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« October 2004 | Main | December 2004 » November 30, 2004Exercise in Perspective #4New Notional Slurry exercise: Read your signature on the scattered ashes. The exercise includes: What items there in the room with you could be used to reconstruct or rediscover an aspect of your life? What of your possessions differentiate your life from that of others in your demographic? Although i could make a psychologist giddy with this exercise and expound for hours in a state of utter procrastination, i'll refrain. Instead, i'll use this exercise as a prompt to offer a few "observations" that one would have, all of which say very different things about me. There's a sewing machine upside down on top of the sweaters. Taped to it are hand-written labels and instructions in someone else's handwriting, pointers to what particular dials are and what to do to make the machine work. The gift card for the sewing machine will be found under my bed, with a note wishing me luck on learning to sew. In a bin, one will find a stack of things needing mending and nothing in the room will be found with mends having been made. 700+ books scatter the room, many in topical piles. Most are not duplicates, but there are 7 copies of one book and 9 of another. Upon opening many books, random things are bound to fly out. There will be hundreds of transportation stubs, fliers from parties and receipts. Surfing through the books, random phone numbers and to-do lists will be found. A box of Lego Mindstorms is stashed beneath a 4' stuffed dog. Inside the box, there is a list of all Legos included with this set. All of those Legos are there, but so are many more. Many of the additional Legos cannot be found in any set now or ever on the market. Under the bed, there is a large box containing mostly photos. There are thousands of photos, mostly Polaroids. That box also contains a hand-made collage, a poster, a handmade box containing paper butterflies, a Self magazine, a bottle of perfume, three unmarked postcards, a signed Ani Difranco stub, an earring, a broken bracelet and a pacifier. There are many more boxes with mementos, but this one is at the front and contains very few mementos compared to photos. OK... i'll stop because this is too much fun. It reminds me of the time when a couple broke up across the street and one threw all the others' possessions into the street for trash day. What a story those items told. Or, of course, the I Found Some of Your Life blog.... Note: mucho appreciation for Danyel for giving me an opportunity to procrastinate. He rightfully knew that i would love this post in context of the CSCW workshop on Representations of Identity that Liz, Michele and i ran. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 5:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1) deception vs. context in profiles[From OM] Consider a common housing-wanted ad on Craigslist: I'm a mature woman who just moved to San Francisco. I'm friendly, considerate and pretty clean. I'm fairly quiet and am responsible about paying bills on time. I love arts and crafts, cooking and traveling. In searching for housing or looking for a date, people often describe themselves in order to find others like them for a comfortable housing situation. People use the context of their search to help direct what aspects of themselves they share. When looking for housing, people are trying to be honest, direct and descriptive because the genuinely want to find a compatible roommate. Yet, what does it mean to describe oneself as "neat"? What is the context in which this trait is being ascribed? It is very dependent on one's experiences with other roommates. Compared to the roommates i've had in the past, perhaps i can describe myself as neat, but is that truly meaningful for future roommates? Traits like mature, neat, friendly, considerate, clean, etc. are only meaningful in context. People seeking people online often express frustration over the self-depictions, irritated by what they perceive as deception. I would argue that most perceived deceptions are not lies, but moments where the presenter is trying to describe themselves as either 1) how they see themselves; 2) who they are working to be. I can describe myself as neat and you might see this as deceptive, but i see this as truth compared to my own experiences. I might describe myself as neat because i'm really trying to be neat and thus, i don't see it as a lie so much as an attribute that i've not fully possessed. Of course, neither of these are particularly helpful to you who is looking for someone neat based on your calculation of what that term means. And thus, you see deception. Trying to construct a portrait of myself requires a level of self-reflection that is not something that most people are comfortable or capable of doing. I must also assess the readers' assumptions of 'norm' in order to build this depiction, yet how can i assess the norms of an unknown audience? I can't. As such, i must first make a guess about these norms by constructing what i believe to be universals - universal conceptions of 'clean.' But