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Final Project (Direction: Unraveling Objective Reality Experience…
Final Project
Direction: Unraveling Objective Reality Experience
Goal
Create an experience that makes people aware of how easily manipulated their realities are in the post-truth world
How do you evaluate this thing's success?
Research
Designing an emotional response
Film makers
Ridley Scott
Simon
Experience designers
Es Devlin
Helen
Monica
Punch Drunk
Secret Cinema
Psychedelics
Music
Skin Orgasms
Art
James Turrel
Richard Serra
Walter D Maria
Disinformation
Existential/philosophical
Weston
Geopolitical
Maria Ramirez
Ethan Zuckerman
Social/Technical
Renee DeResta
The power to influence opinions increasingly lies with those who can most widely and effectively disseminate a message
zero-cost publishing & zero editorial review
Popularity > Truth
Jaron Lanier
Tristan Harris
Methodology
This has to manipulate reality, not perspective - e.g. get people to believe 2+2=5
Fight fire with fire
- this is a result of a lack of critical thought, appealing to emotions and human tendencies that are exploited via social media, which itself has mechanisms that are hacked to increase dissemination of a given message
The goal here is to have an emotional response but one that encourages critical thought
Potential Problem: people become exhausted / desensitized to problems they feel they can't control
Look to misinformation networks - unified front from different angles/institutions force distrust over a given topic
Problems
Disinformation - hollows the baseline of objective reality
Individual level: leaves us without a baseline of reality - no way to anchor ourselves and direct our lives
Global level: we fracture along political beliefs and via identity politics but unify globally through commercial and communication interactions - the effects of the fracturing aren't contained, the conflict is scaled as we are still globally connected through other means
Destabilize society
Ideas
Philosophy
What is objective reality?
Define the difference between reality and perspective
What are the elements of objective reality that keep society bound together?
Approaches
Cooperation
Seeing ourselves as human first
#
Analysis of the positive and negative ways people interact online
Can also act as a toolkit to optimize real-life debate
Build a one on one digital conversation tool that uses said analysis and is optimized for cooperation
e.g. start with creating primary sense of self-identification being mutual; not being allowed to respond until the other person explains back their position, etc.
e.g. sports forums have the most civil partisan discourse on the internet because they view themselves as fans of a team first and democrats/republicans further down in sense of self-identification
Deliberate manipulation of reality
Defensive measure
Individuals
Increase sense of ownership of digital persona/data
Increased ownership --> seeing potential harm to their digital persona in the same way they see harm to their physical selves
Visual mirror of your digital identity
e.g. Time Well Spent but less around addiction / compulsion and more around data collection
Society
Build awareness to severity of the problem
Awareness is necessary as a first step but doesn't seem to accomplish anything - many of us know that our data is being capitalized on and in some capacities used against us, most of us do nothing
Offensive measure
Use psychological warfare tools for good (e.g. for cooperation & problem solving)
#
Passive manipulation of reality
Time Well Spent
Meta Problem: Global existential crises require consensus and cooperation to solve them
Cooperation gets more difficult as isolationism increases
Isolationism is increasing as evidenced through a return to nationalism/populism
Secondary problem
this is in part being driven both deliberately and passively by diverging of objective reality
Deliberate: misinformation campaigns + psychological warfare tools
Passive: Google search rankings, Facebook advertising
Universal Conditions / Assumptions
Opinion increasingly = fact, decreases the meaning and power of fact / evidence
Facts don't matter as much as we think they do
e.g. the same information that makes trump a megalomaniac to some makes him a righteous leader to others
Backfire effect