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Assessment 3: Hillary Cruz and Ted Clinton Bots

For my final assignment I made two twitter bots that connect the tweets of two presidential candidates running for president of the United States for the 2016 election. The candidates I chose were Ted Cruz, the first republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, the first democrat nominee. For one Twitter account, which I named Hillary Cruz, takes the first half of Hillary Clinton’s tweets and the second half of Ted Cruz’s tweets and combines them. I also made Ted Clinton which does the vice versa of Hillary Cruz. The aim for these bots was to take the issues being discussed by each candidate and bring them together. Once the tweets are combined they create tweets that make sentences that may or may not make sense depending on how they line up with each other. By doing this it shows the nonsense of politics and constant issues that are always being discussed.
Most of the time democrats are tweeting about very liberal issues while the republicans are normally discussing very conservative issues. They are creating tweets that are half right wing/half left wing creating tweets showing both ends of the political spectrum. Very similar to the types of bots mentioned in Rob Dubbin’s article “The Rise of Twitter Bots,” my bot aims to create something new out of two things already existing, like the exosaurs combing dinosaur names and exoplanets. My bots are combing political issues and events the nominees are talking about and creating tweets that can be comedic in the event they line up perfectly. Being able to manipulate and make adjustments to tweets that already exist and bring new meaning to them was my overall goal. This project allowed me to explore the American politics that exist on twitter, while creating candidates that aren’t too far right or too far left. I’d say they both stand out in the middle and could be perceived as the “perfect candidates.”

You can visit Hillary Cruz here and Ted Clinton here!

Assessment 3 Proposal

For my final project I’m looking to make a bot that searches for two types of hashtags. One hashtag would be about one opinion and the other hashtag would be the opposite opinion. After the hashtags are searched for I want the posters of the people who tweeted the hashtag to be @ replied by the bot and ask them to talk to each other. If this can’t work, a bot that retweets both of these opposing hashtags would work to show the differences in why these types of hashtags are being used.
I’m also thinking of combing the tweets of two presidential 2016 candidates twitter accounts to make for one interesting presidential candidate.

Assessment 1 Part B: Her, AI , and Social Relationships

Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ is a look into a near future where artificial intelligence is practically human. The film explores how an AI can feel human and how much a human can become attached to something that inherently isn’t. The main character Theodore, going through a divorce, begins to find companionship and intimacy with his operating system. Theodore himself chose his OS to have a female voice and then she gave herself the name Samantha. At the start Theodore viewed Samantha as a computer, but once he says he “couldn’t believe he was talking to a computer”, Samantha says, it’s “ not a conversation with a computer, it’s a conversation with me.” Samantha wants Theodore to perceive her as a human being and once Theodore sees her that way he eventually begins to see her as a significant other.
Throughout the film there is this constant focus on the relationship Theodore is having with Samantha. He see’s her as another person and he wasn’t the only person who was doing so. In one scene Theodore and his friend Amy are having a discussion about an article that talked about people having romantic relationships with their OS’. This reveals that Theodore isn’t the only person involved in a relationship like this. It’s as if there is a stigma the might be attached to people dating OS’ for a while since Theodore initially tells his Goddaughter about who Samantha is. Theodore slowly opens up more to others about his relationship with Samantha once it begins to feel more real. Similar to normal human relationships, Theodore and Samantha constantly try to make their relationship work as much as they can. By looking at how close Theodore becomes with Samantha it parallels the relationships people have with technology today.
Part of Sherry Turkle’s ‘Alone Together’ discusses how many people today are going to robots for comfort. She states, “Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want them.” In ‘Her’ Theodore’s ex-wife see’s his relationship with Samantha as one that is programmed and one that didn’t come with the emotional struggles that existed between that of two people. The film brings to life what Turkle describes in her book, “Our first embrace of sociable robotics (both the idea of it and its first exemplars) is a window onto what we want from technology and what we are willing to do to accommodate it.” Theodore embraces the technology because it gives him what he wants out of a romantic relationship. As Turkle points out, with our interest and acceptance of social robotics, we may be very close to the future that exists in ‘Her.’
Both ‘Her’ and ‘Alone Together’ work well in thinking about how we can see AI working to meet our social needs in the future. Today’s constant use of social media may even be considered detrimental to our own relationships with others. If we start having IA/OS’ like Samantha becoming the norm, the society and culture around it needs to begin to think about the positives and negatives that are associated with these new technologies. It mainly comes down to our interactions with others and how much we want to let some of those actions be with an AI.

Her. Spike Jonze. Elite Film, 2014. Film.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Print.
D’Ambrosio, Anthony. ‘5 Reasons Our Generation Just Isn’t Cut Out For Marriage’. The Huffington Post. N.p., 2015. Web. 17 Apr. 2015.

