Today:
This week’s social software: Artist-designed social media: Minus, Binky, Die With Me
Team Reminders:
Landing Page (Phylip, Julie, Christian)
Documentation, License, CoC (Idris, Melissandre, Tyler)
Icons (Mike, Brock, Yared, Griffin)
Accessibility and mobile-responsive design (Sarah, Scotia, Luis, Mac)
Special Features Group (Zack, Jose, Chris P.) (alternative name: Team “Everything else”)
Minus social by Ben Grosser
But what if social media wasn’t engineered to serve capitalism’s need for growth? How might online collective communication be different if our time and attention were treated as the limited and precious resources that they are? Minus is an experiment to ask these questions, a finite social network where users get only 100 posts—for life. Rather than the algorithmic feeds, visible “like” counts, noisy notifications, and infinite scrolls employed by the platforms to induce endless user engagement, Minus limits how much one posts to the feed, and foregrounds—as its only visible and dwindling metric—how few opportunities they have left. Instead of preying on our needs for communication and connection in order to transform them into desires for speed and accumulation, Minus offers an opportunity to reimagine what it means to be connected in the contemporary age. The work facilitates conversation within a subtractive frame that eschews the noise and frenzy for a quieter and slower setting that foregrounds human voices, words, and temporalities. Though it may be disorienting at first to navigate an online social space devoid of the signals and patterns Silicon Valley uses to always push for more, Minus invites us to see what digital interaction feels like when a social media platform is designed for less.
How artist Ben Grosser is cutting Mark Zuckerberg down to size, The Guardian
Binky: The best way to spend time on your phone
by Dan Kurtz
Binky is an infinite feed of random things (“binks”) to look at. What will come up next? Cauliflower? Diana Ross? Keep scrolling to find out! Unlike similar apps such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, Binky won’t stress you out or make you hate your friends. It just keeps your attention where it belongs: on your phone.
Die With Me
by Dries Depoorter & David Surprenant
The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.
Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook, Pew Research Center