Mike El

In my thesis, I wrote about the influence of modern visual culture on the perception of happiness. One chapter focused on Facebook, a platform primarily centered on positive news. There is little room for nuance—users can only "like".

To offer a critical perspective on Facebook’s use, I created a robot named Mike El (an anagram of "like me").
After giving Mike his own Facebook profile I let him add friends himself by just clicking on the ‘add friend suggestions’ offered by facebook. Based on each new connection the algorithm proposed new suggestions.

On Mike El’s page, his friends will find a link to my thesis, offering a bit of insight to the addictive power of Facebook.