Doomscrolling

This project is an exploration of the concept of "Doomscrolling" as a little interactive app. The app is styled to emulate an older or more corrupted version of Twitter, and it loads tweets from the internet using Twitter's API. As you scroll down the page, the tweets start to become more and more garbled until you reach the end of the string of tweets and the text is almost unreadable. The app also allows you to input a keyword into a search bar in order to pull tweets the same way that you can on Twitter's website.

I used this project to help visualize a feeling I've had using social media lately, especially during the pandemic. I want to express how at some point, if you have been on social media for a while, you end up just scrolling through a feed of posts you don't care about or at least do not want to read. Eventually things start to blur into something uglier and harder to look at.

Additionally, I learned a lot about how to use APIs with unity, and gathering data from social media websites. I have only used the API to search for and retrieve tweets, but with Twitter's API you can access user profile pictures and information, images, global as well as local trends, and even location data for specific users! It was a little unsettling to see how easily accessible all of this data is for really anyone to look through.

Icon Images: Saloni Sinha on The Noun Project