who am i to construct a universal measurement of cleanliness with limited experience? And why should i expect you to have the same mental model? Reading a profile of someone requires the reader to not read on their terms, but on the terms of the presenter. What is the presenter trying to say about themselves? What context are they in when describing themselves? How can you determine their sense of norms? Of course, this is not something that one can simply do by staring at a profile. Most social tools center on profiles and while we're becoming accustomed to reading and constructing these profiles, observing and developing productions of identity in mediated contexts is not a naturalized activity. So long as we're building tools that rely on this, we must consider the complications that are being introduced by profiles instead of bodies. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:51 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) November 29, 2004hands-on science for adults??Does anyone know of any good programs where you can travel to some place and spend a month or so doing intensive science learning as an adult while being out in the world where science is real? Think semester-at-sea for adults. Think learning geology while hiking in Peru. Thinking learning animal biology while in Africa. Think studying linguistics while working with people who speak a creole. Think adult Space Camp. A braniac vacation really. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 6:56 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0) apophenia and recursive momentsLast week, i joined a friend and some of his friends to see a DJ spin. We ended up at the Rx Gallery which made me smile since i had last been there for the Urban Probes event. We both had the eerie feeling that we should know people in that room, given the music and the vibe, yet we did not know anyone other than those we went with. Upon penetrating the packed room, i found Brian Knep's Healing installation which gave me a fantastic grin, remembering hours spent playing with Anya at SIGGRAPH (she was obsessed with Healing and i knew Brian from college). Another piece at Rx struck my fancy, as folks tried to dance in front of it for it to record their patterns. I forgot about this, but i was reading Caterina's post where she referenced Scott Snibbe, another old Brown pal. I surfed to his site only to find an image of Deep Walls, the exhibit from Rx. The whole point of this project is to create cinematic memories and i couldn't help but think about how reading this injected recursive memories into my headspace, as i spiraled into all directions brought on by finding these, bridging connections over time, place and intention. I love apopheniac moments. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) November 28, 2004Urban renewal, the wireless wayA feature in Salon tomorrow called Urban renewal, the wireless way features the work of some of my dear friends - Eric, Michele, and Joe. They weave a narrative through what it means to live in an urban technologically enabled society. Good for anyone interested in urban planning or wireless culture. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 10:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Visualizing FOAFFor all of you FOAF fiends out there, check out Paolillo & Wright's chapter on "Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web: Techniques and Challenges for Visualizing FOAF". I have a feeling that it might be of great value since it deals with how people are using FOAF and how you back away from it to see what dynamics are occurring. [I still hold my reservations about FOAF even though i really like this paper.] Category: visualization
Posted by zephoria at 5:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) "LJ Killer"Rachelle Waterman's LJ is filled with posts about her life, depicting not only her daily activities, but also her depression and thoughts of suicide. Yet, it is the final entry that has caught the attention of so many: "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered." A few days later, reports started appearing that showed Rachelle was arrested for the murder and has since been arraigned. Thousands of speculative LJers started posting in threads on her final entry. While some were trying to understand what was happening, much of the thread devolved into obscenity. The Anchorage Daily News has a poignant article on the situation: People flock to online journal after 16-year-old's arraignment Category: LiveJournal
