With the expanding barrage of tweets threatening people with information overload, a UCLA doctoral student and four of her colleagues have figured out how to help them cope with what’s become known as social media fatigue.
Together with four other doctoral students from other institutions, Amelia Acker, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, created new software they call ampDamp to turn the cacophony of too many tweets into polyphony.
"Polyphony is a principle that comes from art and literature where multiple voices are braided together in a graceful way that makes sense," Acker explained. "Most online publishing platforms are confusing and cacophonous. There are a lot of competing influences, whether [through] ads or comments, or the real content. So our challenge was to see how would you design or build something that would allow for an experience of polyphony instead of cacophony." 
Acker and her co-creators, four doctoral students from the University of Michigan, Princeton and the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently took home a prize from the Social Media Expo competition at the annual iConference, hosted by the College of Information at the University of North Texas. A video of their winning presentation is available above.
Amelia Acker
"Most of the settings for Facebook and Twitter, and even Linkedin, are based on muting," she said. "It’s binary, it’s on or off, ‘follow’ or ‘un-follow,’ yes or no. We wanted to reinsert a sense of control [with] more than one option. We were interested in a peripheral [interface] that was an actual thing you could touch and use."
So using ampDamp, people can filter through Twitter messages to find the topics they are most interested in reading about. To do that, Acker and her colleagues decided to use a physical knob that you can turn up or down as you hover over part of a tweet, a username, a hashtag or a link in order to curate the information that is being shown.
One of Acker’s teammates, Matt Burton, a programmer from the University of Michigan, wrote a Chrome extension, which is a layer over the Twitter interface that controls the tweets that are viewable within a user’s account. Tweets that are about things that matter little to you fade out. 
AmpDamp helps people deal with their compulsion to be on top of everything. Many people feel they "have to be aware of everything that comes through these social media content streams," Acker said. In reality, "not all of it is important."
AmpDamp helps people deal with their compulsion to be on top of everything. Many people feel they "have to be aware of everything that comes through these social media content streams," Acker said. In reality, "not all of it is important."Acker and other members of the design team felt "a need for sort of locating the things that were important to us, and that may be varied across our interests," Acker said of her design team. "We also might use Twitter for fun and relaxing things, not just for professional resources or job postings. So we all had different ideas of how we wanted to use and find content in these streams, but definitely the one thing that tied us together was wanting to be able to control what is important."
AmpDamp was originally conceived last summer at a weeklong workshop on values and design at UC Irvine, hosted by the Bren School of Information and Computer Science where the five students met. Acker says that their interdisciplinary approach brought a diversity of skills and thought to the challenge.
"It was a totally different way of collaborating, but it was really, really fun," Acker said. "There were team members from new media departments, someone from design and someone from humanities computing. We all had different ways of approaching things." 
Right now, the team is deciding whether to pursue more funding for user-testing and additional research, Acker said. The app is in its early prototype stage and not available for downloading currently. "We will eventually make the source code available for download so that it will be open and free for others to use or to modify."
Right now, the team is deciding whether to pursue more funding for user-testing and additional research, Acker said. The app is in its early prototype stage and not available for downloading currently. "We will eventually make the source code available for download so that it will be open and free for others to use or to modify."Twitter is not her only interest. Acker, who is writing a dissertation on the history of the text message. An avid texter, she is most interested in learning about how these forms of communication can be kept for historical records and personal posterity.
"One billion text messages are sent and received everyday, and most of them are read within the first few minutes of having been received," she said But most of these text messages will be deleted or overwritten "because of the way our phones are built.
"I’m interested in how we can stabilize and locate these new digital traces that are coming out — things like text messages and tweets — and how might we save them over time," noted Acker, who previously worked as an archivist on UCLA’s Ralph Bunche manuscript collection at the Charles E. Young Research Library. "Increasingly, we’re finding that we might want them around for lots of different reasons. They get folded into different evidence regimes; for example, the Presidential Records Act has expanded to include things like Obama’s Blackberry.
And the Library of Congress is now archiving Twitter, said Acker. "It’s a really exciting area to be working in."
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A longer version of this story was originally run in Ampersand, the online magazine of the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
