Page 117 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014BITLY FOR FEELINGS WEB APPLICATIONhttps://bitly.com/a/feelingsemotions are to be interpreted. Such as the emoticons that, far from going out of fashion, are becoming ever more precise and more complex. There is the case of Facebook, which has developed, together with Berkeley University and Pixar, more complex forms of this sort of communication that reflect certain feelings, emotions, moods or simply situations through emoticons. Researchers at Samsung are working on software that could assess a user’s mood by the way they write their tweets on the smartphone. It would work by analysing the speed with which the user writes, how much the telephone is moved in the process, the frequency of errors or self‐corrections and the number of emoticons used. In this way, it would be able to tell if the user is angry, surprised, happy, sad, depressed or frightened. Several marketing 2.0 studies have observed that the use of icons in the pages of social media sites such as Facebook help to empathise with followers. In fact, many of the uses of these affective technologies are within the field of marketing and communication and, indeed, in the field of personalisation and service that are demanded these days.For example, Bitly.com, the Web service to shorten URLs, has developed a Web application Bitly for feelings, in which they invite users to express what they are feeling together with the content they share on social media tools such as Twitter. These commentaries may refer to a book, a review, a film, a stage play, an exhibition, etc. The methodology consists of making use of the “shorts” that signify feelings or reactions that demonstrate that users are enjoying certain content (luvit.me), are amused (lolthis.me), dislike the content or find it frightening—not necessarily something related to horror (news about the economy may these daysAC/Elead to the use of the short scaryto.me), are saddened (sadto.me) or also who express some desire (iwanth.is), amongst other options. The search for these shorteners may provide very useful information for all sorts of cultural entities.On the other hand, the emotional factor may be induced. That is, the entities themselves may provoke an emotional response from their users (through their website, for example) and empathise with them. It is known that people’s habits of buying, searching or pastimes are driven by unconscious as well as conscious processes. Our acts and choices are nor always deliberate or rational. Decisions may be greatly influenced by the emotions. We could take as starting points the website of a publisher, an art gallery, a museum, a theatre company. That is, the portal to all the content of every entity, including those offering cultural content. According to conclusions from neuroscientific work that analyses the results of online marketing, two thirds of stimuli reach the brain through the visual system. Hence, Web page design can work in its own benefit when attracting attention, playing, in turn, the emotional role.Web designers and application developers, of whom we have already seen some examples, are taking an approach of stimulus and understanding, in order to attain a sufficient degree of empathy with the user. In a well‐known study7 on design and user experience, Arhippainen and Tähti, experts on userWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 9: THE NEW AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES COME TO THE CULTURAL SECTOR CURRENT PAGE...DESIGN AND USER EXPERIENCE STUDYhttp://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/011/007/ecp011007.pdf117