Posted by zephoria at 1:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) November 26, 2004Why do you articulate your relationships?[From OM] When Friendster, et. al. were the hottest thing on the block, hordes of people jumped online to articulate their social network for everyone to see. Analysts thought that they were buying in to the "goals" of the services - dating, job seeking, classified, etc. There's no doubt that many people gained value from these services but is this why everyone was so keen on articulation? Articulation is not new. Building an address book is a form of articulating relationships. The address book is considered to be a tool of memory, yet what assumptions are being made when an entry is created? I would guess that anyone who scribbles a new name in assumes that they will have some reason to contact that person again. There is an assumption of a future connection aided by the knowledge of a current or past connection. Address books are an articulation of our connections to others with pointers for locational reference. The primary purpose of an address book is to look up an individual. It is our own personal people dns. In the technology sphere, there are plenty of tools that incorporate articulated relationships into their application. Consider LiveJournal or AIM. In both applications, one articulates the people one wants to keep in touch with and uses each application to connect with others voices either through static or synchronous text. Both are tools for presence and communication - the articulation is key to engaging with these people. What then are the motivations behind articulating relationships in publicly articulated social networking tools? Certainly, many participated simply because it was the cool thing to do. For some, PASNTs offer a nouveau address book where people can have access to a collection of one's relationships for future use. For others, it is a mechanism to keep in touch with others' evolving representations of self. Yet, the public aspect of this articulation takes on an additional role, that of signaling connection (a topic that Judith Donath and i took up in Public Displays of Connection). Because the public signaling is so deeply rooted in PASNTs, this is off-putting for some people. Not everyone wants to engage in this practice which can be seen as pretentious at best. This is not necessarily an empowering feature for everyone, particularly those who keep their relationships dear to their heart and see no value in public signaling. While all social people maintain relationships, there is nothing consistent about how people maintain them, yet these tools require some consistency. Who does this limit and how? For some, private articulation for a particular purpose (memory, reference to a connection, presence) can feel quite comfortable and thus the people engaged in tools that permit this may not feel nearly as comfortable in ones that require public performance of relationships. I would be very curious to know what motivates others to articulate their relationships and in what situations. If you think about your blogrolling habits, your be-Friending on PASNTs, your address books, your IM buddies, why do you choose to put people there? What purpose does this serve in your life? Category: social software
Posted by zephoria at 1:19 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0) November 25, 2004i am thankfulI am thankful for being alive and for having the most magnificent friends and family. I am thankful for the opportunities that i have had to follow my dreams. I am humbled by the privilege that i have. I am thankful for my life. Thanksgiving for me has always had conflicting resonances. I was born on the day that we celebrate the kindness of a people before genocide. It is during this week that i reflect on the past year and seek to reground myself. I will return shortly to the intellectual babble but right now, i am just appreciating life for a moment. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) November 22, 2004oh what a life
Namaste. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 2:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) November 18, 2004deconstruct this!
Is this what security techies aspire to be like? Sooo funny. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:41 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0) Loews Hotel: Become a Metro ManYou love him just the way he is... and just the way he will be after a Loews Metro Man package Our unique Metro Man package will help any man polish his look, improve his culinary skills and refine his taste... all in the name of becoming more attractive and dashing to women. The Loews Metro Man is a 24-hour transformation featuring services to educate, pamper and makeover a man. He'll get a two-hour tasting meal, etiquette info, wine knowledge, manicure or pedicure, haircut and shave and a consultation with a personal shopper*. The package includes all this plus accommodation for one night. For even more enhancements, there's also the Metro Man Deluxe. It's two nights which builds on all of the above services, and adds things like waxing, a facial, dental bleachings and more*. The Deluxe package is tailor-made for each man, and is priced accordingly. OMG. ROFL. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Has anyone done this??? Category: fun links
Posted by zephoria at 12:06 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) Google ScholarGoogle Scholar is a fantastic new tool for the researchers out there. You can search citations and find publications. Yippeee! Category: digitalness
Posted by zephoria at 10:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1) November 17, 2004Depressed?
