The Tools Series is a series of Baltan Sessions that examines the complex and changing relationships artists and designers have with the technologies and tools they develop, modify or use to create, with an aim to explore social awareness around the tool choices they make as well as the (aesthetic) influences of these choices on the work they create.

During the Naked on Pluto project one of the key ways to confront the problems of centralised social networks turned out to be to encourage a deeper understanding of the processes and protocols of these sites.

So, like the previous workshop at CCCB, we centred this around a web application called FaceSponge, which we developed as a social programming interface giving quick access to the Facebook API and allowing participants to try out each other’s scripts. The other key issue was to find out people’s opinions, and so we collected answers on post-it’s to three questions for each area, which the participants later sorted for presentation to the public.

Social advertising

This workshop was perfectly timed with Facebook’s IPO, and as 82% of it’s revenue comes from advertising we started off by working on a simple spoof advert. We took one friend, and picked something they have ‘liked’ and wrote some code to promote it. This is what happens on social networks where a brand gets advertised to you because one of your friends follows or likes it. Being able to put a friend’s name in an advert is seen as an exciting future of advertising (or perhaps less so as the share price continues to drop).

function runme() {
    FB.api("/me/friends", function(friends) {
        var friend=friends.data[0];
        FB.api("/"+friend.id+"/likes", function(likes) {
            var like=likes.data[0];
            display(friend.name+" endorses "+like.name+" BUY SEVERAL TODAY!");
            FB.api("/"+like.id+"/picture?type=large", function(picture) {
                display_image(picture);
            });
        });
    });
}

Privacy

There are vast amounts of pictures available on facebook, and it was fun to write a script that presented them all back at in a chaotic manner without any other information. This also gave us a chance to show how the privacy on Facebook is imaginary, as the URL’s FB gives you for your friend’s pictures are public – regardless of anyone’s privacy settings.

// showing the holes in the walls                                               
// you think your photos are private?                                           
// these images are accessible without a login                                  
function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/photos', function(f) {
                 if (f.data.length>0) {
                     var gallery=f.data[0];
                     // show the public url                                     
                     display(gallery.images[0].source);
                     // show the image                                          
                     display_image(gallery.images[0].source);
                 }
            });
        });
    });
}

Social pressures

The third area we were interested in exploring was the more subtle ways that social media are affecting communication methods. We came up with this strange script that collects the last things posted by your friends and puts them together without information on who posted them, or who they are for:

function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/feed', function(feed) {
                if (feed.data && feed.data.length>0
                    && feed.data[0].message) {
                    display(feed.data[0].message);
                }
            });
        });
    });
}

We continued to play with and adapt these scripts in order to show more information. The mood was interesting as it flipped from serious to hilarity and then slight awkwardness at what we were dredging up. We followed each of these practical sessions by collecting feedback on thoughts and emotions for each section. Although this was a very demanding workshop (changing between coding, politics, funny juxtapositions of friend’s personal data and having to think about how it felt) we recorded a wide range of thoughts – from the dismissive, “doesn’t matter” to the outright enraged. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this workshop was being able to expose these mechanisms to groups of people normally considered ‘users’.

(Programming a spybot with it’s behaviour)

Eventually the plan is to be able to program the bots fully within the game client – this is still a long term goal, but there are of course some fairly complex security problems with this idea.

(dressing a AudienceBot with another object)

Not all players have the ability to use these secret commands right now, in order to access them a player has to be carrying a special object (also known as a “Golden Medallion”). This allows you access to all areas of the game, including an “administration room” and various other secret powers.