Javascript Exercise

For the Javascript node exercise I decided to pull from two essays I wrote last year. One of them was an essay on self-reflection in fencing and the other essay was from my advanced standing proposal. As James Pennebaker mentioned in his TED talk, if we are writing to those who are above us, we’ll tend to use I more. Though both were mostly self-centered I wanted to see how much I used I before certain words in both essays. I decided to pull out how much I used ‘I’ and ‘my’ in both of these essays. ‘My’ showed up 13 times and ‘I’ showed up 24 times. ‘My’ was mainly followed by words in regards to my art, while ‘I’ came up mostly when I discussed what I was intending to do. In the fencing essay ‘I’ showed up 94 times and my showed up 46 times. ‘I’ came up when discussing what I did when describing those moments and when I was writing about ways I could improve. ‘My’ came up when reflecting on what fencing meant to me as a fencer and what it meant to me in my daily life.
I think both of these essays are good representations of how common self-reflection words are used when trying to discuss one’s own current situation and looking ahead at the future. I see it the most when I’m discussing parts of who I am and what makes me who I am.

#Week 9 Update

This week we were able to settle on everything we needed to do. In the workshop last class Alex, Siera, and Julie filmed the video. I worked with Professor Tega on making an in class demo with processing that used the Twitter API and Google talk to text API. We then met earlier this week to edit the video. Alex and I did most of the editing work for the video. We were able to use my H4 Zoom recorder to capture the narration of the video. The main shots were edited in final cut pro. Alex then transferred it to After Effects to add the tweets being shown in the video.
While editing the video we thought of our logo which ultimately ended up being a brain with the wifi signal. We felt that this was appropriate to demon-straight our prosthesis being able to bring your thoughts to social media.
Overall we were able to get the vision we wanted for our project out of the video and a working demo to demon-straight the concept.

Our concept headband for the video:

The Brain Stream Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/brainstreamNY

Here’s our video:
[vimeo 123347282 w=500 h=281]

BrainStream from Alex Zahn on Vimeo.

Here’s the Talk to tweet program:

#Week8: Project 2 Update

This week we were able to split up the roles we had for working on our project. What it came down to collectively was figuring out the type of prosthesis we wanted to make which ultimately became something similar to a headband.
The main thing I was working on this week was trying to get some of the arduino and processing talking to twitter to work. Unfortunately I was unable to get some of the twitter keys myself and had to get help from Julie to get the keys she got from Twitter. I then still ran into issues with processing having a difficult time locating the Twitter library. On the bright side though, I was able to get a Google Developer Key to have the processing talk 2 text program running. If it’s possible I’m thinking of modifying the code for our presentation. In class today and within the week I’ll look to see if it’s possible to have a mock demo for the presentation.
We also continued to work on our ideas for our video. We kept thinking about what type of video we want to make and how it will help make it easy for people to understand what our device is. We looked at some Kickstarter videos to give us some inspiration. We’re set on a formula and language that is typically associated with Kickstarter videos and have a rough plan of how we will work on our video today in class.

Brief Summary

– What ideas, themes or issues do you want to address in your project?
We want our project to address our consistent connection to social networking.

– What is the purpose or intention of your project?
Our intention is to have people be consciously aware of their consistent connections to social networks. Mainly focusing on how much we talk about them and how much we use them to share our thoughts. If this device existed we would want people to be more conscious of what they’re thinking because any thing they think would shared publicly on social media.

– Who is it targeted at?
This device is targeted to people who want to share their thoughts on social networks more often. This is also for people who might be interested in being more aware of what they’re thinking or saying.

– How will it work?
Our original concept focused more on sensing a voice and then transferring the words to a twitter account. Our focus is now on thoughts being translated into tweets. It’s mainly conceptual now, but we will have a small prototype simulating how it may work.

– What sensors and/or services does it need to connect to?
A mind reader or voice sensor is what would be needed to make this device work. It has to be connected to a social media service such as Twitter or Facebook or other platforms that allow sharing information in an Internet public place.

– How will you make it? What materials do you need to get?
To make this we’ll need a computer, an arduino board, arduino software, and processing. We already have the materials we need accessible to us.

– How does your idea relate to what you have learned so far in Social Software?
This relates mostly to the lessons where we learned about how people use social media platforms. Our prosthetic will be looking at how people currently use social media and how social media might be used in the future. This also relates to the other social prosthetics and art projects that look at things that could be useful, but more or less bring up more questions than actually answering some.

– What additional research do you need to do?
Our additional research is looking into the current API’s that exist that could help make a small prototype.

