Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s “Harrison Bergeron” was one of those short stories that blew me away as a kid and i find myself still referring to it. In talking about identity online with two friends tonite, we got into a conversation about how digital tools create certain handicaps that, in theory, might place everyone on an equal playing field. I brought up “Harrison Bergeron” and was stunned to find that they hadn’t read it. So, i figured that i’d post it here (under extended entry) in case there are others who haven’t had the opportunity to read this wonderful short story.
Monthly Archives: October 2004
election woes
This election is going to suck. I have yet to receive my little packet of information on the candidates and the propositions; none of my roommates have, even though our friends have. I started getting anxious, wondering if it was possible that someone de-registered me. I voted last winter – can you de-register? Of course, i thought that i registered permanent absentee but my roommate received an absentee and i haven’t. Then again, i think i registered like 10 times when i moved here out of anxiety.
A friend of mine is receiving loads of election materials to a new nonexistent roommate with a peculiar name. Apparently, people are registering folks who don’t exist.
In my birth state, Nader is being kicked off the ballot for fraudulent signatures used to get him there, in the order of 25,000 fake signatures – apparently Mickey Mouse is now voting.
In swing states, it appears as though the RNC is funding voter registration volunteers to tear up registration forms if they’re marked Democratic.
The worst part is that there will only be more horror stories between now and November 2. This election will be nasty.
a new word: starts with ‘n’ ends with ‘o’
When i was a little girl, my mother worked absurd hours to keep food on the table. She was always on the brink of collapsing (and on a couple of occasions did). We had this amazing babysitter – a grandmother type figure who would come and pick us up from school, take us to soccer practice and otherwise help my mother out. She loved us and my mother was beyond thankful for her help. One day, my mother came home a complete mess. I don’t know exactly what prompted it but Mrs D looked at mom and said:
“Kathryn, you need to learn a new word. It starts with ‘n’ and it ends with ‘o’. The word is ‘no’!”
The memory of this tale used to always make me smile, but i never quite got it. Nowadays, i’m trying to learn the same lesson. Like my mother, i’m always excited about a new possibility, a new opportunity. But i’m definitely cracking under the weight of what i’ve committed to. There’s nothing that makes me feel more guilty than flaking, yet i flake because i’m avoiding a more fear-driven action: having to say no. I want to be involved in everything, i want to be helpful to everyone; i want to be social and a workaholic. Much to my dismay, i cannot take on anything more for a while so i’m trying to learn the lesson my mother tried to learn 15 years ago. Of course, i don’t think that my mother succeeded.
the term social software
Of course, i still despise the term (sorry Clay) and its (ab)usage.
The term bothers me because the software is helping the hardware mediate between two people engaged in a social interaction. I’ve always loved ‘computer mediated communication’ (CMC) because it describes the action and then we can talk about CMC hardware/software and CMC behavior. In CMC, the focus is on the communication with the computer and its role as mediator being a description to the primary activity: communication. With social software, the adjective is describing our focus: software. I know that the term is used by technologists who build things instead of dealing with social interaction, communication or even hardware, but it still bothers me. I feel as though the term allows us to emphasize the technology instead of the behavior that it supports.
Its usage has grated me because folks use it as though a revolution has happened. We’ve been building software that can be labeled as social software for a long long long time. Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy? Worse: it’s either far to inclusive or exclusive. Is SMS social software? What about MMORPGs? I guess retrospecticely, we’d call them that, but for the most part, we just focus on YASNS, blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and other recent developments.
Anyhow, it’s not like i have a better term. I tend to talk about social technologies or social media and i tend to use the term CMC. The problem is that CMC isn’t describing the new wave of behaviors which aren’t always about communication. Perhaps i need to use computer-mediated social interaction.
Public Displays of Connection
Judith Donath and i wrote a paper for the BT Technology Journal called Public Displays of Connection that some may appreciate. It was just published today.
Abstract: Participants in social network sites create self-descriptive profiles that include their links to other members, creating a visible network of connections – the ostensible purpose of these sites is to use this network to make friends, dates, and business connections. In this paper we explore the social implications of the public display of one’s social network. Why do people display their social connections in everyday life, and why do they do so in these networking sites? What do people learn about another’s identity through the signal of network display? How does this display facilitate connections, and how does it change the costs and benefits of making and brokering such connections compared to traditional means? The paper includes several design recommendations for future networking sites.
g’bye superman
I am stunned. When Derrida died today, i chuckled at the NYTimes label Abstruse Theorist. But Christopher Reeve’s death hits home on a much more personal note.
I broke my neck only months before Reeve broke his in 1995. Our injuries are very similar, only a calcium deposit in my spinal chord from an earlier gymnastics accident prevented my destiny from looking like his. Every time a doctor looks at my chart, they are stunned that i am walking. I am very lucky and very thankful. Every time i see Reeve, i am humbled.
I lose vision and hearing often and have ongoing chronic pain. Still, this is nothing compared to Reeve’s story. Yet, i have always held onto the dream that through his celebrity, research would continue and there would one day be a cure that will stop the deterioration of my neck. When Kerry referred to Reeve in his answer on stem-cells, i couldn’t help but get teary-eyed. Reeve has been an icon for my quiet struggle. I just hope to god that, in his memory, the fight will go on. I am sad to see my Superman depart this earth and i hope that he is dancing in the heavens.
a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture
As i wrote before, i quit using RSS/syndication readers. Sitting in at Web2.0 for 20 seconds, i was intrigued by the ongoing hype of RSS – how everything is going to be syndicated and how everyone is going to access data that way. For this audience, i think that it is certainly true. But i’m wondering if that’s really true beyond the info-nerds.
