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« January 2004 | Main | March 2004 » February 27, 2004anti-corporate sig filesI don't know why, but lately, i've been getting more email from the type of corporate folks that drive me nuts with their "this is private" sig. I know it's not their fault, but their companies.. but still - it's not even legal. Anyhow, it reminded me of Cory's old sigfile which i thought i'd repost to make everyone smile in light of the random C&D requests as of late. The information contained in this communication is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed[1] and others authorized to receive it[2]. It may[3] contain confidential or legally privileged[4] information. If you are not the intended recipient[5] you are hereby notified that any disclosure[6], copying[7], distribution[8] or taking any action in reliance on the contents[9] of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful[10]. If you have received this communication in error[11], please notify us immediately by responding to this email[12] and then delete it from your system[13]. OpenCola is neither liable for the proper and complete transmission of the information contained in this communication[14] nor for any delay in its receipt.[15] Category:
Posted by zephoria at 3:09 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) love to apopheniaApophenia has always been one of my favorite words. I like quirky "worthless" words. What makes me even happier is when my friends remember my quirky appreciation for these things and send me fun things, like this Atlantic Monthly article on Word Fugitives. The first word sought was for "a situation in which you refuse to accept that the occurrence of two events is merely coincidental but there is no evidence to link them together." For this the neologisms included fauxincidence, coincivince, coincidon't, duperstition, and wishful linking. I do think that it's funny that apophenia is usually considered a "condition." I've even heard of it in reference to a "medical condition." I guess it's kinda like ADD - you can call it a condition; i call it a fantastic opportunity. Oh, backstory on why i love apophenia. People often ask me how my research happens and it reminds me of people who ask me how i play Set - i stare at a problem long enough and something pops out. This was much more relevant when i was doing weird things like making connections between depth perception and sex hormones. But, my research still comes from this weird state where all of a sudden, two things get placed together in my brain - often in little mental visualizations. And then i obsessively try to determine if there really is a connection, if my hunches are at all valid. This is why methodology fascinates me. I've never been able to stick to one methodology because i see so many different ones as useful depending on what connections come together in my head. Luckily, i'm obsessed with proving myself wrong so my favorite task is to try to figure out what confounding variables are connecting disparate things in my head. Of course, it's that criticalness that drives others nuts because i'm trying to tear apart everything around me. Tehehe. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 11:21 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) Altered States and the Spiritual AwakeningASSA is back by popular demand! Last year, i helped organize a fantastic cross-generation conference on altered states and spirituality. We will be doing it again this May (and my dear friend Barlow will be keynoting!) So, join us! Here's the official invite: Last year the first Altered States and the Spiritual Awakening (ASSA) conference was amazing, surpassing all of our hopes. Inspired by that great success, Organization for the Exploration of Spiritual Consciousness is announcing that ASSA 2004 is coming up May 14-16 in San Francisco. The conference includes lectures and workshops, opening and closing ceremonies, catered meals, yoga classes, and more. Lectures and workshops will be led by a number of luminaries in the fields of transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, and entheogens. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 1:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) February 26, 2004rebecca blood on saving orkutI really like Rebecca Blood's article on 13 ways to save Orkut. Category: yasns
Posted by zephoria at 10:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (3) Which YASNS is best?Over and over again, people tell me that one of the YASNS is *far* better than any of the other ones. Usually, they want me to agree with them. Sometimes, people just ask me which one i think is best. Given that this is me, i have a problem with this question. My problem is not personal or political... it's contextual. In this case, "best" is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, i often ask people what *they* want in a YASNS. Almost always, there's one overwhelming factor that makes one YASNS better than another for the individual: "people like me." In a post-finals hallucinatory state, i decided to attend a gathering with some of my peers last December. A group gathered into a "panel" to talk about social software. One very smart, very respected VC spoke about how she believed that LinkedIn was hands down the best YASNS. I found myself speaking... or more accurately exploding because of her conception. It's not that i don't believe that LinkedIn was the best for her - i truly do. It's that i don't believe that there is a universal best. When i was interviewing early Friendster adopters about the site, over and over again, they told me that they loved it because it was a site fool of cool hipsters like them. They identified with the people on the site and they loved feeling like everywhere they turned, they saw other people that they thought were cool. They were not looking forward to it being mainstream because then there will be duds on the system. Each sub-hipster group was likely to run across more people like them depending on their linking structure. (Homophily again.) Because most people joined under one context, they never saw the other "non-hipsters" that they dealt with in everyday life. When that started happening, they were disappointed. When Orkut exploded, all of the social software fiends jumped on the train like it was going to Disney World. It was the end-all be-all of the YASNS. Of course it was... to them... It was filled with people like them - their colleagues, those that they respect, etc. It felt like home. Guess what? At Tribe.net, there are lots of people who feel at home and spend exorbitant hours on the service. Same with MySpace. Same with Everyone's Connected. Same with Live Journal. The battle is not simply about the best tools. In fact, that's a truly secondary issue. It's about motivating a coherent group to join, participate and make it home. What makes the best pub? Is it really the beer or the price? Hell, the only reason that the music usually matters is because it draws people that you like to the pub. It's the combination of environment and people.. but the environment brings the people so the environment DOES matter. There's an architectural lesson there... Environment matters because it draws the right people. This is why niche shit works. The biggest joke about the Internet is that the most profitable services are barely public. They address a niche market completely. One of the most unfortunate things about social software is that everyone is trying to court everyone to their service. Frankly, a far more appropriate response would be to try to figure out which users are most suited for your tool given its current state and then try to meet their needs completely. Figure out your audience. And don't simply focus on your desired audience because the tool you created may not have met their needs... be able to shift if you find that you've built something far more appropriate for another group. Cause frankly? If you have, the users know it and are using it more completely there. [Note: Friendster's popularity in Asia isn't because it's a good tool; it's because the way the site was structured met that population's needs/desires without much translation. It was inadvertently and accidentally best for them, not well designed for them.] Category: yasns
Posted by zephoria at 3:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (8) hoax Orkut articleOn various mailing lists, people were up in arms by this article: Popular social website revealed as college experiment. It argues that Orkut is a class project to collect data and that is why the ToS is so fubared. I was a bit skeptical by the emails, so i was glad to find out that it is truly a hoax. Sorry for ruining it for people. But it really is funny. Popular social website revealed as college experiment
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004 21:30 GMT Mountain View, CA (HACT) -- Orkut.com, a popular social networking Website which has attracted the attention of the some of the Internet's biggest names, was revealed today by its creators to be an elaborate "reality Internet" project to form the basis of a master's thesis. "We figured we couldn't keep it secret much longer anyway," said Orkut Buyukkokten, after whom the distinctive blue-colored meet-and-match site was named. "I didn't think we could do it this long in the first place, actually." Orkut.com opened its virtual doors January 23 on an invitation-only basis. Its user base grew rapidly, reaching over 50,000 in the first two weeks and attracting such Internet luminaries as Alan Cox, a well-known and important contributor to the open source operating system GNU/Linux, and Brian Behlendorf of the Apache group. The site was revealed today as a data-gathering project for the master's thesis of a member of the Orkut.com team who wished to remain nameless. "Last year I read the paper [Orkut Buyukkokten and colleagues] wrote and I was blown away," she reported in an exclusive interview with HACT. "Then I just looked at my college fund and realized the amount of money I'd spend on grad school was more than it'd take to set up something like this." Shortly thereafter, in November 2003, the project (and the master's thesis) was on its way to completion. Similar to other social networking sites like Friendster, Tribe.net and Ryze, users of Orkut.com create a list of friends with whom they share "karma", rating the other person's trustworthiness or sex appeal. Users can also freely create "communities", platforms for the discussion of topics ranging from "Fly Chicks for the Geeky Guy" to "AnyoneButBushin2004". "I'm really upset about this experiment thing," said Rhonda Fourier, who signed up with Orkut.com on February 2, "but at least it explains the whole bizarre terms of service." Shortly after launching, Orkut.com's terms of service were loudly denounced as overly restrictive by outside observers like The Register and Orkut.com users alike. The oft-quoted passage from the terms of service reads:
