Direction for the Background: ‘Internet Noise’
For the background of my design, I decided to create visual noise based on live twitter interactions. Below is a sample screen recording of the background direction. Each square represents one tweet. The alpha channel (transparency) of each square is in direct relation of the number of ‘retweets’ of each post (i.e. the ‘loudness’ of the post) and the size is of the square is in direct relation to the number of followers that user has (i.e. how far the tweet reaches). While it may not terribly interesting by itself, this will be used in conjunction with the rest of the interactive design and represents the information ‘noise’ of the internet that is why rendered it in squares to represent digital noise or pixelation. I believe this ties in nicely with the direction of my thesis paper.
Here is an early 83 second video represents roughly 1680 tweets in realtime: