Use Facebook to tune your hetero-dar

Posted in Design & user experience, Digital culture, Site review, Social Media on February 1, 2010 at 3:51 pm

It’s said that to find out who someone really is you should look at their friends. Stockholm Pride used that thought as the foundation for their new site that focuses on heterosexual norms affect the everyday lives of homosexuals, bisexuals and transpersons by gauging how “hetero” you are by analyzing your Facebook friends. The number is generated by giving the site access to your Facebook account and then it takes a minute to go through all your friends and give you a hetro percentage. It is also interesting because when you number is generated you can also see all the hetro percentages of your friends.

After going through the experience and getting my percentage I was left feeling that the site could have been a lot more impactful and effective if it would have exposed the logic and stereotypes that were used to generate the percentages.  The promise of the site was to deal with the heterosexual norms affect the everyday lives of gay society but telling me I am 59% heterosexual without the context how that stereotype was created makes the number feel hollow. It’s only effective if I am so prejudiced that the mere suggestion of not being 100% heterosexual would effect me. So while the use of Facebook data is new and unique, something as simple as a report card style breakdown would have given me some insight and enlightened and that would have been much more effective. I hope they grow and revise this foundation to make it more hard hitting because then I think it will really turn into something special and effective.