Make sure to check out the Depressed Democrats' Guide to Recovery by Mark Fiore. Category: politics
Posted by zephoria at 2:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) sociability first, technology second[From OM] In September, Joel on Software crafted a blog entry entitled It's Not Just Usability that can be read both as a positivistic call to action and a scathing critique on the current methods used for understanding how design should connect with people. Personally, his words brought me great joy and should be deeply considered by designers, technologists and users of technology. In design, there's a desire to understand the relationship between the human and the computer. Interface designers are often trying to understand the psychology of the "user" so that they can offer an interface that will make the tasks at hand easy to do. This is the reason that cognitive and quantitative psychologists have been so involved in human-computer interaction. Social tools don't fit well into the HCI paradigm. While the interface is important, it is not as important as the way social relationships are negotiated. Napster was not a good interface, but the social desire to share overcame that. Many of the Articulated Social Networking tools are the same - a pain in the ass to use, but worth it because of the social component. The ways in which tools for mediated sociability are conceptualized and analyzed must shift. No longer can we simply study how the user interacts with the tool, but instead we must consider how people interact with each other and how the tool plays a part in that interaction. Note: people, not users. The tool is not a primary actor in sociability, but a tool that mediates. People should not be framed in terms of the tool, but the tool framed in terms of their use. This means focusing first on the types of social interaction desired and THEN on the technology necessary to instrument that interaction. A technology first approach is a crap-shoot. It can work simply because people may find a way to repurpose the tool to meet their needs. But without an understanding of the social behaviors that should be supported, one should not expect the technology to be valued simply because it is good technology. Focusing on social interaction does not mean simply focusing on an activity unless you broaden the term activity to include identity construction, play and reputation management. These are all aspects of sociability and part of why people use these tools. Think about the role of an architect. An architect designs a public space not for a limited number of activities, but for an increased possibility of social interaction that will be extensible enough to support the diversity of ways in which people wish to interact. This is the kind of mindset that is needed. Focusing on sociability means understanding how people repurpose your technology and iterating with them in mind. The goal should not be to stop them but to truly understand why what they are doing is a desired behavior to them and why the tool seemed like a good solution. A park bench wasn't made for stretching but just because people do stretches on it rather than sitting on it doesn't mean you should stop them. Taking away the park bench stops the sitters as well as the stretchers. Figure out how to support the stretchers and the sitters so that they are not in conflict but both appreciative of the park bench. Think about Friendster. Friendster was built for a very specific activity, yet people's interactions with the technology were about a whole range of social management. Their activities grew from their conception of how Friendster fit into their social lives. They did not see it as a dating site, yet the company kept trying to force them to see it that way. This was foolish. Instead, the company should've tried to support the wide ranges of behaviors in a way that was not conflicting. Consider the pub. Some people go to the pub to be voyeurs, some to date, some to socialize with friends, some to just drink. Pubs rarely try to make everyone have the same agenda - why should online services? Much of this has been said before but not much of it has been heard. If we want to thinking about designing social tools, we must be prepared for a shift in mindset. If you find yourself thinking "those stupid users", you're in the usability frame not the sociability frame. Just as there are no stupid questions in the classroom, there are no stupid users in technology. People who use technology are offering a roadmap to different social behavior around technology than we normally consider. Pay attention to them. Category: social software
Posted by zephoria at 1:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1) reprieve (new Ani song)For the Ani fans out there, i just uploaded lyrics to Reprieve. In theory, one can watch her perform this song on FabChannel but i can't get the damn thing to work. and the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war It made me smile to see that she played De Melkweg on 9/11. I will never forget seeing her there years ago with about 100 other people when she started singing "In a coffee shop in a city which is every coffee shop in every city EXCEPT THIS ONE... what's up with this town??" This devolved into a very funny conversation about coffee shops. