What is it?

I plan to title my guide The Gossip Type Indicator (GTI), again drawing parallels to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This guide targets social Millennials and Gen Z, roughly aged 14-45 who consider themselves to be high social and active with large, varied circles (spanning family, friends, coworkers, classmates, etc.), who use social media daily and watch reality TV regularly with the intent of being informative for everyone. 

Why this, why now?

When considering my guide’s affordances, I want to highlight what the form of an interactive quiz like this allows users to do that, say, a “______ For Dummies” guide, wouldn’t. These affordances also enable users to interact and engage with my guide in a specific way:

• Users can participate in self-reflection through play. Because it’s structured like a personality-type quiz rather than a guide to read, it invites quiz-takers to think deeply about their own habits.

• Personalization drives the experience (and invites repeat usage over time). The report format gives each user something individualized, and that’s what makes it something to reference and laugh at later, rather than it being a one-time read.

• Shareability drives its distribution. A personalized, illustrated result is inherently more shareable (and interesting) than a chapter outline.

• Low-stakes entry into a loaded topic. Gossip is a huge topic and has its own connotations in the zeitgeist; a quiz format makes it easier for folks to engage with it honestly and nobody has to admit “I gossip” outright.

• Repeatability and comparison. A quiz can be retaken as many times as the user wants, whether that be alone to see if answers change over time or socially to compare results with friends, reinforcing the “deck of cards” or “tarot-like” experience that prompted this idea in the first place.

For this week’s reading, I chose “Questions of Affordance” by Douglas Rogerson. Transparently, I thought this reading was a bit heady and a tad bit philosophical, but I appreciated the questions he posed throughout: “Is the object defined by its features, its phenomena, its material and form, by something more or less? Is it the sum of these categorizations, or none at all? Can you see object-ness through an object?” I couldn’t quite answer those questions on first-read, and I had to go back a few times to digest it. I still can’t answer them, and I think that’s what makes this article interesting—it forced me to sit with the thought and ponder instead of answering for me outright.

How do I know it’s successful?

Key KPIs include the number of users who take the quiz, the quiz completion rate, the number of reports shared and the number of repeat users. I would also want to track the spread of archetype results—if one or two archetypes absorb majority of users, then that could be a sign that the mapping system is lopsided.

Another success indicator would be the clickthrough rate on the MLA works cited list which would show users are interested in digging deeper.

Outstanding questions

There are still components of the interactive experience that I'm actively working through, particularly focusing on keeping credibility in tact and reducing opportunities for alienation:

• How will individual answers actually map to a final type?

• Do any of the archetype names or depictions risk caricaturing a real community (racial, gendered, religious) rather than staying behavior-first?

Looking ahead…

For Project 02, I want to interrogate hedonism in a post-pandemic world. I feel the ways in which people engage in pleasure has changed over the course of the 2020s, and I think the pandemic has a lot to do with that. I’ve noticed a change in party/nightlife culture over the years; it seems like people are more interested in raves/underground parties than glitzy clubs. I also feel like the bounds in which people seek out sex and participate in it has also expanded; people seem less rigid and, frankly, more horny these days. Also, alcohol consumption may be in a decline, but I would be willing to bet that people are engaging in recreational drugs of all types more abundantly. I want to dig into why this is.