Now that the secret is out, what will happen to the service? "Oh, we're expecting a lot of attrition, but the bills are paid until the end of March, so what the hell? Anyway, I have my data." The thesis author added that all the data will be anonymized, "I promise." -- Mark Schalofski Back to HACT Please note that this is a humor article and is not true in any way, shape or form, except in that it rings true in a scary way Category: yasns
Posted by zephoria at 2:36 PM | TrackBack (0) February 24, 2004Orkut statsI noticed that Orkut put statistics up. The demographics are fascinating and i'm intrigued to see that 37% of the population is under 25. This means that Orkut has gone into new domains. Mmmm.. yummy. Of course, i'm less than thrilled to see the member stats. They have it broken down into connectors, celebrities and stars. I wonder how much this motivates different people to connect more, put up sexier pictures, pressure friends to indicate each other as fans, etc. ::sigh:: Category: yasns
Posted by zephoria at 2:22 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1) login to FriendsterIf you haven't logged into Friendster in a while, you should check it out. The new little announcement suggests that new things are coming. In the meantime, you can control who all can see you and send you messages. Very interesting. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 2:14 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack (0) the webby awards: communitySo, i'm helping out with judging in the Webby Awards this year, in the Community category. I'm hoping that some of you might have some good suggestions of sites that should be considered. In particular, i'm curious to see some of the more quirky niche community sites nominated (not just the big tool sites). I'd love if you could help me think of different sites. To do so, just click here for a Webby Awards form and make your suggestions. (Oh, and don't bother nominating a YASNS - they're all nominated... and not even by me.) Category:
Posted by zephoria at 2:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) February 23, 2004echo-chambers and homophilyI'm thousands of blog entries behind in my RSS and not doing much better on email, but i just re-read a (semi-)recent thread on echo-chambers in light of David Weinberger's Salon article. As much as i really respect the people involved in this conversation, i'm having a hard time with the content. And the reason is homophily. Let me back up. [I know that i'm missing key parts of the conversation so i'd be stoked if anyone would be willing to include them in the comments.] It seems to me that the primary question is whether or not the Dean campaign failed because the people involved were only talking to other people of like minds and didn't realize the larger context. The notion of an echo-chamber is that people only communicate with people like them and their conversation is irrelevant to the outside world. Some argue that this is prevalent on blogs. The thread seems to have posed lots of questions, but most of the "answers" are either personal anecdotes, tangents about the implications, or a childish "blogs are echo-chambers!" | "no they're not!" Of course, these kinds of conversations make my little brain go !research! Unfortunately, i don't have time to research the answer, but i do have some theoretical underpinnings that i think are quite relevant to the discussion. In social networks literature, there's a concept called homophily. The basic idea is that birds of a feather stick together. There's a good reason for this. The more we have in common with someone, the more points of context, the more capable they are of supporting us. We are more likely to gain social and emotional support from people who are awefully similar to us. Our strong ties are usually very similar to us. One approach for considering the echo-chamber question would be to analyze the strength of relationships between bloggers. If we're going to talk about a notion of "community," we have to think about what the focus of the community is. Often, the focus involves activity. Some might argue that blogging is enough of an activity to link the community together. But if this were the case, there would be a random probability that any blogger would link to any other blogger. This is not the case. My hunch would be that a blogger is more likely to link to other bloggers who share multiple points of context in common. This does not mean that two people have to share political values in common, but this is a completely valid context to share. Furthermore, the more contexts two people have in common, the more likely that they will know each other. Thus, it is more likely for two like-minded bloggers to know each other than two diverse people. Part of the problem with having this discussion surround blogging is that blogging is relatively new. Only a few years ago, there were very few bloggers. As such, i would suspect that political views were less important because the fact that the person was a blogger (a rare thing) made them interesting enough to connect to. As there are more bloggers, blogging doesn't end up being as strong a context point as before. Another theorist that i think plays into this discussion is Manuel Castells. As an urban sociologist, Castells is interested in the consequences of gated communities. He suggests that, when given the option, people will retreat to "safe" communities of people exactly like them. Thus, he suggests that it is the responsibility of urban planners to construct environments that force people to engage with heterogeneous populations. He is worried that the interweb gives people the choice and thus they will form homophilous environments. The problem with this conversation is that it's breaking down into SHOULD and DO. Certainly, people have the option to read anything that they want, connect to dissimilar people. But do they? That's why it's a research question, not a question that bloggers can simply answer by considering personal habits. In fact, the conversation is kinda reminiscent of one that came out during anti-racist movements. Sociological fact: most white people hang out with mostly other white people. Individually, everyone immediately screams not me! and starts listing off all of the people of color that they know. Individuals never want to see themselves as non-diverse, but the desire to be seen in a positive light does not make someone diverse. Weinberger asked "Behind the echo chamber controversy lies the question of whether the Internet causes people to solidify their beliefs or to diversify them. Does it open people up or shut them down?" I don't know that i'd agree with the structure of his question because i don't think that this question is the primary force behind the controversy. One of the biggest motivators for a lot of people to get online in the 90s was to find people like them. The goal wasn't to solidify or to diversity, but to feel validated. Suggesting solidification/diversification implies that the primary motivation behind engaging online is to participate in purposeful dialogue, to be educated and educate. Frankly, i don't believe this to be true. I think that people interact to be social and that discussions of politics are a key way to be social and to be validated. Weinberger goes on to call the "echo chamber meme" destructive and misinformed. Don't get me wrong: i don't think that it has been proven and i think that there are significant consequences for digital designers if it is accurate. But i'm also not convinced that it's simply an ill-formed meme. I think that it's a very valid research question. What i'm worried about is that people have too much invested in it being (in)accurate. Update: Since this post is now the top post in a Google search for 'homophily' i feel the need to directly reference a canonical essay on homophily since this blog entry is by no means authoritative. Instead, read: McPherson, Miller; Lynn Smith-Lovin; James Cook. 2001. "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks." Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415-444. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 11:34 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (20) Friendster short accepted for CHII'm ecstatic to announce that my short paper on Friendster was accepted to CHI. For those interested in reading it, check out my papers listings. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 5:53 PM | TrackBack (0) February 19, 2004knuckle down & recoilThanks to Nathaniel and Shawn, i just put up two new Ani songs on the lyrics site: Knuckle Down and Recoil. I hear there are four more out there so if you have em, send em my way! As for these new songs, woah... they're intense and full of pain. ::sigh:: I wish that i didn't cringe every time that a new Ani song came out because the raw emotional quality draws me in so intimately. I've always found it eerie to hear her songs because i can grok her expression at a level that i've never recognized with other artists. but somewhere between hollywood and its pretty happiness Category:
Posted by zephoria at 8:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) blogging bibliographyTwo people have recently asked me for a blogging bibliography. There are a handful of articles that i regularly suggest to people, but i have a feeling that people might have far more comprehensive bibliographies out there, or other materials that they think should be shared in a classroom/research setting. Thus, i thought i'd ask you. What are the key academic papers, blog entries and media writings on blogging, particularly on the social analysis of the phenomena? [Also, any links to blog bibliographies out there.] Category:
Posted by zephoria at 6:15 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (1) why i don't build (right now)People keep asking me why i don't build my own YASNS. Usually, it comes in a sarcastic statement like "if you're so smart, why don't you do it?" The short answer is that i'm an academic, not an entrepreneur, but it's more complicated than that. First, as an academic, i'm interested in what people do, why and how. I'm not interested in capitalizing on them; this doesn't motivate me. This is also why i'm far more aligned with the geeks than the entrepreneurs. Geeks, by and large, want to build something cool that people use. I get that and this sometimes motivates me too. This goal is about tapping into the motivations of the population, not trying to pervert them. I also want to tap into the human psyche. Unfortunately, right now, i think that my current goals require me to restrain from building and focus on analyzing. Fast moving and highly complex spaces likes YASNS and social software require iteration. No one project is going to completely "get it." Lessons will be learned, features stabilized across different applications. I certainly have ideas for the next iteration, but to develop them means to stop paying attention to the larger picture and work on just building that next level. Furthermore, to make a living doing it requires jumping into the entrepreneur space, which is something that i detest. There's another problem... In the case of YASNS, i don't really care to make a working tool. Effectively, i want to experiment on people. I want to create technologies that bring out human traits in order to understand human behavior at a higher level. This is the kind of thing that makes any human subjects board FREAK. Highly not acceptable. And right now, i need to play nice with human subjects. For those outside of academia, there didn't used to be a subjects board. But then a bunch of psychologists (ahem, Milgram) started running studies on human behavior that sent many subjects (a.k.a. his grad students) into post traumatic stress. Human subjects boards were developed to protect subjects from those experimenting on them. Lots of 1960s research could never have been done under the current restrictions. You would never have heard of Milgram if there was a subjects board back then. But they're here now and us academics must play nice with them. That said... while i'm restricted in experimenting on people, entrepreneurs and entertainers aren't. Thus, just as i rely on Jamie Kennedy to push human nature to its boundaries and provide me with a text to study, i count on technologists to create perfect fodder for my curiosity. My public critiques are not my academic output; they are intended to be my feedback to the domain whose creations i'm studying. They are channeled feedback from users, suggestions based on learned lessons and ideas for public discussion. In effect, they are publicly presented usability material without any pressure to listen to me whatsoever. I do not think that i have all of the answers. That said, i do think that i'm asking a different set of questions than the creators of these technologies. And i believe that those questions are valid and valuable. For that reason, i offer some of the results publicly so that they can be part of the greater discourse. My apologies to those who don't think that's good enough. Perhaps one day i will go back to development, but not right now. Right now, i'm having fun. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 3:49 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack (1) February 18, 2004the pictures in iChat weird me outFor whatever reason, at Etech, i switched from using Fire to using iChat. I also got conned into using a "real" picture of myself as my image (instead of a butterfly). So, every time i send a message, i see a chipper danah with fuzzy hat representing my text. This completely weirds me out. What weirds me out more is to see my friends speak back to me. Two of my friends look like their in thinker pose. One has a childhood picture. One is whistfully staring out into nowhere and one is jumping out of a plane. They're all smiling and looking far too chipper and proper for their own good. As noted by my previous post, i spent the bulk of yesterday in a dreadful state. Of course, that didn't prevent me from IMing. So here i am, moaning in bed, greasy, face as white as snow, slumped over IMing with an image that makes me look as chipper as ever. Even *i* can't take myself seriously. On more than one occasion, a friend would ask how i was feeling and i would respond with something like "::moan:: dreadful..." and i knew that they were seeing the happy fuzzy danah saying this. Cue conflict at its most visceral state! I regularly carry on a conversation with a friend whose pic makes him look like he's in thinker mode. No matter how emotional he's trying to be, i see that post and read him as calm and contemplative even though i know damn well that this is not his state. Ever. The pictures in iChat weird me out. So, when i express this to others, they often tell me to hook up a cam and make it an automatically evolving picture and i'm equally terrified. I am a multi-tasker; most of the time that i'm IMing, i'm doing something else as well. For simplicity, imagine that i'm carrying on two conversations. In one, i'm being professional and proper; in the other, i'm gossiping about my girl friend's date from the previous nite. Why on earth would i want my gossip face revealed to my professional colleague? What fascinates me about IM is that i can be in two contexts simultaneously. My brain is quite capable of doing this, but physical constraints rarely allow it to happen in everyday life. IM is *fantastic* this way. If my picture were updating regularly, it would collapse those two contexts. And besides, the state of my room and/or dress is not for public consumption, particularly at the odd hours in which i'm likely to IM. Actual faces are so powerful for identifying people. I can look at my IM buddylist and immediately recognize the folks that i know. But i get really screwy emotion detection from it too. When i'm in a grumpy mood and need support, i'd rather talk to the teddy bears, kitty cats and alien creatures than the chipper versions of my friends. I don't read emotion into the abstract or non-human images nearly as much as the human ones... iChat is reminding me of why i believe in abstract representations for conversations when cue conflict might be a problem. In any case, i'm going back to the butterfly.... Category:
Posted by zephoria at 11:17 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (2) February 17, 2004sick and avoiding doctorsSo, if you've ever had to deal with university's health services, you know why i'm avoiding the doctors. It's worse than the emergency clinic. But, since i'm always surprised about what my blog readers know, i thought maybe i'd ping out to you. I'm sick as a dog. I've been vomiting and and off since the middle of the night and i'm trying to keep Saltine's down as we speak. I've been drinking Ginger Ale. While i've managed to avoid vomiting for a few hours, i still feel nauseous as hell, particularly whenever i move. When i sleep, i get hot flashes and can't really sleep comfortably. When i'm awake, it's just perpetual dreadfulness. I don't seem to have a fever. I feel weak, but i can't keep food down so i'm not surprised. All of my sniffles, sore throat and the like of last week are gone. I don't have any obvious flu symptoms. Even the body ache is low other than the feeling of weakness. My guess is food poison, but yesterday, i hate veggie sushi and an omlette. Is it possible that i'm feeling late ramifications of Mexican food? Is there anything that i should be doing other than Saltine's/toast/Ginger Ale/Coke syrup (and late nite dramamine) and waiting it out? Category:
Posted by zephoria at 7:43 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0) geography of Orkut profiles: visualizationDunno where this came from, but it's a fun visualization of Orkut members in the NY region based on long/lat. It seems as though folks are already scraping Orkut.... Category: yasns
Posted by zephoria at 7:19 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) tonite, on lifetime: until the violence stops
PS: Seeing as i don't have cable, i'd be super stoked if someone would be able to record a copy for me.... Category: gender & sexuality
Posted by zephoria at 3:01 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) more hacking of FriendsterIf you want to see a beautiful exponential curve, graph the commonality of last names. Some names (::cough:: Smith) are EXCEPTIONALLY common. Jonathan Moore realized this and he used it to extract more data from Friendster. "From this we see that after trying only twenty-eight last names we have a ten percent chanse of having guessed the user's last name." Moore continues on to tell us other ways of extracting purportedly private data from Friendster. Ah, hackers, how i love thee. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) February 16, 2004Ni una mas! Not one more in Juarez!
