Submarine Channel

Anti-Social Media: Unspeak Data Visualization Part 2

In the fourth episode of the Unspeak series we dive right into where you’re most likely reading this right now – on a social network. But as Steven Poole points out, what is actually social about this network, when corporations and brands consistently disguise their true intentions in an attempt to monetize our interpersonal relationships and materialistic preferences, and ultimately persuade us to buy in or out? Social network is just one example, and as with all Unspeak terms what’s left for us to do is question whether there is persuasion in the description, and what opinion is being brainwashed into us.  A concoction of the unspeak words in this episode would produce a silly sentence such as: in a world of the ‘viral’ ‘smartphone’ ‘paywall’ ‘the cloud’ suggests ‘reform’ against ‘piracy’ and ‘file sharing’ using ‘intelligent design’, ‘user generated content’, and ‘big data’.

Much like unspeak terms that discuss the environment, which we wrote about last week, when we look at words covered in this episode of Anti-Social Media, we discover strong links between the terms in the network visualization, showing that the Wikipedia articles for each of the terms are closely linked. No surprise there!

You can try it out yourself by clicking on a label of another Unspeak term, and watch the related words reorient around it.

Overall we notice social media and technology related terms in this episode are more widely mentioned and discussed than those in the previous post which deals with the rather urgent issue of the environment. While Climate Change, a highly debated topic, peaked with 25,777 tweets on June 25th, The Cloud, a corporation-owned physical place where our digital data is stored, is hotter with a total of 31, 749 tweets mentioning it on August 26th.

Some of the key issues people are discussing in relation to ‘the cloud’ are: company servers, the NSA, spying, trust, blaming, malware, privacy, password security. silicon valley, and a host of various cloud company names such as dropbox and IBM.

A glance over at Newsmap, where we see headlines related to the Unspeak terms, reveals a recent Amazon hardware outage and glitches that exposes infrastructure risks with data storage in a cloud facility.

Another unspeak term you might not easily recall is Smartphone, the clever phone with a screen full of apps powered by a mini computer, as opposed to a ‘feature’ phone, who sole feature is to call. There’s a lot of discussion about smartphones, with a peak frequency of 21,256 that hits on July 17th.

A look over at Context and Newsmap confirms how seems several competing companies, amongst them one in China, are either launching or previewing new smartphones.

Curiously enough in context we find the key issues discussed are the features of the smartphones, whether it’s a rumored projector, best camera, comes unlocked, is the slimmest or most affordable.

Last but not least, Reform. Supporting the definition of ‘any kind of change ordered by politicians that will generate positive media headlines…and where reform is always for the better’ we find that Immigration reform is top of mind for Americans, with a peak of 37,009 tweets on June 27th (also about 12 thousand more tweets than the dire situation of Climate Change.

The context of that conversation is “senate should pass, comprehensive reform, historic immigration. And for the most part we find all age groups involved in the conversation and in favor of reform, though a noticeably higher percentage of tweets from the 41+ age group.

This article is part of a series of articles that explore the results that Unspeak’s data visualization tools provide. You can find the rest of this series here: Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4. The data visualization tools, which scour social media and the web for Unspeak terms, are just one part of the Unspeak interactive documentary experience which also includes six video episodes and an ever-growing Unspeak dictionary you can contribute to yourself.