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:07 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) November 16, 2004announcing "Operating Manual For Social Tools"While i was traveling, a new site that i've been helping with launched: Operating Manual for Social Tools. Stowe Boyd, David Weinberger and i are exploring what the issues are critical to consider in the process of building social tools. This is a topically-driven blog that is sponsored by ZeroDegrees. [Given the crap i've gotten about this, i've written an explanation in the extended entry.] We will be covering various issues relevant to the social tech space and this may be of interest for those of you who really liked my "connected selves" blog that got rolled into my main one. I should note that i'll probably repost some of my blog entries from there here for my own searchability. An explanation... OMST is using blog software. It is not trying to be a journalistic project; please don't evaluate it on those terms. I work as a consultant. I give talks for money. I write reports for money. I do research for money. Usually, these activities are private and directed at a small group of people in a particular company. OMST is a public project. ZeroDegrees is sponsoring it; i am consulting for Stowe, who is running the project. What i post on OMST is not dependent on ZD at all. I know nothing about what ZD is doing. They simply want bright people to actually put some of their brains towards public production of ideas around social tools. I often do this on my own as it is (and i often get pressure from folks on my blog). Frankly, supporting me to blog about this stuff motivates me to get off my toosh and write entries that are of value to ZD and any readers interested in social tools. Apophenia is my venting space where i write what i feel like and i get very very cranky when people ask me to write about the things that are of value to them. This is *my* space and i feel a deep need to maintain those boundaries. OMST is a service to the community and to ZD and i very much respect ZD for being willing to make it a public project and not just a set of reports that are for their private consumption. My hope is that it will make everyone a bit more aware. This project is in no way connected to any of my other consulting or internship work nor to my responsibilities as a PhD student. What i write on OMST is what i think is best for people interested in this topic including ZD, not what i think ZD wants to hear. In other words, i am operating as a consultant and a public intellectual not an advertising whore. I hope this clarifies. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:21 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1) psychological overhead of responsibilityA friend asked if i wanted children. This prompted a long conversation about what i call psychological overhead and i'm curious to know if there's a proper psychology term for it. Psychological overhead is the amount of cognitive work that must be done to make certain that a responsibility is taken care of. In other words, if two members of a household split all chores but one is in charge of making sure that they're split and completed, there is no equality because the psychological overhead is at play. It takes a rare housing situation for everyone to equally maintain the psychological overhead. This connects to children because in most families that i know, one person maintains psychological overhead even when the responsibilities are purportedly shared. This is almost always the mother in a het parenting structure. This is the person who will by default take care of things or ask the partner to take care of things. In older children, this inevitably is the parent who is by-default called when something happens. This conversation turned to queer culture and how psychological overhead plays out in marginalized populations. It is usually the queer person's responsibility to translate society's het structures into a model that makes sense. Queers also typically verbalize their experiences in a het structure in order to be accepted (fuck you HRC). There's a psychological overhead of responsibility here, whereby the queer gets to do all the translation for the normative community. Anyhow, i have to imagine that psychologists have a term for this and something that can be read. Anyone? Category:
Posted by zephoria at 10:19 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) November 14, 2004declaring ostrich
There are 12 unopened NYTimes in my living room. I've just /dev/nulled all mailing lists that mention politics at all. I apple-w blogs that mention red, blue or purple faster than a fundamentalist finding porn. I changed my morning radio station to not-NPR. I've always been told that escapism is bad. I respect that view. But i went running full speed into a tornado and standing in the eye of the storm on November 2, i realized that i needed to duck before i got picked up and whisked away into nether-nether land. Politics are in the air; i haven't stopped breathing, but i'm trying not to light fires either. My political allies are too angry, too confused, too frustrated to think clearly or move forward in an effective manner. I can't join them in that state because i just end up angry with them and that's not fruitful. Sometimes, deconstruction is not the best tool in the shed. I know that this nightmare has temporal and spatial implications beyond my imagination and it is harrowing to hear the anger and fear in the voices of those beyond our borders. I just cannot hold on to all of these messages and emotions without crumbling. I'm a true liberal. I believe that i need to be personally strong in order to fight on a larger scale. I can't fight with anger - i must fight with respect. I need to find grounding and in order to do that, i believe that stepping back is healthy and responsible. I live in an overly mediated world and sometimes, i just have to go back to my roots. Instead of reading the paper, i'm doing yoga. Please respect me on this one. And if you're on one of those bazillion lists whose topic is purportedly not politics, please understand that i am taking a break. PS: This is not a long-term solution, just a temporary one for me to get grounded. Category: politics