It was surreal. Two days surrounded by famous people, paparazzi wanting to see them, and the mothers of victims. What a triangulation of emotions. The hope of the privileged, the desire and surfaceness of the paparazzi and the mind-numbing sorrow and anguish of the mothers. As i escorted one of the mothers to the stage, i took her hand, i looked into her eyes. A wave of nausea hit me. Her eyes were dark, lifeless, staring out in complete shock and horror. How do you explain to a woman who lost her 17 year old baby that her participation was so valuable, so appreciated? You can't. But i didn't have to. A few ours later, she came out on stage to give a speech. At the end, a hideous heart-wrenching, blood-curling scream came out of her. "Ni una mas." (Not one more) We all coiled back, struck by the terror of that sound. And then we collapsed, in anger and sorrow, remembering why we were there... Perhaps i should back up.... Scott and i connected at the airport. I had spent the last n days with my geek community and was trying to find grounding in what i was about to do. I went to the bathroom to get a breath of fresh air. I found a woman in there talking about Juarez. Sure enough, she was headed over. I smiled, knowing that there would be many of us. I walked out, trying to figure out how to cross the border. The woman from the bathroom spoke Spanish and arranged a taxi for us. In the meantime, i saw a huddle of pink and red... V-Day. I approached them, oblivious to who it might be and asked if they were going over to Lucerna. Abruptly, a brisk man came up and said yes. By that point, i realized that i had just walked in on Carole Black (the head of Lifetime) and her crew. Later, i was to learn that the brisk man was the head of security for all of the stars. He was amazing, totally involved in the movement, had been following it for years, made a movie and a music video about the Juarez murders... later, he would tell me all of the details about what he had found. We got pulled into a car with the brisk man's sister and whisked off to Juarez. Landed right into the headquarters of chaos, as folks worked to organize what was going on. Dropped off our stuff and headed out with everyone to the consulate. It was an opportunity to talk to who all had come. 2 US Congresswomen, the US diplomats in Juarez, Jane Fonda, and others. Here, Jane gave a moving speech about why she was in Juarez: "I am rich, I am famous, I am white. I have a daughter and a granddaughter, and I know if they disappeared, the authorities would work very hard to find out who did it. I have worked very hard to feel in my body what it would be like to lose a child and go to the authorities and be dismissed or beaten or have relatives beaten by the authorities just because the police needed to blame it on somebody because they were covering up for the people who did it." She continued on to talk about privilege and why it was necessary to recognize privilege, to use privilege to help others. It was a perfect opportunity for reflection and many of us took it. The next day began with a lecture and a press conference. Hundreds of local women showed up. By the time we reached the march, we were met with thousands more. We met at the bridge to El Paso. From the distance, we watched as thousands poured over the bridge, with banners and posters. I couldn't see the end of them when i pulled back to join the rest of the V-Day crowd. Those of us who worked with V-Day were pulled in to help make a human barricade around the stars - the Congresswomen, Jane Fonda, Sally Fields, Holly Near, Christine Lahti, 3 Mexican actresses (Laura Flores, Marintia Escobedo, Lilia Aragon), Esther Chavez, Eve Ensler, et. al. We surrounded the "Very Important Vaginas" and the security guards surrounded us. I thought it was all fun and games, mostly keeping the press at bay, until a man from the crowd rushed us. He was masked, armed with a spray paint can and looking rabid, screaming. People everywhere were screaming, being pushed aside as he rushed us. We split apart. i was with a group that grabbed Sally and 2 of the Mexican actresses and pulled them off to the side, huddling around them. A security guard stood with his back to us, facing the oncomer. Thankfully, the police tackled him before he reached us. From that point on, we were all on nerves. There were people protesting us, protesting our presence. I spoke at length to Marintia Escobedo and she told me that many in Juarez thought what we were doing was foolish because only prostitutes and other undesirables were killed. Life was not equal; some people were worth more than others. Proper women weren't killed. I was nauseous. There was another round of speeches, and keys and whatnot, but everyone was on edge and we needed to get to the theatre so we made a human barricade again and ushered everyone to cars and rushed to the theatre. At the theatre, we ran around, getting people food, organizing chaos. Everyone from the protest lined up to see the production of The Vagina Monologues, done in English and Spanish. It was there that i escorted the various mothers, saw their faces, was haunted by their sorrow. The show went on and it was magnificent, full of so much raw emotion. I was amazed watching the Mexican actresses. I could not understand their words, but their body language and emotive nature was so expressive that i knew exactly what was happening. Sally read a new piece... "The Memory of Her Face." It was heart-wrenching, pulling together the stories of the acid burns in Pakistan with the bomb burnings in Iraq with the torture of the women in Juarez. I spoke at length with the people from the consulate. They explained the political structure of Juarez and Mexico in general. The mayor of Mexico was of a different political party than those in the federal government. He had no interest in listening to them. They wanted answers; he refused to investigate. The US FBI wanted information; he refused to help. Elections are on July 4 and everyone is hoping for a more sympathetic mayor. Mayors are elected for one 6 year term. An attempt to assassinate this mayor was made in his first year; they shot a bullet through his brain; he is still the mayor. Hypotheses were made as to what was going on. The various groups investigating it, both from the consulate and from other groups, told me that they believe that there is one serial killer who kills about 2 per year. They suspect that he is from the States and crosses twice to kill. The FBI believe this as well and have been trying to investigate; the Jaurez police will not help. Everything else is copycat crimes, trafficking in humans, or human parts. These women show up with parts missing. The serial killer never leaves nipples. I went back to my hotel and realized i was out of cigarettes. I went to the front desk, asking where i could go get some. The guy got wide eyed. You can't go out there. It's dark and you're a woman. Tell the bellman what you want and he will go out for you. My heart sunk. He was right, but it was so painful to be helpless. The media were so happy to have us here. Apparently, the story has been covered many times over the years, but there is nothing new to report on... this is frustrating. Thus, it has died as a conversation. By being there, we gave them an opportunity to cover it again. There was so much media, so many interested groups. The pressure is on. A special investigator was appointed by the federal government to investigate, no matter what. She was there with us. Amnesty International was there. Code Pink was there. So many amazing groups with amazing stories were there. I'm still so blown away, lost in thought. Ni una mas. photo credit and caption: Actresses Jane Fonda and Sally Field, right, join hundreds of demonstrators who marched across the U.S.-Mexico border, Saturday, Feb. 14, 2004, in the city of Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, to demand that authorities resolve the deaths of women and girls whose remains have often been found discarded in the desert Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte) [And yes, that's my fuzzy hat off to the left. Category: gender & sexuality
