@Eli_App_D @ClareThomsonQUB @LinziMclagan @Cheneehey @HerrSchwindenh_ it seems convoluted,when we cld jst use 'press it' in WP tools #mscedc
— Renée Hann (@rennhann) March 7, 2017
In some ways it feels uncomfortable to consciously give permission to IFTTT to track my movements across different platforms. Yet, we do this anyway just by going online and logging-in, donating data to Google, FB, Twitter and so on.
My tweet though is about the indirectness of creating an IFTTT algorithm which tracks my interaction with third party service providers (so far Twitter, Pinterest, Diigo, Youtube, Evernote, and – new this week – Flickr and Pocket) in order to post to WordPress, when I could ‘ask’ WordPress to post for me directly, through the plug-in/Chrome extension ‘PressThis’. Using IFTTT does, however, have the advantage of raising awareness of ‘being tracked’, and of giving agency to the algorithms: the posts appear when the IFTTT Applet runs, there can be a delay, the code doesn’t always ‘pick-up’ what I intended (Pinterest Applet, for example).
Indeed, very important point about IFTTT, and a pretty good rationale for why we are using it on the course. It gives us an opportunity to ‘programme’ the automation a little – well, more so than one-button WP posting – so we could think about that as seeing more of the ‘under the hood’ of the algorithmic web. The ‘If This Then That’ logic is precisely the kind of ‘algorithmic thinking’ that recasts the world into distinct problems with definite solutions, which, one might argue, is not a very accurate way of understanding it.