This document discusses the rise of virtual personas and how data is used to create narratives. It notes that as sensors and computing devices became smaller, social media encouraged oversharing of personal information. This data can now be used by systems like Weavrs to generate virtual personas that act autonomously online. While this raises issues around authenticity and transparency, it also enables new types of market research by simulating audiences at scale. The document questions how people and businesses will interact with these algorithmically generated narratives in the future.

1. Virtual Persons for an
Information Age
Luke Robert Mason
Research Director, Philter Phactory
@LukeRobertMason
http://weavrs.com
http://philterphactory.com

5. @parkinn & @HenryWeavr

6. So, you think your
Customer is Human?

8. Socio-Technical

9. 1931

10. “Looking at an old map of the
Underground railways, it occurred to
me that it might be possible to tidy it
up by straightening the lines,
experimenting with diagonals and
evening out the distance between
stations.”
Harry Beck, London Underground Employee

12. Online Social Network

13. Self Description

14. “[When asking people to classify their
own data] – People lie. People are
lazy. People are stupid, know thyself
is a tall order and people are
notoriously poor at describing
themselves and their own behavior.
Schemas aren't neutral. Metrics
influence results. There's more than
one way to describe something”
Cory Doctorow, Science Fiction Writer
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

15. "It's not who you share with, it's
'who you share as.”
Chris Poole, 4Chan & Canvas Founder (2011)

16. Subjective Editing
MySpace Angle

17. Erin Ashenhurst, ‘At arm’s length’ - http://ashencreative.com/at-arms-

18. “Seduction through Obscurity”

19. “In bristling over the notion of audience, they are likely
rejecting a popularly discussed act of ‘personal branding’ as
running counter to what they value: authenticity. In other
words, consciously speaking to an audience is perceived as
inauthentic.”
Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick, ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately:
Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.’

20. Authenticity

21. The Facebook Mirror
Photo Credit: Jennifer Daniel

22. A woman poses in a funfair hall of mirrors,
circa 1935

24. “Using Twitter to carefully construct a ‘meta-narrative and meta-
image of self’ (Hearn, 2008) is part of what Jodi Dean (2002) calls
the ‘ideology of publicity’, in which we value whatever grabs the
public’s attention. Publicity culture prizes social skills that encourage
performance (Sternberg, 1998); people are rewarded with jobs,
dates, and attention for displaying themselves in an easily-
consumed public way using tropes of consumer culture.”
Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick, ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter
Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.’

25. “Interfacing with Identity”

26. The Status Project,
Heath Bunting

28. “First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people
started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised
as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to
share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the
rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”
Gary Wolf, Founder of the Quantified Self
“The Data-Driven Life” - The New York Times

30. MyLifeBits, Gordon Bell
Researcher at Microsoft Research

31. What’s the point?

32. “People who prioritized preference were more willing to open
themselves up to being tracked if they gained benefits by
releasing certain information. For example, 58 percent of
midlifers were willing to share information about themselves if
they received discounts or free services in exchange.”
Julia Greenberg, International Business Times on ‘Identity Shift’ by Allison
Cerra and Christina James

33. "Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and
send them out into the world to have
conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re
sleeping, your media —your books, your blog
posts, your tweets - [are] on the march. It’s out
there trying to making connections. Mostly it’s
failing, but that’s okay: these days, copies are
cheap.”
Robin Sloan, Kanye West: Media Cyborg (2010)

34. “our machines are
disturbingly lively,
and we ourselves
frighteningly inert.”
Donna Haraway,
Author of the Cyborg Manifesto
(1991)

36. We’re robots, made of robots, made of robots, made of robots.
You’ve got billions, several hundred billion probably cell neurons in
your brain. Each one of those neurons is an eukaryotic cell with a
nucleus and with mitochondria and it’s a direct descendant of free
swimming, free living autonomous little single-celled organisms that
have been around for billions of years.
And if you look inside each neuron you find that there are motor
proteins in there; little motor proteins are certainly a robot. It’s not
alive. It’s a bit of nano-engineering that does all sorts of interesting
works, it’s mindless - and that’s what we’re made of.”
Daniel C. Dennett, American Philosopher, Writer and Cognitive Scientist