Posted by zephoria at 1:07 AM | TrackBack (2) February 15, 2004boundaries, hang-ups and professional decorumLast week, i stated my disgust at the image Marc Canter used to advertise his party at Etech. Since then, there's been plenty of blogging conversation, speculation about my views, and dismissal by strangers who don't know me. It's a clear reminder of how reading my blog is not indicative of knowing me, my views or my philosophy on life. So, let me clarify a few things. First, just because i spend a bulk of my life fighting to end violence against women does not mean that i abhor BDSM. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that i'm one of the most ardent supportors of consensual BDSM out there. I don't believe that it's violence and i have always supported the BDSM community both inside of and outside of V-Day. I am completely supportive of others' sexual preferences; that's not the point here. Second, i believe in social mores and social decorum. It is outright inappropriate to advertise a professional party in the way that one would advertise a play party. Different social contexts require different social norms. Images set expectations, intentions. Certainly, people have the right to offend, just as i have the right to be offended and state that offense. The point of my frustration is that offensive adverts are not the way to build community or encourage proper decorum that is inclusive. I view Etech as a professional activity. Of course i enjoy parties. Duh; i'm a trancer! But the roles that i play in my personal life are different than those that i play in my professional life. At a professional activity, i want to go to a professional event, not one that is advertising itself as a sex party, offering up images of the expected roles of men and women. As professionals, we're working towards gender equality; sexualizing a professional event does not continue that commitment. Parties can be fun without sexualized imagery. It is certainly a woman's right to do whatever she wants in front of a camera. I'm not arguing against that. That doesn't contradict the significance of social norms. If you want a party to be welcoming, you advertise it as inclusive. For example, there were children there. Thus, explicit sexual behavior or drug use is just outright unacceptable. This is common sense when it comes to social norms. Perhaps i should take a Californian stand and clearly state my boundaries with regard to my professional/personal life. Note, these are *my* boundaries. As a professional colleague of mine: 1) It is unacceptable to ask me to participate in threesomes with your wife via email or any social network software. In fact, it is inappropriate to ask me for any sexual favors period. 2) It is unacceptable to corner me and try to get me to kiss you or go home with you, regardless of whether or not we were drinking. 3) It is unacceptable to treat me as a sexual object or token. 4) It is uncool for professional events to be held in environments that blur the lines between sexual and professional boundaries. This isn't about me being a prude; this is about me wanting a professional life that is not sexualized. I spent many years of my life trying to be just one of the boys. I'm finally accepting my femininity, enjoying playing with fashion and willing to be a female. This is not an invitation for sexual advances; it's about me being me. The fact is that i have friends who are also colleagues. Yes, i'm far more likely to be affectionate with them, even in a professional domain. That's not about sex; that's about friendship. The friends that i'm most flirtatious and goofy with are the ones who i am certain understand that there is no sexual innuendo involved; i don't cuddle with people who don't get me. Cuddling for me comes from the raver world where cuddle piles are about friends not sexual advances. My friend group is not about cliquishness, but there are a lot of underlying social commonalities between us that bind us together both on and offline. For example, when it comes to the discussion about the image, the fact of the matter is that most of my close friends are feminists, as were their parents. They get it; of course, they understand why i'm upset and they have their own reasons beyond mine. I do have a hang-up in this community that is tangentially related to that image. My hang-up is that i want to be accepted not because i'm a potential sex toy but because i have intellectually stimulating ideas to offer. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 9:48 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1) V-Day on V-DayIn my world, V-Day stands for Valentine's Day, Vagina Day, Victory over Violence Day. To celebrate, i am in Juarez with V-Day to demand that the government investigate why over 300 women have disappeared, are still missing or have turned up murdered and violated. Tonite, we gathered at the consulate's home with 2 US Representatives, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, the newly appointed Mexican investigator into the Juarez murders, Amnesty International representatives, Carole Black (head of Lifetime). Everyone made speeches, spoke of what is to be done and prepared to spend V-Day marching on the streets of Juarez. It's an eerie environment... you can feel the fear. But i do have faith that what we do can work to stop the violence. I look forward to tomorrow's efforts. If i were to ask anything of my readers today, it would be that you support V-Day in any way that you can. If it is in your means, please donate to V-Day as we work to end violence against women and girls worldwide. Every bit helps. Also, for those who cannot be in Juarez, turn on your TVs to Lifetime on February 17th at 10PM as Lifetime airs the new V-Day documentary of the work we've been doing worldwide. Have a fantastic V-Day and work with us to envision a world without violence. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:49 AM | TrackBack (1) February 11, 2004my etech talk: revenge of the userI gave my talk at Etech on Revenge of the User today. In typical danah-mode, i spoke a mile-a-minute and, thus, folks kept asking me if i had more material. Thus, i thought that i'd offer the crib of my talk on my blog. I've included it in the extended entry. Please note that it was a crib for me and probably has a lot of holes and missing bits. Feel free to add what i skipped in the comments. WHO AM I WHY GIVE THIS TALK? WHY HERE?
