My intervention involves having at least two people having a very passionate argument in public around a lot of people. The goal is to have people approach and give their perspective similarly to how they do on social media where everyone is extremely opinionated and loud over every little thing. I think it would be nice to simulate that and throw away the silliness and frankly ridiculousness of current social media outlets which seems to involve everyone trying to prove someone else wrong. On top of that this piece also came to me as a reaction to rage bait where people say outlandish things or push you to a point where you get very angry due to the reaction that you give and I think that this has been very normalized in social media and online culture generally. Thus I wanted to make a type of commentary on this by making the discussion that seems to be very common on online platforms and place that discussion in a public space where everyone is able to see the person that is making all of these arguments for their point. How differently will people react if they don’t have a screen to hide behind are they willing to join a conversation that wasn’t directed to them like they are online or will they shy away. I only attempted this intervention with silly topics where we mainly discussed which condiment we thought was best but extremely passionately we began by simply arguing really loudly and I wanted to see if that would be enough to get somebody to join the discussion. You can see this first attempt in the first half of the video where we do get a couple of strangers to give us strange looks but they all seem to want to stay out of it for the most part. Then we saw Christopher Barney and decided to regroup and try again but this time grabbing a stranger and asking them what they thought of the argument that we were currently having. You can see our attempt in doing this in the latter part of the video and even though the person we asked was willing to give their personal opinion it was very obvious that they were incredibly uncomfortable partaking in the discussion and wanted to leave as soon as possible. As I mentioned in my presentation I think it would be a good idea to do this intervention again in a different location and with different groups of people arguing along with try varying subjects. I would like to keep it apolitical as the idea that I am bringing up mainly involves the discourse present for political arguments.
The presentation: Intervention presentation
My intervention was heavily inspired by the interventions that people have been doing for social media where they are incredibly loud and attempt to get a reaction from the people around them normally they end up being quite obnoxious but I think most interventions are somewhat an inconvenience for those who are being intervened. I think a great example of this is ADrizzy or Aaron Yeung who tends to go to very crowded locations such as the T and then starts saying things like “HEY EVERYONE TODAY IS FRIDAY AND I HOPE EVERYONE IS EXCITED FOR THE WEEKEND!!!” while everyone in the T looks incredibly uncomfortable or tries to avoid him. I also really like the intervention we saw in class which I can’t quite remember the name of but the general idea was having these two hackers walk around the cafe and are using suitcases and the cafes wifi to see what everyone is looking at and at the end they swap what two of the devices are looking at. I think this very much represents the idea of my intervention where people are very willing to look at certain things online but when that is brought into the public everyone suddenly feels naked because again they no longer have the internet or their screen to hide behind. Finally I feel like I should bring up the intervention created by the guest speakers where you are able to play the game on twitter by using their @ or on their site and having a lot of discourse online that is more visual than simply seeing tweets which at points you could see a lot of missiles being fired. Along with this you would have a lot of people who were not aware of the game trying to @ the game and get mad at them for talking to the president or saying whatever they were. I think this shows the general idea that the state of argument and discourse that we have right now in the 21st century is how everyone tries to respond to everything they can disagree with to the point where regardless of the topic or to whom it is like a game people would yell their opinion at.