Final Post before project hand in

As it is coming to the hand-in date I thought I would do an analysis of the website to see how it has progressed, and how it mobilizes the theoretical ideas proposed in my pilot.

The aim was to make a self-surveillance website by purely re-appropriating already existing social networking tools and combining these into one website. However, the aim in doing so was to re-appropriate it into a Orwellian style design in order for the audience to think about how these self-surveillance tools have become a new form of surveillance and control mechanism that can be used to watch over you.

In the pilot I made a pretty successful design - however the elements from other social networking sites were re-appropriated using the flash widgets that the social networking tools provided therefore I did not have any control over how this elements looked therefore the design was limited as it was all split into blocks:

Thus the aim of the project was to create a website without using these widgets so I had ultimate control over how the project looked. In essence the aim was to make the website from the coding level up, rather than having an external widget decide how these elements look.

Therefore the decision was made to use PHP to grab these elements off the social networking sites, by parsing the RSS feed onto my website and using CSS to format these elements how I wanted.

This process of using PHP took some time as I had no previous knowledge pf PHP therefore I had to learn the basics in order to get started on this project (and much of the workbook is dedicated to this process of learning)

First of all I learned how to grab the separate feeds into separate blocks and then used PHP to grab a single element and put it into its own division - therefore making it possible to apply CSS id's and classes to these components (therefore having ultimate look over how it looks)

Also because I have control over these elements I was able to apply javascript to each of the elements on the page so that if the user clicks on the twitter, photo or map a web 2.0 pops up (which are better than normal pop ups in many ways - as they are not blocked by the browser and have a better aesthetic look, and are more integrated into the design)

However In doing so I was able to positition the social networking elements as I wished and ended up choosing a spiral design where the elements spiral around an orwellian eye with the map in the middle.

The spiral was partly influenced by the Fibonacci spiral, whereby these data flow outwards and constitute a new surveillance culture - whereby spirals of this data equals spirals of your life being uploaded onto the internet.

Thus demonstrating how these social networking sites have become the new big brother, but instead of you being watched, you are encouraged to participate in this self-surveillance culture, and in essence create cycles of data for people to watch over you with (hence the cycle of photos and tweets).

But more than this the design is constructed like a big brother eye in which the flows of data that circle around it constitute a new control mechanism to look over you. Thus reflecting on how in contemporary culture, we in essence all have our own eye, and cycle of information that are used to watch over us whether thats through facebook, twitter, flickr or photobucket (or any other social networking tools for that matter).

http://www.mydataflows.co.uk 

But by re-appropriating these elements into a new design I hope it elicits the idea in the audience that these social networking tools are a new form of surveillance in contemporary society.