Social theorists have constructed a body of literature around social networks, to understand how people construct, maintain and utilize their networks to meet daily needs. Researchers have learned that these networks are a critical part of people's daily lives. People use their networks to acquire support of all different kinds. They use the structure of their network to find jobs, loved ones, get and make meaning out of recommendations. Enamored with the value of networks, people have worked to exploit the structure. Any MBA is told that she must build a network to be valuable in business. Recently, we've seen a plethora of companies trying to do the same thing. For the sake of this talk, i'm going to refer to these services as YASNS short for "Yet Another Social Network Service", an umbrella term coined by Clay Shirky to reference the many services that have tried to explicitly and implicitly present people's social networks. Most specifically, this term refers to sites like Friendster, Tribe.net, Ryze, LinkedIn, orkut, etc. Of course, there are many services that also draw on social networks without specifically joining the fold, such as LiveJournal, blogrolls, etc. and others who are using social networks in a more explicit nature, such as Spoke and Visible Path. Although this latter group is interesting, little is known about how these will affect social behavior. Thus, i will primarily be addressing the increasingly popular YASNS sites that have gained popularity with disparate social groups. Many of the YASNS systems concerned themselves with what social theory told us about one's networks; they turned it into hype. Weak ties are key to getting jobs! The best dates are friends of friends! Thus, sites were constructed to model people's social networks so that users could more efficiently engage with their networks. If friends of friends are so valuable, why not make people aware of who each others' friends are? Yet, in building these systems, the creators made assumptions about both the networks and human behavior. This is where the trouble began. Creators had a set of assumptions about how their systems would be used. Needless to say, not all users agreed with, or even understood, the philosophies of the creators. As a result, users repurposed the tools available to support their own needs and desires. Thus, what the users did did not match up to the social theory expected by creators. In some cases, these new uses horrified the creators who actively attempted to construct boundaries of acceptable behavior, further aggravating the users. WHY DOES THIS MATTER? So, what went wrong? And why does this matter? First, this matters because everyone seems fascinated by social networks. They aren't going away. Many of you are building social software or software, involving social networks in some form or another. If we continue to build technology based on loose understandings of social theory, we will continue to be disappointed in the results. Thus, the last year of YASNS gives us a perfect opportunity to understand how design decisions affected user behavior and how user behavior affects any chance of having a business out of social networks. In order to consider what went wrong and tease out the lessons from this, i'm going to do two different types of analysis. First, i'm going to consider the relationship between the technology and the social theory upon which it is built. Second, i'm going to break down how users interacted with these systems, why this didn't look like the social theory and how attempts by sites to regulate the scope of acceptable behavior has only made the situation more problematic. ON SOCIAL THEORY When i generically talk about social theory, i'm referring to the large body of knowledge about human behavior that has been generated by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, etc. This work is grounded in observing and testing human behavior, but it has not built a complete model of social life. This work is developed in a cultural and intellectual context. There are assumptions and gaps in every bit of this. One of the biggest assumptions built into social theory concerns the architecture in which we interact. Much of this work is connected with ideas on face-to-face interactions and negotiating life in the context of a city, suburbia or a village. Everyone in this room knows that technology has changed something about this. We can feel it, even if we don't understand it. Our social life has changed; the types of people we talk to are different; the ability to find people like us is visceral. There are critical differences in everyday social interaction for those of us who've gone digital. Even if we can't articulate the differences, we can feel them. In reflecting on Mitch Kapor's argument that architecture is politics, Larry Lessig noted that code is law. In fleshing this out, Lessig equates code to architecture. This is a critical reflection. It allows us to think about how what we build structures the underlying elements to the ways people can interact. This realization doesn't negate social theory, but it puts it into context. It means that rather than translating everything that we learned about social life into the digital, we must critically reflect what will and won't work as new social structures are built. The core of people isn't different, but how they interact might be. Take spam as an example. There are real life spammers - people who try to sell us things at any moment. There are varying levels, from the street vendors to the marketers. Many of us have structured our everyday lives to avoid these people. We don't go into that part of the city. We can block these people out. If we create a society where people have easier access to everyone's attention, spammers are going to utilize this as much as we are! Complex ecosystems all have parasites and energy-sinks. Once your email system scales to a certain size, it will accumulate inefficiencies. We can damn them for existing, but we are simultaneously building tools that meet their needs just as much if not more than our own! So, let's ground this a bit and think about the theories being used by the YASNS phenomenon. First, let's discuss the argument of 6 degrees of separation. For anyone who didn't know, this isn't a term coined by Milgram. His research was called "Small Worlds." It's a term coined by a playwright. What Milgram did was question how many hops it would take to get from one person in Nebraska to a person in Massachusetts. For those who aren't aware, he asked people in Nebraska to send a packet along to someone in Massachusetts. If they knew the target personally, they were asked to send the packet to the target. If they didn't, they were asked to send the packet on to someone who might know the target. Each person was asked to continue passing on the packet until the target was reached. Thus, someone in Nebraska might send it on to their neighbor who used to live in Massachusetts, who would send it on to someone who lived in the appropriate town, etc. He found that the average number of steps necessary was around 5.5. Thus, everyone professed that people are, on average, separated by 6 hops! From Milgram's perspective, if we build a model of a network, the average person will be separated by 6 people! There's a crucial missing step in this logic. What Milgram asked people to do was GUESS who would be the likely next candidate in passing on the message. The person did not have a whole networks view. She did not KNOW who should be the next candidate based on shortest path. She only guessed. Without a whole networks view, we don't actually know the average path length between two people. We only know the how long it took for a message to get through a string of guesses within the network. Next, take the number 150. I've heard over and over again how the average person only knows 150 people. This is referring to research done by Dunbar. He was interested in understanding how many people humans could "groom." In other words, how many people did a human keep in their social network at any one point in time. Dunbar was interested in how monkeys groomed each other to keep up their social network. What he found was that there was a similarity between monkey grooming and human gossip. Just as monkeys groomed to maintain their networks, humans gossiped to maintain theirs! He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn't mean that people don't have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point. What about Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties"? In his seminal work, Granovetter found that the majority of people found out about jobs through weak ties, not strong ones. First, people have corrupted the definition of weak tie to equate it with friends of friends. This is not accurate, but it's also not egregious. The idea is that with a strong tie, you are aware of all of their strong ties. What kind of best friend are you if you aren't aware of your best friend's other best friends? These people are not inherently your strong ties and, thus, they become weak ties in your world. You have a connection to them; that connection is because they are important in your friend's life. But there's a problem here. Not everyone that you know is a strong tie. And not everyone that you know's friends are weak ties. In the States, we have a totally different conception of the term Friend compared to the rest of the world. We call everyone that we've ever