Joshua, Vox Pop Experiments, 12 January 2010

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Contents 1 Vox pop 2 History of the vox pop 2.1 Chronicle of a summer, Rouch 2.2 Galton, Sir Francis 3 Conventions of the vox pop 4 Synaptic crowd tool 4.1 Previous examples 4.2 Live demo 4.3 Use cases 4.4 Next steps 5 Connections to civic group 5.1 Flipping the metonymity of vox pop

Vox pop

"On the street" interview

• Constructing the voice of the people

What tools and media exist?

• What do they create?
• What other tools are possible?
• ethnomethodology

Collision spaces

• Resisting the enclaving Sunstein, Putnam suggest
  • Habermassian cafe
  • Pricescope

History of the vox pop

Chronicle of a summer, Rouch

Portable audio, film recording technology

Galton, Sir Francis

• Vox populi
• Wisdom of crowds
• Galton was a eugenicist

Conventions of the vox pop

• The interviewee is non-expert
• Not a pundit
• The street as a "third space"
  • Oldenburg "the third place"
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Place

People take on the role

• They assess your dress and your camera to determine audience
• And therefore adjust behavior
• "Who am I talking to?"
• "Who am I supposed to represent to them?"

Interviewee must imagine who they stand-in for

• Expected to speak from personal experience
• Yet expected to act as a representative of a group
• shared experience v. personal experience

Synaptic crowd tool

Interviewer carries phone + camera

• Questions from remote viewers are sent to the phone
• Remote viewers watch respondents live
• Enables follow-up question possibility

Questions:

• How do interviewees react?
• What about the agency of the audience?
  • Theater of the Oppressed
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Oppressed

Previous examples

Tendency to move from the personal to the political

• "What was the best day of your life?" yields reflections on the Iraq war

Live demo

• http://www.voxpopexperiments.org

Interviewer in person can't see the question before it plays

• Atypical interview relations

Use cases

Not as much a msm man-on-the-street

• Citizen journalism
• Bloggers

Next steps

More scalable

• New interface demands

More contextual specificity

• For interviewees

More case studies

• Different groups, different purposes
• Use within the HP Alliance, por ejemplo

Norms and ethics

• What if the remote questioners say something offensive?
• Design some accountability controls
• How does the "there"-ness fit?
• Denial of responsibility in the mediator
  • Disembodied
• Inheriting norms from existing communities
  • Using it at a conf/conv

Asymmetry

• Interviewee is seen but cannot see
  • The mediator could carry a screen with ppl's faces on it
• Is there value to the limited channel?
  • Rheingold: Hyperpersonal effect
  • http://www.well.com/~hlr/tomorrow/hyperpersonal.html

Presence

Connections to civic group

People starting from a comfortable place to have a challenging conversation

• Be it popular culture
• Also this type of conversations

Flipping the metonymity of vox pop

One interviewer can represent a group of geographically dispersed

• "I am here representing 50 people..."