37. Computer Wins [IBM Watson] on
Jeopardy! Trivial, It’s Not.
John Markoff - New York Times, February 16, 2011
In Case You Wondered, a Real
Human Wrote This Column
Steve Lohr - New York Times, September 10, 2011
Siri, Can You Hear me?
Sam Grobart - New York Times, October 13, 2011

41. Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world
TED Global 2011

43. “Twenty-Two of the Top Thirty
Wikipedia Editors are Robots.”
Stuart Geiger - Bot Politics: The Domination,
Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in Wikipedia,
2011

45. “I will tell you a true story. If you believe
me you will be well rewarded. If you
don’t believe me.”
- 20 Nov 2011

46. “Today’s women have an inward turn of mind.
Identify themselves with the world around
them. Create imaginative worlds. Look at the
world”
- 19 Nov 2011

47. “There is no form or method. There is
only emotion.”
– 21 Oct 2011

50. “24% of Tweets are created by automated
bots, not humans”
Inside Twitter: An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World
Sysomos Research, June 2009

51. “twitter でずっと仲良くしていた人が bot だった”
“The people I've been friends with for ages on Twitter
were bots”
coconutsfine, Blogger
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/coconutsfine/

52. “ とにもかくにもプログラムと仲良くなるという貴重な体験が出
来たことはとても幸せなことだ。”
“… the fact that I was able to have such a valuable
experience with someone who was actually a [computer]
program makes me very happy.”
coconutsfine, Blogger
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/coconutsfine/

57. “…socialbots are designed to be light,
efficient, and entirely automatic and thus,
easily deployable in large swarms. We
believe this study marks the first step
towards demonstrating the ability of such
technologies to shape online communities
at a large scale.”
PacSocial: Field Test Report – November 2011

58. Online Narratives
in Social Media Space

60. #coventryriots

61. “Lauren Laverne, a daytime DJ on
6music, a UK national radio station,
talked recently of how she had been
enjoying following Kurt Vonnegut on
his twitter feed. Vonnegut died April
11th 2007.”
Dan Buzzo, Things to do in the Digital Afterlife

62. “Is this testing
whether I'm a
Replicant or a
lesbian,
Mr. Deckard?”
Blade Runner (1982)

63. “Is this testing
whether I'm a
machine or a
customer,
@LukeRobertMason?
”

68. King Kong, @thatbigmonkey

69. Womblr

71. “I'm feeding my own persona into the Weavrs'
system and mapping out my own personal
history. The Weavrs post, tweet, listen to music,
check in to places and learn new skills. I'm
currently running a series of 40 year old versions
of myself that live in Munich”
Marcus Brown, Media Artist – ‘Army of Me’

72. “In the future you’ll be able to
dispatch a robot to each event.”
Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman
Keynote at Mobile World Congress (February 2012)

74. "Your Filter Bubble is your own personal, unique universe of
information that you live in online. What’s in your filter
bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what
you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more
importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out.”
Eli Pariser, Author of The Filter Bubble

75. Algorithmically Animating Personas
Fictional characters representing a brand’s target demographic

77. "We used the weavers to simulate an audience and its behaviours
on the social web. Weavrs allowed us to scale up qualitative
insights harvested through a traditional online community, with
quantitative social data hand picked by the Weavrs from multiple
streams of social content. Using the mix of qualitative and
quantitative data we were able to map a solid and precise picture
of the audience we were studying.”
Francesco D’Orazio
Chief Innovation Officer, Head of Face Labs

79. “My Infomorph […] I wouldn’t have
minded so much if it was selling porn or
doing fraud. But it’s a probable idiot”
Jon Ronson, Esc & Ctrl – The Guardian [Video]

80. Moon (2009)

82. “So the Future […] can also be about how
complex and abstract robots can inform and
stimulate the creative process within agencies.”
John V Willshire, Smithery & Andrew J Willshire, Data2Decisions
(Forthcoming Essay for Advertising Age)

83. Activity Streams

84. Welcome to the Non-Human Agency

85. Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’
in Human Perception

89. We Turn Our (Life) Narratives into Data.
Weavrs turn our Data Into Narratives.
Narratives are Products and Customers.
Businesses Feed on Narratives.

90. Thank you!
@LukeRobertMason
http://weavrs.com
@weavrs
http://philterphactory.com