A tangible twitter robot, 2020
Little Jack is a robot that reads tweets about Covid-19 from twitter and gives different responses in physical world according to the tweets it read. It will give sad faces and noise when the tweets it read are generally negative and give happy faces and noise when the tweets are positive. You can also interact with it to make it happier and it will kill it self if it’s too sad.
This idea came from the current situation: Covid-19 is sweeping all over the world and everyone is now in quarantine, meanwhile, for years we have been addicted to social media and we have let them control our life without noticing this fact. I think this is a good time for us to scrutinise what’s on social media and our relationship with the them.
This is a big, serious topic (social media and us), and I always believe that the best way to let people think about those big topics is not to make a profound speech, but to make a relaxing joke. And Little Jack is a relaxing joke, it makes you smile, and maybe have some thoughts after that, for me that’s enough.
The idea of tangible twitter robot is also very interesting, it’s like a retrograde in this more and more Matrix-like world (Think about it, now we do everything online!). Personally, I think Matrix is somewhere OK to live in, who knows this ‘real world’ is not a huge simulation? But before our technology level get to that point, I think tangible things still have their meanings.
And lastly, something about the suicide button. Here is the situation of Little Jack – it doesn’t have the courage or ability to deal with the social media control, so it can just kill itself. But we can have the courage and ability, as human beings, to make changes.