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For my mapping project, I cared for a tamagotchi for 7 days. This was to compare having a digital pet over a living pet (such as a dog).
I first began by keeping a log of all activities, movements, and annoyances the tamagotchi brought into my life. However, this became quite a task I didn’t expect, as it meant I was logging activities on a half hour basis – one demanding little creature I can tell you! So I ended up doing a summary of the experience in a comparison chart.
The comparisons were:
- how long does each pet live
- how often do they eat per day
- how much do they cost to keep
- the time spent interacting on a daily basis
- the portability of the pet
- how strong is the emotional connection
- how much exercise do they require
- how clean are they to keep
I tried not to draw an answer over which is the better pet, but instead have presented the information on both pets so people can draw their own conclusions from the knowledge acquired.
You can download the presentation here: Tamagotchi vs. Dog.pdf
For my mapping exercise, i chose to look at the mobile phone and the idea of old vs new. I decided that for a 2 week period, i would record all of my messages that i sent, and then work out what kind of effect sending each of those message by post would have. I looked a few variables, including time spent physically writing the letters out, money spend on stamps, paper and envelopes, and environmental effects of mail trucks transporting each of these messages to their intended destinations.
In the end, i found the environmental impact data to be the most interesting, so i chose to soley map that. I came up with some really interesting results, and it helped to envision a direction for our major project.
Above is a poster showing the overall mapping, and below is a link to a pdf presentation with goes into day by day detail of my messaging habits.
For my mapping project (thank you Sarah for hosting this), I chose to add Facebook into my life.
I take this quote from the introduction to the presentation:
As I had always deplored social networking sites, despite knowing little about them, I chose to add Facebook to my life.
I wanted to see how it differed from the communications in my ‘real-life’ networks.
I quickly discovered that Facebook was more about networking than friendship.
Hence, I chose to map my real-life and Facebook networks, showing the strength of communication in both scenarios, and also where I know each person from.
I found the process interesting and enlightening. I used to consider these sites as almost evil, however, now, I realise that so long as they are used with discretion (which many people do not appear to use them with), they can simply be a fun way of keeping in contact with friends and acquaintances whom otherwise might slip from your network (and a great way of wasting a lot of time). I should probably attempt a reverse experiment and see who I don’t really talk to as much if I stopped using Facebook. It has certainly slowed down the amount of text messages going in and out – it could be coincidental, as my circle of friends hasn’t organised much lately, however, it would be interesting to note what would now happen if I dropped Facebook, now that people are used to finding me there.
I also think it’s interesting that in each of our mapping projects we each looked at something versus something else.
