Comments on: my talks at SXSW

By: BookBlog

BookBlog — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 16:53:51 +0000

Decorating a Social Space

The design of online spaces reflects personal identity, danah boyd said in her excellent talk on the SXSW panel on…

By: BookBlog

BookBlog — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 16:05:02 +0000

Decorating a Social Space

The design of online spaces reflects personal identity, danah boyd said in her excellent talk on the SXSW panel on…

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:00:26 +0000

what do you think about the efficacy of robots.txt? to what degree will this allow a degree of temporal privacy?

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:00:17 +0000

what do you think about the efficacy of robots.txt? to what degree will this allow a degree of temporal privacy?

By: andy

andy — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 11:45:58 +0000

danah, they have transcripts of both of your talks available at the site below,
http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/cat_recon_sxsw_2004.html

By: zephoria

zephoria — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 10:11:18 +0000

i277 – of course, people also love to collapse that material. zephoria is actually a name that i used when i was studying queer youth. It was my nic on various channels, in various places. It was my blog after i left LJ. It was separate. And then it was collapsed and i stopped fighting it. Instead, i changed the location of my blog, altered all old posts and gave up on being able to keep things separate. This is sorta the problem with relying on that complete separation. It just takes one person to link you and you can no longer maintain the separation with anyone…

By: Tomi

Tomi — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 08:56:44 +0000

I also think that a “visual” of a social network adds much to the whole experiance. See for example http://www.huminity.com where you can search and watch your social web.

By: i1277

i1277 — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 06:12:53 +0000

About the “people publish without being aware of what it really means”-thing: This is why some of us use nicks rather than full names in our blogs/journals/forum posts.

Some people attribute this to cowardice: “What, you can’t stand by your own words?” No, not really, not to everyone and at the same time. We use different words for different people (spouses, friends, family etc.) and at different times (I am not overly pleased by reading some of the stuff I’ve written in the past, I don’t know how some future employer would like it). As you are aware, we try to control the way we are perceived, by acting/speaking a little different in different situations (with different people).

Some might argue: “Your stuff would be better if you used a full name, you’d be forced to reflect harder”. Maybe, maybe not. I think it’s hard enough to post as it is. And I don’t know how interesting a “least common denominator”-style blog would be for either part. There is a reason our IM-chatlogs aren’t available to the public, and it would cripple the conversation.

I think I had the naive notion that after some initial stumbling and well-known anecdotal horror stories people would learn that what they write online becomes searchable. But they don’t seem to, so maybe you are right that they never will. We do however have a school system and though I don’t know how much the school teach the kids about Internet consciousness and similar issues, if society changes in ways so that we need new knowledge, schools should respond to that.

Communicating online is a powerful concept that should be available to all. From a democratic point of view it’s not right that it should work fine for those in-the-know but serve as a trap for the unitiated.

(Nice blog by the way, keep raising those interesting questions).