It is no longer a surprise in the digital world when a
person decides to recreate themselves. This is seen frequently in the gaming
community where players have multiple accounts and act like multiple people. Recreated
selves are seen in all digital communication forums. But what effect does this
have?
Fake accounts are big. There is a sense of pride when the
number of your followers increases. You feel connected, important, and
powerful. But what if all of those followers did not really exist. In an
experiment done by Kevin Ashton this possibility was explored. [2]
First he created a new name, Santiago Swallow, using an application
called Scrivener. Then he created a Gmail account with that name. Then using
the Gmail account he created a Twitter account for Santiago Swallow. The really
amazing part is how he got to 90,000 followers. It turns out that all he needed
was $50 and 48 hours. Currently on Fiver.com you can buy 2400 twitter account
for $5. [1] Finally he created a portrait using free software, a page on Wikipedia,
and a website for $18 more.
For $68 Santiago Swallow became one of the most famous
people on twitter. With his personal website, interconnectedness, and wiki page
twitter did not mark him as a fake. However, Santiago immediately had fake credibility
because 90,000 followers can’t be wrong.
This opens up a new vector of social engineering. How
seriously is someone checked before they are added to the followers list? Do
you need to know them, or do they need to know someone you know, or do you just
need to think they are real. These fake accounts look real and interesting.
Unfortunately real harm can be done with these fake
accounts. Think of a class of college students doing social media analytics.
How many of the reports are going to suffer due to there being fake accounts
with lots of fake users. The most important person in their analysis may not
even be real.
There is help. Companies’ exist that will scan users
accounts looking for users without any friends or followers and no tweets, such
as Status People. However, the companies
do not always get it right.
“One of the best known is “Kred,” a
service provided by San Francisco company PeopleBrowsr.
PeopleBrowsr says its customers include consumer goods giants Procter
& Gamble and Budweiser and
major advertising agencies Ogilvy
& Mather and Wieden
+ Kennedy. Less than a day after he was invented, Santiago Swallow had
a Kred influence score of 754 out of 1000. [3]”
What is real? Role playing or pretending to be something you
are not is common. Children do it to mimic other people and characters. These imaginations
bring happiness and fun to life. With advancing technology we are moving our
ideas beyond words into visible concepts. For example a program called Vocaloid
allowed for the creation of a completely synthetic pop star. See the video below. A second option is bring
back artists to preform after death. See video 2 below CAUTION EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.
In the future will social influence continue after death and will ideas and
synthetic creations have social influence?
References
[1]
[2]
[3]
