Jiminy

[ THE JIMINY EXPERIMENT ]
Jennifer Stenhouse * Jennifer Lee


Our application, "Jiminy," which gets its name from Pinocchio's cricket conscience in the Disney movie, is a mobile conscience for the tech-savvy community. We developed this application in the hope of exploring a number of areas including social responsibility, user vulnerability, surveillance, dependence on technology, and peer pressure. As artists, should we have a responsibility to treat our audience in a particular manner? In our project the users played both the role of audience member and participant, and we treated them in a malicious manner.

Users of many systems, particularly context aware systems, make themselves vulnerable when they agree to interact. For example, match.com [1], an online lifestyle/dating service, requires that users register their location, age, sex, interests, etc., to view profiles of potential "matches," forcing the user to sacrifice a certain amount of privacy in exchange for access. The site also provides helpful advice about what perfume or clothing you should wear on your date. Do the gains of entering such a relationship outweigh the costs? In his essay, "Locative Dystopia," Drew Hemment discusses how the new role of surveillance systems is interested in "producing not docile subjects so much as better consumers." The desire for efficiency now goes beyond commercial enterprises and permeates through the cultural domain. Hemment states that "the mobile phone in many ways encapsulates the new relationship of power better than any other technology