Music 256A Reading Response 7

Elena Stalnaker | Fall 2021

Reading Response ~ "Artful Design" Chapter 7: "Social Design"

"The role of technology is not to abruptly alter our nature, but through new experiences, to hold up a different lens that gives us new perspectives on who we are and what it means to be human." pg. 394

I find this quote extremely powerful, especially when paired with the examples of leaf trombone and the 4000 person lean on me performance. I didn't realize quite how big 4000 was until I saw that collection of tiny faces on page 393 and realized that crowd was only a tiny fraction. Having been in a choir of ~65 people and felt the "groupthink," I shudder to imagine what it would feel like to sing with a group of 4000. However, part of the power of making music in a group for me is the physical presence of those people in the room with me, and I suspect that would we be significantly inhibited by making music through technology (sortof like zoom class versus in person). I wonder if there is a technological way to communicate all the factors that make performing with others in person such a potent experience.

I found myself thinking about privacy and user data for a lot of this chapter. With things like CAPTCHA and Mechanical Turk, it's hard for me not to be automatically suspicious of what the data people are creating when playing these games is being used for. I was even a little shocked about how much Smule knew about their users, like exactly how many times each individual user had judged, performed, and composed. With the whole "making games that harness the power of the masses" thing, I wonder about consent and how important it is. For instance, on pg. 373, Ge says that the idea behind GWAPs like "What do you see?" was "that people didn't have to know the bigger picture or purpose - they contributed simply by playing." Even though the GWAP in the example was only being used to label images, the larger principle of people participating without knowing what their playing of the so-called "ESP" game is going towards unnerves me. It reminds me of Jenny Odell's discussion of B.F. Skinner's utopian novel "Walden Two". The whole premise sounded super creepy, and a bit like GWAP - experts were designing a perfect society where everyone was happy so long as they didn't know what was happening behind the scenes. The members of the society were essentially just being manipulated by the experts to want certain things so that they were happy doing what was best for the group as a whole. GWAP is no where near that extreme, but I still think it would've been better for the GWAP makers to inform their players of what their work was going towards.