Last year, as part of the 2008 Impakt Festival, the Gifted project was developed as a collaboration among NetNiet, Alchemyst, Lava design and Impakt. This playful project wanted to provide a critical insight at the recent boom of social networking. It was constructed upon the ideas contained in Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom(2003). This renowned book, which has awarded the Nebula Award for best novel in 2004, explores “the future of society, where money doesn't exist anymore, but everything is based on your popularity; so you might be really popular and then you would get a free Porsche, or you might be very unpopular and then elevator doors won't open for you and you will have to take the stairs” tells us Tijmen Schep, one of the creative minds behind the project. Drawing inspiration from Doctorow's world, the Gifted project tried to replace money with Whuffie, a reputation-based currency from the novel, by creating a measure of popularity for everyone attending the festival. People where thus given buttons that they could clip on their clothes, which would contain a number and the image of a mask (a sort of avatar) so that people could vote on each other based on a different question everyday. “On the first day everyone was asked, for example: 'do you think this person is drug free?' And then you could send an sms saying: 'I think person number 313 is not drug free at all.' So that person would get zero stars instead of five stars” continues Tijmen. People would constantly vote on each other, taking note of each others numbers and increasing their interactions. “So basically we got this huge list of how people are perceived during the festival everyday on a different question. And we used this lilts on a fun way, we gave people the same kind of feedback that was used on the book. So, someone with a higher rating, would get a better treatment during the festival.” One day, for instance, soup was distributed and people with a low rating would get a really bad frozen soup while people with a high rating would get an excellent soup.

Tijmen explains to us how the critical undertone of this project was never spelled out to people in an obvious way; rather the organizers just said to the people: “This is a fun thing, do it”, but the visitors by themselves started to think about it. “People came to me and said 'hey, you know? This stuff is actually kind of freaky', and that was great!”, says Tijmen, “it was better that what I could have hoped for. They were themselves thinking about it and forming their own opinions about whether this future would be something that would be inciting or not.”

When I asked him if he actually thinks something like is likely to lay ahead in the future, he acknowledges how “things will never happen in the way that you think they might... but on the other hand, people are giving ridiculous amounts of information on line, and they are being trapped inside their social networks”. And he elaborated on the paradox of social networks: how the promising freedom of social sites, where you could be 'anyone you wanted', has actually turned to be a place where, since “you are so googleable, the different personas that you have towards different people have now become one on the internet. So if somebody googles my name, they find the personal things that I say to friends as well as my business things that I say to business people”. These means, in Tijmen's view, that people are no longer able to manage their different identities as separate things anymore, “which is ironic because the promise was that we were going to be able to do that to an extreme extent.”

The interesting thing is the possibility for debates opened up by this kind of projects. As Tijmen concludes, “there will always be people who are aware of the implications of these things and who will not take part in them”, and people who would be extremely enthusiastic. If you want to discuss these ideas with us, please send us your comments to miguel@impakt.nl or join us in our FaceBook or MySpace groups. And, by all means, feel free to contact us using a fake identity.

Posted by Miguel Escobar