Welcome! If you're new, please check out Best-Of Apophenia. A feed for this blog is here. If you are unfamiliar with me and my work, check out my bio.

Dissertation Crunch Time: I'm knee-deep in dissertation chaos. Please understand that I have no spare cycles to do anything at this point. Anything.

May 07, 2008

Mobilizing Generation 2.0

Ben Rigby and Rock the Vote have put together a book for activists, politicos, and organizers called "Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0." It is a how-to guide to help those who want to mobilize using the web, focusing on how organizers can leverage blogging, social network sites, photo/video sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps and virtual worlds. Interspersed between the directly practical and usable are a handful of "Big Picture" essays which are intended to help organizers put the practical and usable into a broader context. I had the honor of writing one of these based on my talk last year at Personal Democracy Forum. My essay is called "Digital Handshakes in Networked Publics: Why Politicians Must Interact, Not Broadcast." In short, I outline why it is important the politicians treat the online world as another form of public space where direct outreach and interaction is critical. If you see networked publics as a modern-day street, it only makes sense to login to the street and start shaking hands.

If you're only looking to read what I've written, you can check my essay out here. If you're an organizer or activist, you might enjoy it better in the context of the whole book.

Category: politics

Tags: activism

Posted by zephoria at 12:40 PM | Comments (5)        

May 05, 2008

User Elections for LiveJournal's Advisory Board

LiveJournal's Advisory Board helps advise LJ about policies, business, user practices, and product development. Currently, the Board consists of: me, Esther Dyson, Brad Fitzpatrick, and Lawrence Lessig. LJ has decided that users should also sit on the Advisory Board (recognizing that Brad and I are both also active users). So, LJ is having an election!

It is with great pleasure that I announce that LiveJournal has opened the nominations for user elections. LJ has decided that, in order to make certain that different communities are represented, there will be two user representatives in the Advisory Board. One will be elected to represent the Cyrillic language community and the other will represent the non-Cyrillic users. This may seem a bit odd, but it's probably important to note that a large percentage of LJ's users are Russian and they engage in very different practices on LJ than non-Russian users. To make sure both sides are represented, we decided to divide things this way.

LJ will accept nominations for representatives from now until May 15, 2008. Users must nominate themselves and obtain 100 comments of support from different users. The election poll will be posted on May 22 and users can vote until May 29. For complete details, click here.

• To nominate yourself for the Cyrillic position, click here.
• To nominate yourself for the non-Cyrillic position, click here.

I'm super excited that we're doing this and I can't wait to meet the user representatives!

Category: LiveJournal

Posted by zephoria at 4:28 PM | Comments (1)        

May 01, 2008

Little Brother + the Uglies series = le awesome young adult scifi

Although I've always been eh about most scifi, I've grown increasingly fond of young adult science fiction and scifi focused on teens. There's something fun in reading about teens running around trying to save the world. I can thank/blame Cory Doctorow for most of this because he's the one who got me hooked on reading it. So I'm super super super stoked to announce that his first young adult scifi book is on the shelves.

Little Brother is the story of a group of friends who are in the middle of an alternate reality game when a terrorist attack shakes San Francisco. They are whisked off by homeland security as potential terrorists; after a horrible few days, three of the four are released. And thus begins the tale of a group of teens who declare war on DHS. Beneath the fun YA story is a critique of the war on terrorism and a how-to guide that teaches teens how to be culture and tech hackers and jammers. It's really geekalicious. I was fortunate enough to read the manuscript, but I've just ordered the book so that I can reread it. I really recommend checking it out - it's quite fun and entertaining.

I also have to give Cory kudos for introducing me to my favorite new teen book series - Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras by Scott Westerfeld. Westerfeld's series does the most awesomest job at breaking down contemporary society's ideas of beauty, status, and reputation. In Tally Youngblood's world, everything is about finally turning 16 and being allowed to become "pretty" through plastic surgery that makes you look as cool as everyone else who is 16. Being an ugly teenager sucks; being a pretty means getting access to everything and having all of the fun. Only, perhaps there might be a cost to being pretty?

While the first three focus on pushing against society's valuation of the beautiful, the fourth introduces a new and "improved" world... where everyone in society is ranked based on how often people talk about them and "kickers" (aka bloggers) are obsessed with getting to the top. Needless to say, attention/reputation-based economies don't come out the way that we might imagine them to be. (Translation: this series deconstructs both of our most "valuable" economies today - the economy of the beautiful AND the purportedly merit-based attention/reputation-economy. Sooooo good! And such fun world-saving kickass girl characters!)

