It’s 2078 and our college professor bot assigned for us to look at our grandparents “digital footprint”. After some basic research, I’ve found that 99% of all Snapchat pictures sent were made public after the company’s crash in 2053. I’ve found this guy that uses the username littlegunman, and I’ve also learned that he wished could change it since he made it when he was little and gets heat for it in his high school and college years. He seems to be a shy person, I can tell a lot from the types of pictures people send. For instance, people with outgoing personalities use a lot of filters and selfies. Artsy people send pictures of artsy and interesting things where as shy people send pictures of random things, like blurry pictures, blank screens and other pictures of meaningless things. I’ve also learned that depending on the person he’s talking to, his type of pictures change. If its a disliked person he will send what I consider “careless pictures” that are just what I’m assuming are just whatever was open when he hit reply. If he likes the person, he might send a picture of himself (although these pictures make up less than 1% of his entire file) or something where the picture is focused.
I think the conclusions they would draw for our community is that everyone essentially has the same online presence. What I mean by this is that everyone has the same accounts, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Etc. and this causes this sense of uniformity, causing it to seem as if everyone does the same things, for instance posting vacation pictures on Instagram, or sending streaks on Snapchat. When in reality if you look into these acts, you can see a lot about the way someone is. In their vacation pictures, are they in the picture? Are they facing the camera or away from it? And so on. The same can be done for any online act; when they send streaks what did they send a picture of? We can analyze anyone’s online actions to learn more about them and their culture. In example, we could look back at myspace and learn about the cultural change within our generation itself. We might not realize it, but we can learn a lot about someone’s culture by just what they post online.