Connectivity Probe
One of the critical arguments of my thesis is that digital communication is creating loneliness. In order to test this argument, I designed a cultural probe to consider my participants’ relationships with social media, the internet, and the formation of friendships.
The probe consisted of activities to do over five days—some writing, drawing, labeling, and cataloging.
My five participants were all in their 20s and came from very different cultural backgrounds.
For the first day of the probe, I started participants with an easy introductory activity. Included in the kit was a set of star stickers—participants were to place various stars on the different orbits (and label them) to represent how close they feel to their communities and networks.
The second activity invites participants to think about their social media use and to consider if it’s actually connecting them to new contacts as promoted.
Wednesday’s activities focus on friendships and the perception of relationships that begin in a digital space.
For this activity I wanted participants to think about the ideal foundation for a friendship. I wanted to test my hypothesis that all my participants would mention a physical meeting, rather than a digital connection.
Friday’s activity asked participants to draw friendship and loneliness. I created this activity to analyze where loneliness and friendship take place.
Interestingly, nearly every participant drew loneliness as a scene with a person alone using their phone.
I also asked participants to catalog a social interaction for each day of the probe in order to see if most social interactions were occurring online or in-person.
Through the probe, I gathered some fascinating insights about digital connections, social media and internet use, and loneliness. Notably, most participants thought of the internet as a neutral tool but held negative opinions about social media. It was also evident that participants valued relationships formed in-person more than relationships that began in a digital context.
