“Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” – Richard Dawkins
Remediation based on Richard Dawkins’ quote
Memes are no doubt powerful in this day and age but why?
The use of social media for mobilisation, coordination and dissemination of memes and events allows for fast up-scaling because anyone can contribute in any capacity. Meme warfare swarms operate in an open process with fast feedback loops and develop fast long tails around successful attack vectors. They treat all content as open source, leverage anonymity to lower network transaction costs and make decisions through memetic replication.
My remediation this week is based on the concept of the walled garden whose role is extracting value that is generated by its users who don’t have the same access to data. The garden ‘owner’ (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) controls how we use the content that is tied to the garden.
The walled garden leverages from user participation to extract patterns of behaviour and monetising from the ‘product’ that they see in their users. There is no equal relationship between nodes and platforms, they are simply exploitative and extractive in nature. Economy based on behavioural data that is emerging, everyone who uses views the platforms as a product but in reality, we are the product, our behavioural data is a product for the companies that are running these.
“You are not a node on the internet equal to all other nodes you are a client working inside a proprietary device.” – Bruce Sterling, What a feeling! 2013
Walled gardens and information stacks don’t want their users to question or ask why their data is being used. The question being, what is the payoff for companies that get free access to these platforms and user data?
In the beginning of the DA process last semester, I created an Instagram page around wellbeing because I was passionate about mental health and wanted to share tips, resources and other content related to this topic. Find the pitch blog for this project here.
I soon lost interest in the page as I ran out of things to post about and found out that there was no real aim or audience that I was targeting. When Ted said in a lecture, “If you are aiming at everybody, you will not connect with anybody,” I could relate to this quote in hindsight with my first DA project due to the lack of study into an audience. Beta blog explains in more detail the process of changing this project to a project that I enjoy with an audience and aim and my experience with #FEFO.
Which brings me to Lifestyle Gurus, an Instagram page that is based around sharing easy, healthy food that tastes good and promotes eating healthy to fuel rather than punish your body. With making this page, we found an audience that was engaged in our content and found that we enjoyed making content for the page. There is four of us involved in this project which makes it easier to spread the load of content creation around which then makes it easier to post regularly to stay relevant in the algorithm and gives us time to properly engage with our audience.
Recent starter pack
Currently
Currently in the DA process, we are still sharing healthy recipes as our audience has responded well to meals, desserts and snacks so we’ve continued with that. Behind the scenes with specifically making posts, we research recipes from other Instagram pages, cookbooks or create our own recipes from scratch that we would like to try ourselves. We then make the recipe and photograph it using portrait mode and some food photography tips we have researched (different lighting, etc) and preset the photo with a consistent filter on all our photos. We then type the recipe in a Canva template that we’ve modified to suit our aesthetic and post it in a specific time for that day based on previous insights that we research at the beginning of each week.
Modified Canva template used for writing recipes
Some tips for food photography that we have adopted
Once it has been posted, we comment our unique hashtags, post it to our story with the name of the recipe and save it to a specific highlight based on what type of recipe it is. This seems like a lengthy process however, each of us were already trying new recipes all the time so it was just a matter of photographing them and writing up the recipe. We are all used to this process now so it’s becoming more efficient.
This semester’s pitch blog explains more about our projects aims in detail.
We have just recently begun a new content schedule that will free us of some time as well as look relatively organised upon glancing at our feed as a whole. This gives us one task a week each plus some room to frame some ‘authenticity’ photos of us so our audience can relate our page to faces. We have put a lot of thought into our content being available for our users to engage and give feedback as “Time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the clients or customers needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback.” Brown, T & Wyatt, J ‘Design thinking for social innovation’.
Weekly content schedule and ‘mock’ feed plan
The biggest change this project has gone through has been changing the concept into a project I enjoy and that has a clear user base. Some other iterations we have made are using portrait mode to photograph our food which adds depth to the photo and focuses the meal better but also adds more for the audience to look at. It has also helped with creating a specific style that our users can associate our content to us. We have also started posting pictures of ourselves to tap into being ‘authentic’ which we are trying to project. These posts have done as well as (insights-wise) our food posts, so this will stay regular.
Portrait mode adding depth to photos and better engagement with photosPhoto of us gained good insights in terms of engagement as well as desserts, main meals and lunch prep posts
We have received feedback from our users in a variety of forms:
In-person feedback – friends and acquaintances complimenting our recipes and page
Comments on posts – people we both know and don’t know are commenting compliments and tagging their friends, which increases our reach and potential audience
Messages – DM’s asking for other recipes and recommendations on other content they want to see
Polls – participation in polls on what recipes we should create and what types of recipes they’d prefer
Insights – these have shown us what times of the day we should post, what types of recipes are well-received, what we should be posting more or less of, and the engagement factors of our audience
Project development so far has involved iterating my first semester’s DA into a DA that I enjoy and am interested in creating content for. Project development in this semester’s DA is working out and framing our content with a style and finding a schedule that suits us.
DA from Semester 1 that was changed after a lack of interest
DA after changing
DA today
In the future, we would like to work on framing our content to have our faces more involved with the page so users can relate the page to us. Frames are “a central organising idea or story line that simplifies the volume and complexity of information stimuli, classifies perceived reality through selection and salience, and provides meaning.” Frames will help our audience find meaning in our content whilst following a ‘story line’ that we put out for our users to perceive as reality.
Upon further research of framing, I came across this quote by Victor Yocco (2014), “What you say in a user experience matters. How you say it matters equally.” This is important because you don’t want users to think you’re persuading them towards something, you want them to believe they are making the choice on their own, hence, “how you say it matters equally.”
Learning moments
changing DA to something I enjoy
the use of portrait mode for taking photos
pics of us for authenticity frame
polls and suggestion boxes on stories work better for feedback than comments
using unique hashtags
sharing to stories and saving to highlights – extra promotion of post and categorising
engaging with other pages in the same environment of health and food to grow and build relationships
tagging brands and other creators when using their products or recipes – often they will post us to their story or comment on our posts
content schedule – helped us with time management and plan our feed better (still working on)
Follow along to see what we have planned in the near future… :))
My remediation is based on this quote by Kevin Kelly which was shared in our tutorial with the discussion of the attention economy.
“This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks.” – Kevin Kelly
Social structure today is based on the desperate array of techniques used by platforms who leverage from these techniques to achieve the success of peoples attention to their content, especially towards people who are unaware of how these systems work.
This drive to compete for our attention shapes our perception of reality which then shapes our culture through products and productions that are all interlinked without the peoples awareness. All this content becomes culture driving and remains as a social norm.
chats with chels 