met our Friend. It's socially appropriate! But this is not what the sociologists meant. As such, most of the people in our Rolodexes are weak ties, not strong ones. We do not have rich interpersonal connections with them. Before you object, think who you would call if you were in an emotional crisis; think of who knows all about the ups and downs of your anxieties. There's no doubt that some folks love to blog their woes to the world, but most of us only have a few people we would call and who we could guarantee would support us through our troubles. Those are strong ties. Pulling back from tie strength, let's also look at the logic of the argument. When Granovetter found that people found their jobs through weak ties, he did not find that all weak ties help us find our jobs. Furthermore, he did not say that our weak ties had the power necessary to get us those jobs, simply that they helped us find them. There's a reason for this. And this is the most overlooked issue in all of the YASNS phenomenon. Context. Our relationships have a context to them, not just a strength. That context is crucial for many distributions of information, support and trust. Consider a weak tie that you party with; he's dating someone who runs a big tech company. Your connection to him is a weak tie; his connection to his boyfriend is a strong one. He hears that the tech company has an opening. As Granovetter acutely noted, when he hears that you're looking for a job in that field, he's likely to tell you about that job, even though he knows nothing of your expertise. Why? The favor of spreading information gives him power as a bridge. But this does not mean that he's going to risk his reputation with his strong tie over a weak tie. Say that you want the chief engineering position. He doesn't know you in that context; he has no way to vouch for your worthiness. Thus, he's taking a much bigger risk in hyping you to his boyfriend. Even if he lets his boyfriend know that some guy from the clubs wants the job, he'll make it very clear that he doesn't really know you, but will just offer that information just in case. He'll do it in passing, to see if his ears perk up. If they don't, he'll let it pass. Take the dating realm. Have you ever had a close friend set you up on a date? Now, have you ever had a weak tie set you up on a date? One of the things you will find is that when a weak tie sets you up on a date, you often have NOTHING in common with this person. Again, context. Or better yet, focus. Focus is a researched concept in social networks. Scott Feld talks about the power of foci in understanding networks. You and your strong ties have things in common, the foci of the relationship. Often, the closer you are, the more you share in common. This is why you often have things in common with friends of friends. You and your friend have lots of overlapping things; she and her friend have lots of overlapping things; there's a high probability that you and that person have some things in common. As Feld noticed, the more you have in common with someone, the more likely you are to be a strong tie, particularly when the things in common are rare. But, pulling back, shared foci between friends of friends does NOT mean shared foci between a string of weak ties. Foci are not transitive and the less you have in common with someone, the lower the probability will be that you have something in common with someone they know. Take two hops down a weak tie chain and the probability is random. TRANSLATING TO THE SITES So, i've just thrown a bunch of social network theory at you. Let's situate it in the YASNS phenomenon. 1) Friends on these sites are not close ties. In fact, they're barely weak ties! I'll explain why in a moment. Thus, anything that can be assumed about transitivity across ties is 100% lost. This only gets worse as we go down the chain. As one of my informants reminded me, why would i want to date my hairdresser's brother's drug dealer's second-cousin? 2) Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power. Of course, that's part of the point, right? All of these sites want you to USE your friends to gain access to jobs, dates and recommendations. But what's in it for your friends? And what are the consequences? To answer this, lets go back to who your "Friends" are. After Friendster came out, you'd go to a club in San Francisco or New York and people would be talking about their Friendsters. They weren't referring to their Friends... they were referring to the people that they connected with on the system. When sociologists asked people about their network, they did not pass on the descriptions. Thus, people could speak candidly about how well they knew people, in what context, and what they really thought of them. Thus, when they were building maps of relationships, they could make sense of these variations. There are three problems with these sites: 1) There are SIGNIFICANT consequences to publicly articulating who you know, how you feel about them, etc. That's bloody well uncomfortable. Try saying no to that boss of yours you hate but need to play nice with. You would express this as a negative relationship to a sociologist, but you have to put them up on Friendster as equivalent to your lover. Your evil boss and your lover are not the same! Public articulation means that you can't distinguish them without awkward feelings. 2) People aren't good at systematizing this. Sociologists didn't ask people who their weak ties were; they asked about all of their ties and then came up with a uniform metric to gauge everyone's network. People can't honestly say how "sexy" someone is on a scale from 1-3. Nor can they discuss trustworthiness without a context. 3) Not all relationships are bi-directional. This has to do with fandom and power. Just because you believe you really know Angelina Jolie does not mean that she knows you. On a more local level, not everyone knows the same about someone they know. For example, your shrink probably knows more about you than you know about her. And frankly, the kinds of questions that your superior can ask about your family and personal life are vastly different than the kinds of question you can ask her. Furthermore, just because you read someone's blog does not mean that you know them. Even if you comment. It has to be reciprocal and dive beyond the actual public forum. THE NEXT LAYER So, we realize that these networks don't look real. It's too socially awkward. They're not built to give us a way to express the subtleties of how we know people, the power differentials, the contexts, the strengths. Furthermore, they expose more about us to different groups of people than we would ever do in real life. All of a sudden, we have to reconcile the bar-hopping facet of our identity with the proper work facet. The reason that this became quickly apparent for people is because they usually signed on with one group of friends. On Friendster, it was most clearly demonstrated by the Burning Man crowd. If your Burner friends joined, you signed up and created a Burner profile. This didn't mean that you were only a Burner, but it was the image appropriate to your group of friends. You dress and act differently amongst Burner friends than you do amongst colleagues. Then the colleagues appeared. Do you shift your profile to look like them? Do you find a middle ground? Doesn't matter, really... Because your colleagues can see that all of your friends are Burners. Guilt by association. Take this a step further. They expose the PEOPLE from each facet to each other with us as the only bridge. If the focus of our interactions between two groups were similar, we would comfortably expose them over time. If you find out that your colleague likes jazz, you might take him with you to meet your jazz-going friends. But if he hates jazz, you probably won't think to introduce him to the jazz aficionados. On Friendster, your ability to connect people because of their similarities is lost. The only similarity that matters is you. Furthermore, they get to interact through the system without you even negotiating whether or not they should meet. All of a sudden, your drunken friends are asking your boss out on a date cause she's hot. Yikes! Not only does this disempower you, remove the ability for you to connect them as need be, but it now makes you have to deal with the consequences of two different groups with two different standards of social norms. Of course, this gives people a fright. While many of us in this room live, breathe and sleep techno-world, most people have clearer distinctions between their work and personal lives. I came across this regularly in my fieldwork. Imagine the horror that a young teacher in San Francisco felt when her students accused her friends of being pedophiles because they found his profile on Friendster and it jokingly said that he likes to corrupt young girls. She is required to keep her professional world separate from her personal one; this is a code of ethics of teachers. Yet, the technology collapsed this. Furthermore, it exposed a joke that amongst friends is quite funny, but to outsiders looks offensive. Jokes have context. Consequences. NEXT LAYER Not only are the networks not real, they have unrealized consequences. This is where things got interesting because users went in a million different directions. Faced with an uncertainty of what strength was necessary to link, every user came up with her own scheme of who to accept as friends. On Friendster, users