Blog 20 (Jenna) Visualized States aka please forgive my fuzzy pictures of Sara and Jess...

Like several of my fellows, I too began Election Day by culling information from social media- mainly facebook. When I first checked it, my newsfeed was full of status updates of unsurprising content- my liberal friends, the women in fear for their uteri, expressed hope for Obama; my conservative friends, the Christians in fear for their religious freedom, which I’ll admit still boggles my mind, expressed hope for Romney; the majority just expressed the desire to convince others to vote. Many of my friends discussed the stickers traditionally awarded for voting. Stickers were described as the latest trend, the hottest accessory that all the celebrities were wearing. Many friends were frustrated that the stickers had run out by the time they had voted, implying the only reason to vote was so that they could wear a sticker all day. I was surprised that so many of my friends were fixated on this external symbol of voting, the sticker, rather than with the results of the election itself, but I suppose that in a culture which relies so extensively on visual stimuli and in which the social media touts the act of voting as “cool,” the sticker becomes the object which transfers “coolness” from an action to the visual. As a traditional early voter (this year an absentee voter), I have never received a sticker for voting. After reading so much about them, I suppose I’ve been missing an essential way of participating in Election Day- the donning of the sticker. I’m not sure that the voting sticker is as scriptive of an object as the cut outs for posing in photographs, but they certainly encouraged a very particular type of social behavior on Election Day.

Facebook, in addition to providing a plethora of commentary on stickers, also developed a voting app that fascinated me. Jess has already written about this in her blog post, but I wanted to briefly offer it as well. Located at the top of the facebook page, this app had a variety of parts. First, it told you how many of your friends had already voted. Next, it offered you the ability to share the fact that you had voted. (If you pushed the “I voted button,” you were awarded with a visual sticker!) Finally, once you had pushed the button, you were transferred to a new screen in which facebook was tracking data of how many of its users had/were voting. The screen displayed a map of the United States that featured a plethora of gray circles. The smaller stagnant circles depicted users who had already voting while the larger pulsating ones depicted users who were voting “right now” (the real time of when users were pushing the “I voted” button on the voting app.)

Here is a video of how the graph worked. (You may want to mute the video. There is a lot of static air on the audio track.)

One of the things that interested me most about this visual graph was its immediacy. In theory, if you had the screen open all day, you could “watch” people vote. By moving from state to state, you could track how many people had voted in each state and view what the peak hours of voting were in each state. While there was no data on how these facebook users had voted, the graph fetishized the act of voting.

Later in the day, after the polls had closed, I joined Sara, Jess, Matt, and others at Yogi’s Bar to watch the election results. Again, much of the action in the bar centered around the voting results in particular states. As the bar was sympathetic to Obama, every time Obama won a state, huge bouts of applause erupted when the state turned blue. Likewise, everyone booed when states turned red. 

Awaiting a projection...

The projection appears...

Success for Obama!

As the results of particular states came in, the crowd reactions changed. This was notably true of the Ohio results. When Wolf Blizter announced Ohio and the graphic appeared on CNN about “Projected Results,” some people quieted while others performed drumrolls on the table. When the state was declared Blue, the largest cheer split the air (with the exception of that that pierced the air when Obama was projected as the winner) and members of our table began singing “Hang on Snoopy.” Others formed a massive “Ohio” sign with their bodies.

Thanks to Sara for this photograph, mine didn't turn out very well.

 Like the facebook graph, audience reactions at Yogi’s Bar were centered around visualizations of voting results in various states. The first relies on pulsating dots while the other relies on a color change, but both provide graphics attempting to portray immediacy through visual cues. In these scenarios, the audience can conceivably watch the state’s facebook users vote or the reveal of the state’s voting outcome. While one experience was virtual and the other physical, both graphics tried to create liveness and a sense of presence in the voting experience. Certainly, when the four people at my table embodied the name of the state, Ohio, whose voting results practically clinched the election in Obama’s favor, the presence of those voters broke through the graphic and entered our physical space.

 When curating an exhibit of this information, I would strive to use a form that similarly used states to create liveness and presence. I’d like to adopt a model from our Indianapolis field trip, the project of the storybook created by the autistic student. That storybook was wonderful for so many reasons, but the one I’d like to adapt was its ability to enter a graphic, to click through its space and discover ways of interaction in that space. I’d like to develop a method of creating a virtual reality of the map of the United States. Upon entry, one would be accosted by the gray facebook dots. If you clicked on a dot, then the voter from that state who had just voted, thereby creating the dot, could greet you. Perhaps, there could be a potential to click on the person and ask an assortment of questions about their vote. Using field research and data collected from video interviews, political new shows, and facebook updates we could create a variety of responses for brief question and answer session. Some of this dialogue should be devoted to stickers. Eventually, the dots would accumulate and transform from gray to either blue or red, signaling audio cues of cheers and boos from the digital voters. Perhaps the people could transform into the names of their states. We’d have to develop others ways to interact with the map, but upon finishing the simulation, everyone should get a sticker.