Reading Response #7

to Artful Design • Chapter 7: “Social Design”

May-Ann “Gray” Wong

11 November 2023

Music 256A / CS476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Design for Familiar Anonymity

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 7.7 and 7.13. Principle 7.7 states that “a little anonymity can go a long way” (363) and 7.13 that we should “design for familiar anonymity” (389), but I think I struggle with the fact that I do often have a strong desire beyond the idea of familiar strangers. Kunwoo mentioned in his lecture that he has some close online friends that he developed from shared activities and interests, and I am the same; there are friends that I’ve made online through shared interests, and so the focus on anonymity and “anti social-network networks” made me curious about how to carefully tread the line between building connection for the sake of not feeling alone in the world versus building connection for increased familiarity and friendship; how might we approach building a relationship between familiar strangers in a safe way? And in what contexts might complete anonymity be more beneficial compared to partial anonymity? For a lot of the Smule examples, it felt very much like there were steps to build a community, but nothing more permanent or further than the feeling of there being others out there like you; you don’t have the tools or ability to reach out for any permanent further growth of your community, and in some ways, that might feel even lonelier, that there are people out there like you that you can never talk to or identify but who resonate with you and share your interests. A digital performance on something like the World Stage lacks this sort of afterwards connection and feels like a one-time connection that blooms and dies within that same song performance. There’s no real way to follow or to continue to build a budding friendship, which I find to be sad and a shame.

It’s also interesting that designing with community nowadays seems to be used largely to gamify (or at least in part) human labor to be used for AI that will then often attempt to be independent of human labor and get rid of humans within the loop altogether. Of course, there is only so much that we can design that is feasible within the economic situation and system that we find ourselves in, but I wonder what other examples there are of designing with an anonymous community for non-capitalistic purposes and what kind of lasting impact it has on that community. For instance, I do remember the period of time in which Twitch plays [insert game] was a popular trend, where gamers united under the common goal of completing a game relying on the inputs of chat members within Twitch. But within this kind of setup, there lacks the complete anonymity of Mechanical Turk and other examples within the chapter. As a result, it does seem like there’s perhaps an interesting divide for harnessing human labor anonymously for the intent of alienating labor from its source versus non-anonymous human labor for community purposes.