For those of you who aren't familiar with young adult sci fi, think of it as energizing brain candy. You can finish most YA books on a cross-country flight and they are far far far better than the movies that they show. And besides, they leave you with a youthful grin on your face.

Category: youth culture

Tags: books scifi recommendations

Posted by zephoria at 1:37 PM | Comments (5)        

April 27, 2008

MacArthur Forum talk on "Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics"

Last Wednesday, I gave a talk in Palo Alto as part of the MacArthur Forum "From MySpace to Hip Hop" alongside the rest of the Digital Youth Research Team. I'm still waiting on the videos and as soon as I have them, I will post them. In the meantime, I thought that I'd share my crib from the talk. For those of you who know my work, much of this will be familiar. Still, it's a pretty good overview of my project. Enjoy!

"Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics"

Category: events

Tags: talk research macarthur

Posted by zephoria at 2:36 PM | Comments (4)        

April 17, 2008

I Want You To Want Me

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar currently have a fascinating visualization up at NYC's Museum of Modern Art called "I Want You To Want Me." This beautiful video showcases the piece and its various movements. In short, they've taken profile content from online dating sites and used it to construct an image of humanity through their tastes, desires, self-descriptions, and ideas about the world. This is an interactive visualization on a touch-screen, allowing viewers to navigate through people's self-expressions, all represented as bubbles with people trapped inside. The piece is currently on display at the MOMA and will be until May 12. If you get to check it out, tell me what it's like to play with it since I'll only get to see the video. (Silly dissertation.)

I love that Harris and Kamvar use dating material to reflect society. I think that such expressions of intimacy are perfect for getting at the diversity and commonality of humanity. This also makes me think of Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam, and Jonathan Feinberg's The Dumpster which is an interactive visualization of the romantic breakups of American teenagers as seen through their blogs.

I'm in awe of all of these artists and their ability to create such engaging interactive visualizations of social data. Yummy tasty goodness.

Category: visualization

Tags: art interaction dating

Posted by zephoria at 9:26 PM | Comments (10)        

April 16, 2008

my creative environment

Anil Dash asked folks to tell him about their work environments, about what the environment is like where they feel most creative. In a moment of procrastination, I responded and I thought I'd share. If you're so inclined, I'd love to know what is on the other side of your computer. I do love to hear how people's lives are organized.

Two weeks before I hunkered down to write my last mega treatise, all of my CDs were stolen from my car. I whimpered on a mailing list and this super kind guy burned off 200 of the ones I lost and sent them to me. That week, I also bought the new Son Kite album. I took the 201 CDs with me to the cottage where I hibernated. One small problem... the CD player in the house in the middle of the woods did not play burned CDs. So, for 10 days, I listened to one CD on repeat: Son Kite's "Perspectives Of."

Ever since then, whenever I hunker down to write something longer than a blog post, including all of my articles and most of my essays, I mostly ignore the other 10,000 songs in my iTunes and play Son Kite. On repeat. Every once in a while, I expand out a little bit.. some Dr. Toast here, bluetech there, a little Antix, Ticon and Vibrasphere. But it mostly comes back to Son Kite.

To separate serious writing from anything else (since I never leave my house), I switch to more organic sounds. Blog posts get a little jazz, a little downtempo. When I am emotional and need to just run around the house screaming as a coping mechanism for writing, I turn on Ani DiFranco. Anyone who has followed my Last.FM lately probably realizes that there's been a lot of screaming.

As for environment, my living room (a.k.a. office) has been the same for years. Two fuzzy green couches with 5 separate sitting options. Legs up on fuzzy stool. Surrounded by 1200 books, organized obsessively by topics and catalogued in a database for easy locating... a dozen or so sitting on the couch beside me. Lots of plants, all organic colors, no TV or monitor of any kind. A big calming buddha statue that weighs over 200 pounds and a variety of paintings from friends and travels. Huge windows with lots of light streaming in and birds chirping outside. Candles for nighttime. Twelve different lights that can be combined in different ways in relation to my mood. No fluorescents, all incancesdents.. I love the environment, but lighting really affects my productivity. Most importantly, my cat Marbellio sits on my left side or above my head on the windowsill all day while I work.

I've transported this setup to four different apartments since 2002. I can't work in offices or anywhere where the lighting is headache producing. I can't work at desks. I'm not so good at working without books surrounding me or my cat purring next to me. Environment really really matters when it comes t me producing anything of value.

Category: my life

Tags: creativity workspace

Posted by zephoria at 4:39 PM | Comments (14)