand, the data was also parsed through LIWC (a linguistic analysis model) that gives a personality analysis of the text on the other hand.

Interestingly, there is an overall precise match of the disposition between the interpretive drawing and the personality analysis result. And when the data is not enough to make a judgment, people were confused just as the computer does. The two methods also support each other for details they are unable to find out respectively. I found that human drawings tend to make a better guess about the person’s age, and their disposition seems to be based on the looking of some other humans that shares the same features. It is also interesting that when the linguistic analysis shows very low “negative emotions” from the text, the number of positive vs. melancholy looking faces in the drawings are almost even.

Launch the analysis process

So what exactly does it say?

The initial intention of the project is to testify my hypothesis that people use social media to strategically present themselves. And the use of one media is complementary and influenced by the rest.

Most of the persons I studies have a high awareness of “what in where”, that is separating the information about themselves in different categories and share them via different networks, and also “how to put”, that is organizing how the same information is stated differently on various media.

There is only one person who has told me before that her Facebook self barely represent her in reality, whose result has shown a consistent pattern throughout all of her networks. In that case, she has done a good job keeping the actual self away from the medias, while still keeping her image consistent.

The Obviousness of the Blurriness

What’s going on!

Photo credit: Minyanville Blog (link to the post))

Concerned with the privacy issue with Google map, the German government has responded to the request from 244,000 inhabitants and blurred their house on the map. I am blogging this as a perfectly bad strategy of defending for privacy as one freaks out with a bunch of others.

It has created an effect contradictory to its original purpose. Instead of being invisible, the blurred houses now stand out and draw more public attention to themselves.

It has been concluded in the classic book about military tactics, that the safest camouflage to be made is in the most conspicuous locations, for the common assumption that it is an unlikely place to hide, nets the isolation of the space that has become the perfect condition to protect the body. The blurred houses are obviously taking on the opposite strategy.

How to both benefit and hide away from on-line search engine

Everyone has their own little strategies of using on-line search engine to find an answer. We know that tweaking the spelling or the order of the keywords can help us gain faster and more precise answer with Google search. And we more or less have a sense of the patterns of the search tools, though we don’t know exactly the algorithms they are based upon. But how about hiding from it? Using the search engine to figure out where you can hide and make the answer “difficult for other to find” is totally another type of intelligence.

To learn about how people deal with the issue of using on-line search as a “double folded weapon”, benefiting oneself and incapacitating others, I designed a game where the participants used on-line searches to both raise questions to and answer questions from their opponents.

This is how it works

It was found that as the game continued, the participants started to have more concern towards how the answer to their question can be accessed through search engines by the other team, thus adjusted their way of speaking accordingly to avoid the expressions most likely to be sought out. The result was that they started to play “trick” by using misleading and ambiguous information in their questions so that their opponents would have no way to obtain the most efficient keywords to filter through the information, or did not even know where to start.

It fascinates me to find through the experiment, how fast people adjust their way of expressing to their condition, with high awareness of the pros and cons of the media they use. The result was that people tended to hide “literally” by giving misleading and even deceptive information, probably because of the limited time they were given to design the questions and it was the fastest technique they can utilize as a reaction of defending.

After documenting the whole process, I watched closely at the footage and highlighted the moments where such behaviors occurred, and analyzed the language used by the participants at those moments. The tactics of “making tricks” fell into several categories, such as omission, misleading, ambiguity, paradox and concepts exchange. The process of analysis found here.

Innovating the E-reading Experience: “Social Interaction” or “Social Media Interaction” ?

Recently I have been working on the design of an e-publishing prototype on tablet devices targeted to self-publishing authors, partnered with Ricky Wong, an MBA student from Insead. From some of the voices in the field I heard so far, the current trend of e-reading experience design is how to create innovative reading experiences and again, make it something social. But I already saw some mistakes people are making as they try to interpret the meaning of “social reading experiences”.

The first common mistake is equalizing “social interaction” with “social media interaction” when it comes to user experience design. For example, Copia aims to build a “truly social reading experience” by synchronizing your Facebook and Twitter account. And one of the iBook charm is that as you highlight a part of the text, it will give you information about how many times this part of text is being highlighted by other people.

Personally I really like the statistical method of endorsing the text, a succinct indication of how popular the sentence is. But for the reader the feature is almost useless. If a reader is to be convinced of the value of the book, the best voice to be heard is the persuasion of the critics and tribal readers. The promising thing I see from that is not from a reader’s perspective but the self-publisher.  Researching the market and estimating social influence of the book are the two most difficult things for a self-publisher to do on their own. (Under the premise that self-publisher is someone who regards writing as a profession and who is interested in commercial and cultural value of their writing).

Smashwords and Amazon Digital Text Platform made publishing your own book to Kindle and iPad possible. But neither of them resolves the problem before and after publishing the book. The e-publishing service we are designing aimed to respond to the need for creating continual dynamics between the author, as an aid for the authors to find out more about their audience, sourcing ideas and collecting opinion for writing. If we keep talking more about reading experience without switching the view between the readers and authors, it is very likely we will be create some services that neither of the author or the reader would really want.

The fact that social media tend to create “one-size-fits-all” experiences has become more problematic when we use it as a syntax to foster affiliations in a reading society. For relationships developed through reading is quite different from other social networks. Even now we can claim friendly relationship with more than 100 people, we can only share maybe 1 out of the 100 people the tastes for the language, books and thoughts. Reading is an experience built upon a lot of common grounds. And the bigger the common ground, the more unsharable the experiences is. The attempt of “pulling in as much relationships as possible” does not point to a better experience when it comes to reading and writing.

Some tech savvy authors have provided really insightful opinion about how writing and publishing will be like in the future, how they should adjust themselves to get ready for the new trends and what they really want to claim from the e-readers.  (These resources including Peter Meyer’s presentation from TOC e-publishing conference, an interview with novelist Justine Musk, and  UCLA e-publishing panel discussion)

Work-in-Progress Exhibition at Art Center

Can repeating the same things 14 times to 14 people help creating a better thesis?

I still need to figure why Art Center adopts such way of getting your work critiqued, but… as a result, I did kill my thesis in some way, as I realized the inconsistency between my projects is so huge that I struggled to state them across a single message.

But right after, a new thesis was born on top of the big mess I made…

Good bad news.