The Stalking Project
Within contemporary society, it has become more common and socially acceptable to expose personal information online. This personal information might be anything that can be used to identify a person, such as age, gender, name, marital status, hometown, pictures, family members etc. However, most would like to avoid unwanted contact with those that could potentially harass or harm them with said information.
Mutual Friends
What does being friends really entail? Can virtual friendship, such as FaceBook, be of equivalent value to an actual face to face encounter?
Why I Left Facebook / Why I Stayed on Facebook
Robert W. Gehl's "'Why I Left Facebook'" (from Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch's "Unlike Us Reader" [Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013)]) offers a mini-ethnography of English-language 'Why I Left Facebook' posts.
Inpsired by Gehl, this page summarizes a class project (PHIL 123, "Internet, Society, & Philosophy", University of Oregon, Winter 2014; Prof. Colin Koopman) that involved a short exercise in meditating on the virtues and vices of leaving Facebook behind and staying on Facebook.
Face Facebook
Background: This project focuses on the influence of advertisements in order to better conceptualize online privacy.
Problem Statement: Customers are unfairly targeted by online advertisements based on their online preference. What effects do these marketing strategies have on Facebook users?
Scope: This project only focuses on University of Oregon Undergraduate students.
Facebook: Creepy Stalker or Brilliant Advertiser?
Project Description: We created ten fake Facebook accounts to see how "likes" and friends would affect advertising. After some initial difficulties, we discovered that Facebook only advertises when a user has either friends or a location. Other interesting results include one of the accounts receiving friend requests from real people and another account being discovered by Facebook as a fake. This experiment led to us to question the right Facebook has to use personal information for the sake of advertising.
Creepbook
Case statement: This project focuses on how easy it is to access other's personal information through social networking sites, and also how readily people give their information out to others, in order to better conceptualize true online privacy.
Profile Picture Propaganda
The Project
Profile Picture Propaganda is a qualitative analysis project, researching how identity is portrayed and perceived through Facebook profile pictures.
The project is based on our group's theory that people select certain profile pictures according to how they want to be perceived, and people viewing the profile pictures gain a certain understanding of who the original person is from their pictures.
Methodology
Anonymity on the Internet
The internet was developed as a virtual world where you could exist behind a screen and no one could be sure who was on the other end. Now, an argument rages over whether anonymity should be allowed on the internet anymore. Encompassing the realms of privacy and publicness, the amount of anonymity a person has while existing behind their computer defines their internet identity. By extension, the amount of anonymity a person is given in any certain sphere of the internet allows opportunies for abuse, and changes exactly what the internet stands for.
The Private I
To begin, here is a link to the blog we have created http://theprivatei48.wordpress.com/. The blog is a work in progress and should have several more posts by the end of the weekend.
Below is our problem statement and project hypothesis.
Project Problem Statement: