Tag : experiments

Instagram has changed the way I look at photography, from taking single images of beautiful found ephemera to sharing sequences of images as an event or moment unfolds. These moments become a journey through your life, one that is both shared and intimate (as @malbonster mentions in his recent blog post; Making sense of life through photography).

This made me think about the way that photography has evolved and integrated into our lives. It also made me wonder how literal photographic journeys could evolve. How could the day of a social group be documented though more than just a camera lens? To capture more than just one media (or sense)?

This led to an experiment: could the 'development' of a photographic journey be through the addition of sound bites? What would the experience become, would sound enhance or disrupt the imagery?

Instead of rodents, they’re using journalists – and instead of a Skinner Box they’ll be locked inside a French farmhouse in Perigord for five days and only allowed to access Twitter and Facebook.

The experiment – run by RFP the French-language public broadcasters association – will discover how warped our perception of the world could become if we rely solely on Twitter and Facebook.

Like anyone would do that!

The journalists will continue to report the news as they see it – coming solely through tweets, hashtags, status updates, messages and – gulp – contextual advertising.

We use the traffic ranking tool Alexa to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web; it’s a good measure of the speed with which social media is transforming web habits and economics. But most of its users know that Alexa’s a relative measure, so if a chart’s showing downward movement it doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is falling.

Alexa measures traffic by encouraging people to download its tracking tool to their browser, and then monitors their usage. Most Alexa users know that it indicates a site’s share of reach, rank and page views by revealing what proportion of the Alexa sample has visited the site, and that there’s no clear indication of absolute numbers. Also, Alexa clients tend to be skewed towardstechies and other early adopters so it doesn’t necessarily give an accurate view of market share across internet users as a whole.