Sunday Times 2
Hell is other people
Ever bumped into a friend when you’re not looking your best or when you’re just not in the mood for a chat? Well there is now an app to help you avoid these awkward social situations.
The Hell is for Other People app uses location-based social networking site Foursquare to track any friends who have checked into locations nearby.
The app pinpoints the latest 20 venues that a user's friends have visited. The map also produces green 'safe' areas where a user can be alone
These locations are then plotted on an ‘avoidance map’ and users can make sure they keep their distance.
Branded an ‘experiment in anti-social media’, the app calculates how far away a user must be to avoid their friends.
Orange points on the map indicate the 20 most recent places that friends have visited and the time of their Foursquare ‘check-in’.
Green areas denote ‘optimally distanced safe zones’ around the user’s local neighbourhood to avoid any unwanted encounters.
Ironically, perhaps, for people seeking to avoid any social interaction, users of the app must be a member of Foursquare social network.
The name of the app is taken from a line in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ and was created by Scott Garner, a student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme.
Garner says that his app is: ‘partially a satire, partially a commentary on my disdain for “social media” and partially an exploration of my own difficulties with social anxiety.’
In a promotional video that shows Garner navigate New York with his app and explain his hatred of social media, he says: ‘I had to sign up for a social media site and talk to people to get them to be my friends on that site so I could avoid them’.
It is questionable as to whether the solitary user achieves social isolation as they continually have to check on their friends’ locations to ensure that their ‘safe zone’ is up to date.
Garner is considering adding more data from social media sites in the distant future, such as Twitter’s geo-tagged tweets and Facebook’s check-ins.
This would enable users to have more secure safe zones and avoid unwanted meetings, according to The Huffington Post.
© Daily Mail, London
Follow @timesonlinelk
comments powered by Disqus