In today’s modern world, technology surrounds us, follows us, and defines us. Yet as digital users, we have little influence on how a platform works, until now... 

By: Sarah Schwallier
Course: Language and Digital Media (LING 3800)
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall
LURA 2020

This project, initiated in Kira Hall’s Fall 2019 seminar on “Language and Digital Media,” was designed by students and for students. With feedback from seminar participants, I created a social media site that continued to evolve as the seminar taught us more regarding the social analytics of language in digital media. The main purpose of this project was to give participating students the ability to create, mold, and shape their online community.

In the end, I decided to call the platform “Anchor.” This is meant to signify that when users submit a post, they are locking in—or anchoring, if you will—that moment, idea, and expression on the internet forever. It is also meant to signify that our digital practices will anchor us together as a community in one way or another, whether through the actions of liking, commenting, or creating an ‘anchortag.’ Finally, the name is meant to signify a sense of grounding and belonging in a digital world often perceived ideologically as vast and non-intimate. The site is designed as a user-created and user-friendly place where participants can strengthen their bonds to one another together.

One of the main challenges of the social media site I created is that it relied upon a questionnaire sent out to my fellow peers in the seminar which asked for information on what they would want in a digital platform. The site had to be continually revised based on the feedback I received over the course of the semester. This process reminded me of the Open Source Initiative and Wikipedia. Both of these sites allow users to modify and edit the platform contents. However, my goal was not just to have users modify the contents but to provide them with the ability to impact the platform’s functionality and interface by building on concepts we discussed in class, such as “linguistic ideologies” and “digital affordances.” 

Examples of questionnaire feedback:

⚓ Favorite Platform: Instagram. “Clean looking” and “easy to navigate for first-time users” are some of the reasons behind why this platform was voted to be the best.

⚓ Least Favorite Platform: Facebook. One of the reasons why my peers disliked Facebook was due to the amount of emails they receive from the site.

⚓ Their Ideal Site would be…: Blue. Almost all of my peers said that they would like the color blue for a social media platform. They also wanted the ability to “hashtag” and upload texts, pictures, videos, and audio to their profiles and posts.

How student feedback was incorporated into the final design:

⚓ Because almost everyone identified the ability to ‘hashtag’ as a desired feature, I designed Anchor with this capability. The feature works like Twitter’s hashtag, in that it links similar ‘hashtags’ together. However, one of the feedback ideas I received for the site suggested that instead of using the Twitter octothorpe, I create a hashtag symbol that better resonates with the platform’s name Anchor (i.e. the symbol ‘⚓’). Based on this feedback, I made it so that when a person presses the number-sign ‘#’ button, it automatically turns into the anchor symbol that looks like the bullet points.

⚓ While students generally wanted to identify themselves through selected user names on the site, some students requested the ability to post anonymously, with the option, for example, to report an inappropriate posting or comment incognito. Although this request came somewhat late in the semester, I was able to add an anonymous domain to the website so that users could choose to participate anonymously if they desired. 

⚓ Another change I built in after receiving user feedback was a community feature. My peers wanted to be able to create separate ‘communities’ for groups, friends, and businesses that they interacted with. Together, we decided to call this feature ‘Docks’, again building on the Anchor theme. The choice of terminology suggests that each person is like a ship “docking” into a new community when they visit a web page.

Conclusions and Future Expansions:

Overall, the main purpose of this project was to build a social media platform based on user contribution that allowed user control. One possibility for expanding on this project in the future is to use language models (LMs) to facilitate machine learning, with which I will be able to understand and map user feedback. Neuro networks are one of the possible LMs that could be used, along with the creation of a corpus. This project was granted a UROP grant in the Summer of 2020 that supported the creation of https://anchor.buffscreate.net/. This site will be used in the Fall 2020 LING 3800 course “Language and Digital Media” as a learning tool. Students will build on project outcomes to develop their own social media platform. 

Photo Credit: https://www.wordclouds.com/