tried to institute a mechanism for employing foci. They created fake characters that would collect people of like minds. Faced with uncomfortable situations, some users killed accounts or simply stopped logging in. Other users created fake characters to hide behind the social awkwardness and only be seen by a smaller group of users. Fake characters - Fakesters - were also used to make it fun, not serious. It was a way of relieving the social tension. Fakesters were people who joined the network, putting up fake personas. They represented themselves as Giant Squid or Homer Simpson. Some users were upset that they couldn't see everyone so they tried to scheme the system to be able to do so. Suddenly having access to people different than them, some users used the network to attack. On Friendster, the Neo-Nazis went wild, going after people of visible color. They used the power of the network to connect to large groups of people, pseudo-anonymously. For many, this was the ideal case. But for those being attacked, this was horrifying. The Neo-Nazis weren't the only group connecting en masse in a way that is startling. Informants tell me that people on the east coast use the network to deal cocaine. Friendster was the first company faced with a situation truly out of control. Users were demanding contradictory things. Behavior ran the gauntlet! But Friendster played in to the cardinal no-no learned from science and technology studies: they tried to configure the user. CONFIGURE THE USER When technologies are built, the creators often have a very limited scope of desired and acceptable behavior. They build the systems aimed at the people who will abide by their desires. Often, their users don't have the same views about how the technology should be used. They use it differently. Creators get aggravated. They don't understand why users won't behave. The demand behavior. First, the creator messages the user, telling them that this isn't what is expected of them. Then, the creator starts carrying a heavier and heavier stick. This is called configuring the user. And y'know what... it doesn't work. Sure, Friendster stopped some bad behavior, but at what cost? They succeeded in getting rid of most of the people playing games with the site, but they also lost the foci elements that let people find people like them (often a better mechanism for dating) and the ability for people to safely guard themselves from others. And guess what? Their heavy handedness didn't make the network any more real. Most of the things that make it peculiar to use come from the social awkwardness. People often tell me that it worked because people are actually dating. So what? Give anyone a room full of attractive people and peopel will try to find a date, even if it is a tech conference. That doesn't mean that the model is working or that it's sustainable. The Fakester chaos was a *reaction* to being configured. They were making it light on the outside, because no one can take it seriously on the inside. Some were so frustrated at being condemmed that they created a Fakster Revolution, complete witha manifesto. People are still faced with a set of friends that demonstrate the people that they might have known at the time that they connected to Friendster (but often don't actually know). As more people get on the network and their lives shift, their Friendster representation will get more outdated and more difficult to negotiate. On average, people only remove friends because of serious fights; they rarely clean out their friends, unless there are specific reasons to do so (i.e. minimize social awkwardness). Friends lists are not an accurate portrayal of who people know now, who they could ask favors of, who they would feel comfortable introducing at the moment. They're a weird product of people from the past, people from the present, people unknown, people once met. Killing Fakesters doesn't make social networks any more real. It misses the point. Yet, the more we try to force users into desired behavior, the less we pay attention to why they're doing what they're doing. Users are reacting the designs that creators choose. Why did people try to amass innumerable friends in Friendster? They wanted to see more of the network. In the early days, they wanted to be listed as one of the most popular people in others' networks. Friendster used to list this but they removed this feature when they realized how problematic it was. Yet, it came back in full force with Orkut where every list is based on popularity. Guess what? It came back with the same problem. The more popular someone is, the more others see them and try to link to them because one might assume that this person will take on friends or because other people recognize this person or because it seems like a way to meet more people. It doesn't get us any closer to having a social network that means something. Of course, maybe this is just a foolish goal to begin with. Maybe we need to discontinue our rhetoric that we're trying to build social networking software. Why don't we do this? We don't do this because that's how we're trying to build a business model. We're relying on this to be real to sell to investors, to convince new users that this is useful, etc. We're at a cross-roads with social networking software. We can pretend that the current path we're on - Friendster, orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, etc. - is all the hype. We can pretend like it's really possible to force these users to create everyday social networks that will make all the theory fall into place. We can sell this fantasy to VCs, bankroll money and hope that users will play along long enough to make it all worth it. OR We can wake up and make sense of what we've done. Together, developers have created a new social architecture; users have created a new set of social norms that sit on top of that architecture. Certainly, it's sociologically fascinating - that's why i'm here! But it's also teaching us a lot about how people can and will use technology to socialize, what they're weaknesses are and why. The discomforts that users feel are calling for new technology, new ways to handle social behavior. The more we try to force them into behaving the way we want, the less we'll be able to solve the problem. But that's the problem. Social behavior doesn't have a technological solution. We're all involved with social software because we see needs that technology can solve. Yet, by building the technology, we don't simply address or fail to address those needs; we create new realities. At this point, we need to think in a new way. We need to think about what new realities we formed, what new problems evolved, what new needs happened. Then we need to iterate. We've learned a lot for YASNS. Perhaps, we just need to sit back and figure out how to iterate these lessons into social software. Here are a few major issues that i think emerge and need to be addressed in the next iteration: 1) How do we create a nuanced way for people to negotiate different social contexts without creating unbearable collisions? People should be able to comfortable, and EASILY, determine who should be introduced to who. If we figure out how to empower the bridge without wearing them down, they're far more likely to want to participate in the technology we create. Right now, we disempower them AND wear them down; this is not a survivable model. When Jason Kottke posted to Craigslist looking for someone to manage his social networks, he was dead on: this is more of a pain in the ass than valuable. 2) How do we let people show face? In other words, how do we let them be socially appropriate? LiveJournal has figured this out in part. Everyone can read a kid's LJ. But the parent that reads it gets a different view than the friends. Why? Because it's one presentation with different access to different people. How do we model this in social software applications? 3) Some people want to be seen; some people want to be hidden. By making everyone far more accessible, those who have something desired become more visible targets. While trying to elevate those in need, give them newfound access to their networks, we can't overwhelm the targets and expect them to play along. How do we meet the needs of different people? In LinkedIn, we expect our friends to block connections to us that don't require our attention. This isn't sustainable; it's exhausting. Most of the time, our friends would rather let us deal and feel guilty being put in the position to decide whether or not something should be passed on. It's awkward to have a pending request that needs to be forward. In Friendster or open networks, everyone's fair game. Nowhere is this more painful than hearing the horror from people subject to hate attacks. Sure, there's hate offline, but the social norms control it with greater intensity offline than online. How do we create a system that protects these people from those who want to attack them? No one wants to go online to be attacked. 4) Finally, how do we create architecture that will allow for regulation through social norms? This is a huge challenge! Sure, we can all think back to MUDs and MOOs where social norms created the bo |
The V-Day movie "Until the Violence Stops" airs tonite on Lifetime at 10PM.
I don't think that i can describe the various emotions that i feel returning from Juarez. But i want to try to record what i can, more for my own processing... but also for those who've IMed me to know.