Syndication is based on an email model, relatively close to a mailing list model. You subscribe to a set number of things and the program informs you of updates. Like email, updates come in the form of a new item. If you leave your syndication tool alone for too long, those new items build up and you’re faced with an INBOX-esque situation, an eternal queue waiting to be checked off. Of course, there’s also a morbid pleasure in keeping that number at zero, motivating most digital control freaks to obsessively and compulsively check off the items as read. Syndication readers are the modern day whack-a-mole.
I will fully admit that my digital OCD runs deep. Mixed with digital materialism, a penchant for collecting things and a fetish for information, i found that my addiction to RSS wrecked my world, making it impossible for me to go to bed at night until everything was checked off. While email has long since weighed on me by having an INBOX full of reminders that i’m a bad friend, syndication brought out my voyeuristic tendencies, letting me feel safe lurking without feeling compelled to respond. Reading was enough; reading was everything. If only that were the case in email.
What gets me about syndication is not my personal neuroses around it (although i fear that others will be pushed over the edge with the continuous increase in feeds). What gets me about syndication is that i can’t resolve the proposed models with the usage patterns i see in youth culture.
Melora Zaner did some great research into why youth are throwing away email for IM. In my blogging research, i was only able to validate her findings. Youth use email to talk with parents and authorities (including corporate emails like from Xanga); it’s where they get the functional stuff. They check email once a day. They get notices there, but they’re mostly disregarded. IM is where the action is. Youth see this as their digital centerpiece, where they communicate with their friends, thereby maintaining their intimate community. They use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ. [Remember: blog is not a meaningful term to youth culture.]
LJ Friends Feeds look a lot more like IM than email, unlike most feed readers. Posts are just aggregated in a reverse-chronological ordering and you page through the various posts. There are no checkboxes, no little red numbers that tell you you didn’t read everything. You can easily scan. Unlike their adult counterparts who seem to add and never delete, youth talk about removing people from their LJ friends list if they’re annoying, if they don’t talk much anymore, etc. Because of the overhead of reading LJ friends’ lists, there is a desire to only retain those who are of actual interest. Youth are not grabbing institutional feeds; they’re not reading name-brand journalists just for show; things like Kottke and Boing Boing mean nothing to them. The only strangers they seek are those of genuine interest, those who are like them. Youth use LJ/Xanga like they use IM – to keep in constant touch with their intimate community.
This is quite interesting because the current generation of youth is more brand-conscious, more advertising-aware than any previous generation. Branding is part of their identity, yet their communication technologies are not how they see themselves keeping tabs on their brands.
Whenever i hear about syndication madness, i hear how everything will be syndicated. This mostly means that every company wants to syndicate their material so that the consumers will keep pace. Usually, this references the info-nerds (like myself). Yet, i can also imagine that the goal is for brands to shove info down the throats of everyone and anyone. That said, i cannot imagine youth syndicating non-intimate feeds unless the benefit is exceptionally large, or the feed plays into that culture already. When my generation signed up for mailing list after mailing list just to get access to a particular site, we often used one of a million throw-away addresses, but once we were on the list, it was hard to get off. With feeds, the user doesn’t have to ask the company to be removed; they can simply stop accessing the feed. The question then becomes: why start accessing the feed unless you’re exceptionally motivated?
Of course, there are going to be consumption feeds that are of interest to youth culture. I can certainly imagine the local rag shooting out a feed of what’s going on that night and this being of interest to youth culture. But, for youth culture, news access and social access are very distinct. Google is for information; LJ/Xanga are for friends and social lives.
The future of syndication that folks at Web2.0 are professing is really structured around information organization and access. It’s about people who are addicted to content, people who want to be peripherally aware of some discussions that are happening. It is not about people who use these tools to maintain an always-on intimate community. There is a huge cultural divide occurring between generations, even as they use the same tools. Yet, i fear that many of the toolmakers aren’t aware of this usage divide and they’re only accounting for one segment of the population.
I know that i haven’t completely sussed out my thoughts on this issue, but i wanted to throw this out there for those who are interested in where RSS is going. And i would love to hear a reaction to my thoughts here.
identity kits
Many of my friends have photographed the contents of their bags or that of strangers bags. Thus, this Identity Kit Series completely blew me away – they are images of the bags and belongings of homeless people.
supporting the Mac is required for social computing
I keep beta-testing software the crashes this, that or the other on my Mac. [Given, i’m really really really good at crashing everything.] Worse: i’m often asked to beta test things that don’t work on the Mac. I want to scream.
You can build enterprise software that doesn’t work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don’t work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise – they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.
It doesn’t. But it does matter, particularly if you’re building sociable technologies and you want the attention of the geeks, freaks and academics. This includes the bloggers, who are often bleeding edge geeky freaky academically-minded folks.
Sociable technologies are not enterprise technologies nor are they low-end consumer technologies. They require connecting clusters of people. And to do that, you start with the “mavens” to get to the hubs. Mavens are not mainstream users; they don’t play by mainstream rules. They value their position as outsider, alternative. They love new gadgets that have cultural value. This is the type that Apple has done a fantastic job at attracting and maintaining.
In a sociable technology economy, it is no longer acceptable to treat Mac users as second-class citizens.
Google Print
Google announced a new endeavor today – Google Print. The goal is to make all texts searchable, even if they started out on paper.
I’m quite excited by this prospect, but i’m not quite sure how it works. I went through a handful of class papers i’ve written recently and thrown quotes from authors – Geertz, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Adam Smith, Malinowski, Nietzsche – into Google with no reference to a book. [I did find lots of other class papers citing these exact quotes though.]