Project #5 Anti-Surveillance Tool
Description
Language is always facinating to think about when we want to transmit information, especially when we are living online. While the supervisor of the authority can use an algorithm to detect whether the context is proper or harmful for their own interest. When people want to send out their own voice to the public, they have to think about their word choice and context since there always be a cencorship above people. In China, Hanzi 汉字 or simplified Chinese is commonly used. And the morphology of each Chinese character is very vague. One cannot simply pronounce the word if he doesn't learn the language. So the censorship will use algorithm to detect word combination and its context. It creates a lot difficulty for language users or people who are using social medias like wechat or weibo to send a message. But there has an emerging language generator and language style called Mars character 火星文 that can solve this problem. The mars character can add some unrelated parts in the original character while not affecting the meaning and difficulty for reader to get the message. It takes the full advantage of the feature of Chinese character and has a wide use in some context. When I was at high school, this forms of character was an expression of creative and widely used in qzone (Chinese myspace) and qq. During the time of covid-19, this character appears again in wechat story. The doctor in Wuhan shared her experience during the beginning of the padamic. It was a sensitive topic and the government want it down. The author used the Mars character to escape form the censorship and the article got a lot of views as a result. Here my audience would be the true audience that can understand the Mars characters and know what it really means. The red information is words that can skip from the algorythm and the stars are words been blocked. I use the interaction of drawing on the words to mimic the thinking and understanding path when audience read the text.
Reflection
The words I choose for this information are real banned words and normally can't be shown on social media. I think the color of red is a really strong expression of that emotion and has a sense of rebel. My goal is to show the boundary of government power and the freedom of public speech and try to revoke people to break the rules and speak out. This is a really unconvience regulation that even a normal message can't be seen.