In our video, we use twitter to represent digital communities. When Alice has a downtime, she becomes a digital resident to gain acceptance from digital living. Social network builds a bridge to connect people from the whole world. it becomes possible to gain information about residents from different countries. With social network service, it become easier to find people sharing the similar interests. We could say that social communities make people open-minded and more connected. In our video, Alice is more comfortable to connect with her twitter friends, and finally she falls asleep with smile. 

As big data is introduced, social network services apply this concept in their app to recommend related users and tweets. It is much easier to find interested contents in social network app. The recommendation feature does save the users many time to search for contents and meet similar friends, but it also narrows down the information users can collect. Before the eve of big data, people always perform searchings, and read different opinions frequently. After recommendation service is added, users can gather enough information from their homepage (from followers sharing similar opinions and auto-recommendations), and thus perform less searching behaviours. This phenomenon hides various information, and somehow restricts people’s thoughts. 

People believe the information they want to view on social network is selected by theirselves; however, the fact is, those information is still controlled by algorithms. Still, we have no control over our digital livings.

Yining Wang 20614744

I was working on the storyboard of the video. One of the important parts of the video is the background settings. We want to create an environment to imply the “downtime” theme. Since the video is very short (about one minute and a half), one proper background is necessary. Background settings are the language without any words, but they could carry out some meanings and thoughts.

When people are having downtime, they tend to appear as a tired, despondent image. The first thought comes to mind is to escape home and lay on the bed.  Beds create a comfort zone for individuals; it is warm and soft, like the hug of mom. Most scenes of our video happen on the bed. Laying on the bed also represents the escape from society.

We would like to use the background environment to imply despondent emotion. The mess would be the common way to hint the downtime. There are two major areas in the video: the desk and the bed. Since Alice is still a student, we display the study guides on the desk and cover the surface disorderly. There is an opened book using to tell Alice is now facing some problems caused by school. Unfolded blankets on the bed imply that those problems bother Alice for a long time, that is, she has no extra energy to fold those blankets before going to school. The mess of bed and desk represents the exhaustion in real life, and explain the reason for escaping from real life and hiding into the digital community.

Yining Wang 20614744