ZeroOne proposal

Tracking Social Cost at Zero1 (we will come up with a better title for the installation)

The Social Cost Tracker, an initiative of the Digital Arts and New Media program Participatory Culture research project group at UCSC, began with the seemingly modest proposal that consumers would like to receive compelling stories about social cost of the products they buy, on the spot, while contemplating buying the product. The problem with the myriad extant avenues for tracking social cost of consumer products is that they are dependent for veracity on an outdated model of gathering data: one in which only qualified "experts" are able to tell us about the social and environmental impacts of products. The charts and stars that experts produce rarely tell a compelling story for a consumer who wants to know, the impact of the product on people and the environment. Conversely, when we search for information about the social cost of products in user-generated venues (youtube, amazon reviews, the web itself) we find a multitude of unsubstantiated opinions. This is part and parcel of a crisis of truth that the internet represents.

In response to the this year's ZER01 theme: "Build Your Own World" DANM’s Participatory Culture Research group will ask Festival goers to participate in an interactive installation designed to address a number of research questions that are central to the development of the Social Cost Tracker application -- questions of veracity – of objectivity and subjectivity – of the possiblitiy of using media tools to facilitate conversation and political activism.

For example:

How can we construct a format for testing the truth of a claim that isn't dependent on the expertise of the speaker?

Can participatory media forms be used to collect data that will have impact on public behavior (consumer, environmental, political, and human rights activism)?

What is the political efficacy of social media environments (like You Tube?) where valued is based on popularity rankings (essentially on the lowest common denominator) instead of truth.

How can individuals use media to make compelling arguments about their subjective perspective on issues of importance to the public.

Does subjective data have more power to inform and impact the behavior of individuals than objective data (In other words, are people more interested in story than statistic)

Can verifiable data be collected effectively through grass roots data collection methods and participatory media interfaces.

Attendees of Zero1 are likely to think of themselves as good people: informed, active in their communities, dedicated to those things they think are most important. We want to know what things those people think are most important, and test their opinions on multiple axes. Viewer/participants are invited to record a 30 second video monologue based on the prompt, "what are you most angry about?" participants will build an argument about their central concern using the micro-documentary template application we are building for cell phones and handhelds.

The short videos thus produced by participants will then be exported to a dedicated server from which workers on Mechanical Turk can view them and rate them on several criteria, like:

• "who is this person and what are they upset about?"
• "is this person telling the truth?"
• "is this a compelling argument?" (1-10)
• "rate the importance of this issue to you" (1-10)

etc….

Mechanical Turkers will search for statistical data on the internet relevant to the topic of each participant’s micro-documentary argument and provide links to the video

Mechanical Turk will return results on these tasks in a manner of minutes. The results, as they are returned, will be used to generate a data visualization that represents the relationships between and among all the micro-documentaries contributed. The visualization will be projected in the installation space and participants will be able to download or print out a storyboard of their own micro-documentary and its Mechanical Turk generated analysis.