Exercise 4: Google Diet

The Google diet has been a very interesting experience for me. Since the start of the exercise I completely made sure I logged out of all my Google accounts. I typically use Firefox so I just changed the default search engine to duckduckgo. In the entirety of this week there were only a few occasions where something Google related popped up. The only mishap I had was on Friday when my mom wanted me to search up recipes on this Italian recipe site. I immediately was disappointed and told my mom I had to stop because the website used Google for their searches.
Since Friday there were a few times where I was almost tempted. A person on my personal Twitter responded to me with a YouTube video, which I couldn’t watch. On the latest episode of HBO’s Girls there was a scene where the main character Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) was watching a YouTube video. Later in the week the Girls twitter account tweeted out a video which I thought was going to be on hbo.com, but to my surprise it was on YouTube and since I was on my phone I was able to back out of the site immediately without the video starting to play. The last uses of YouTube and Google Chrome occurred in my Junior Seminar Class yesterday when a majority of the presentations. My classmates presented using Google Chrome and some of them showed videos from YouTube.

For the most part this exercise really had me focus on my self-control. YouTube was almost everywhere and it was hard to get a fill of certain videos, but many video game websites were able to help me fill that void. Other websites that didn’t use YouTube to stream their videos also helped me out. All in all I realized that I’m not too dependent on Google in every area aside from YouTube and my backup Gmail account. I only used Bing once. I prefer DuckDuckGo more. I might leave it as my default search engine for a while.

Exercise 3: Check-in for Mom

Tweetable Description: Getting to know how my mom uses her technology to interact with others and create a recipe that would let her know I’m at or leaving school.

Interview with my mom:
What do you normally use your phone for?

-Texting my children, your grandfather and friends. I also take pictures with it.

Do you like texting?

-It’s okay. I would rather talk to people.

How do you feel when your kids won’t respond to a text?

-Very annoyed because I feel like I’m being ignored.

Would you use your phone to get other things?

-I would, but I choose not to. I might use it more to check for weather updates and if there are sales at Macy’s in the future.

Would you use your phone more if it were able to tell you more about a person you were texting?

-Yes, but I’d be worried of that information was coming from someone else and not the person who owns the phone.

Would you like to know where your kids are if they forget to text you?

-All the time.

My Services:

How they work: My services are triggered when I enter or leave the Purchase campus. Then it sends a message to my moms phone via SMS(Text message) and an E-mail to let her know if I’m arriving or leaving. You can try the E-Mail version out here.

Results: Both E-Mails were sent at the times I entered and exited the campus, but the text message about me leaving the campus wasn’t sent until three hours later.

Assessment 1: Exercise 2: Over Sharing

For my glitch social network experiment I decided to take on one of breaches described from socialmediacollective.org. The glitch I decided to do was the oversharer. For 24 hours I was to message someone everything I was doing. For this project to get the best results it had to be someone who I hardly knew or didn’t know at all. Luckily for me I had received a friend request on Friday from this woman from the Philippines who I had never met in my life. I then decided to message her a majority of what I did from 5pm on Friday to around 6pm on Saturday night. I let this woman know everything I was doing.
The results I got from this experiment were just a few replies. When I started to send the messages to her she initially didn’t reply to any of them. After sending five messages she then replied with a thumbs up and said, “ Sorry but I’m not asking what ur doing.” I didn’t reply to that with an answer and I continued to share with her what I was doing at that moment. She didn’t respond to me again until I told he I was brushing my teeth. She then replied by saying “Okay U may brush ur teeth.” I then let her know that I was at my internship, then leaving my internship and then said that I was back home. At that point the 24-hour period was up and I had no intention of messaging her again. Then to my surprise on Sunday morning she replied to me with a Good Morning picture.
I classify this as breaking the space in which messaging on social media is typically pertained to. People normally use the messaging system to talk and get to know someone. It’s designed to be a space for conversation online. If someone were to actually let the others know what they were doing on Facebook all day they would most likely just leave a post and maybe tag some friends if they really wanted them to see it. I used this space as if I was posting. I was taking the actions of what one normally does when sharing some information, but instead I shared almost everything I was doing in a space normally used for conversations.
This exercise has made me realize that there are certain social guidelines we follow when using parts of social networks. A social network like Facebook has many ways of using it. The messaging area of the social network is to get to know someone or keep in touch with those you already talk to on a daily basis. It’s meant for having a conversation privately and not constantly telling the other person what you are doing. I think direct messaging has a type of experience attached to whoever uses it and using it for reasons other than messaging seems weird and unwelcome.
By looking at the first chapter of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, this exercise helped me realize how our social interactions are determined by the ways in which they work. This reading helped me comprehend the usage of our online social experiences, while also thinking about the ways in which these situations can be used in other ways.

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