Posted by zephoria at 3:45 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (2) November 12, 2004considering the goals of social network modeling[From OM] At CSCW, one attendee asked me what made Friendster a social network? He was frustrated because the term social network did not simply refer to a group of people who could be modeled in a graph-like structure, yet that is how it is being used these days. I have to wonder if the anthropologists are giggling since their term for the same behavior has not been co-opted. Both sociologists and anthropologists have tried to understand and model social relationships since the beginning of their fields. They want to know how these relationships are connected with practices, culture, organizations, etc. They want to know how these relationships affect how people interact with one another. Whenever they try to model these relationships, their goal is not simply to build a graph, but to construct a visual representation that will allow them to better understand people, society and culture. The end goal is not the graph and the graph is not meant for the people being studied. Conversely, consider what all of the social networking sites have attempted to do. The goal in constructing the relationship structures is certainly not for a researcher to make sense of society and culture, but for those represented to be empowered by the articulation and representation of their relationships. Rather than a researcher attempting to understand and model what s/he susses out about others' relationships, the represented are doing the modeling. Furthermore, their models are being used by others and this affects the ways in which they model their relationships. Rather than actually analyzing the practical effects of the differences in these approaches, i'd like to encourage the readers to really reflect on the divergent goals. We often speak about the need for activities once networks are built, but we don't consider the underlying goals. In many ways, i feel as though the goals are what affects the activities, not vice versa. The goals of sociological networks are very clear, but what are the goals of people-generated networks for public consumption? What are the goals of the designers vs. the goals of the people producing these representations? Is one motivation to empower people to find new ways to relate? Is the goal to have a more efficient way of spreading memes? Is the goal to make people reflect on their relationships? What are the goals? Category: social software
Posted by zephoria at 6:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) youth: exotification and hysteriaIn a cover story on urban youth in India called Aliens! (ref Stowe Boyd and Dina Mehta), Business World begins the article with "If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is the species known as 'youth' from the moon orbiting the distant Pluto?" This kind of framing inevitably worries me because it signifies that the writer is going to speak about youth as a fascinating 'other' where adults exotify youth. Throughout the article, they refer to different age groups as different species while trying to classify different groups of youth using models that would make sense to adults. ::cringe:: Deeper inside the magazine is an article entitled IMHO*, IM Rulz. I begin the article concerned. For the most part, the article discusses practices, but there are embedded assumptions that really get my goat. Here's the one that upset me the most: IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans. In July, i spoke about how designers are building technology off of the assumption that everyone has ADD. We often joke about the fact that the MTV generation has no attention span, but i have never seen anything that empirically validates this. Without concrete data, i'm absolutely convinced that this is just an adult projection onto youth. There is no doubt that the prescription of ritalin and adderall are way up but there are tons of reports on misdiagnosis of ADD. Interestingly, more kids are diagnosed in the wealthier districts of the States. Why? Well, frankly, almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they're on these meds and pressure parents who are determined that their kids get into the best schools and calm down and otherwise act proper are bound to see this as a perfect remedy. That does not mean that these kids have less attention than any previous generation. What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there's almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves "is there something better?" Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something. And what is this deep-seated need for constant stimulation that they are referring to? And why is this particular to youth? Aside from my irritation at their projection of ADD onto youth, i think that their causal relationships are all screwy. Youth exist in an always-on culture. With mobile phones and computers at their finger tips, they are able to maintain relationships constantly, unbarred by physical geographical constraints. Always-on culture is not the product of a deep-seeded need for constant stimulation. Alternatively, the perception of this need for stimulation probably results from the opportunity of having an always-on culture. Identity formation amongst youth is deeply rooted in being able to connect and relate to others of the same age. Remember the paper cup phones that kids would string between neighboring houses to talk late at night? Remember teenagers and land lines? IM is no different. It's just a new opportunity to keep in contact with one's friend group, not the production of some mental deformity. My gut reaction says hysteria around IM culture has to do with hysteria over what adults don't understand about youth because of generational differences with regard to access to media. Thus, i groan. Category: youth culture
Posted by zephoria at 4:05 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (1) calling non-profit bloggers...it would be interesting to build a public aggregator of blogs by non-profit and activist groups. Please list any you know in the comments section and I'll start putting it together as soon as I gain critical mass. Note: Please add them to the comment's section of Rebecca's blog. (Tx: joho) Category: blogging
Posted by zephoria at 2:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) November 11, 2004on being a talking headI just finished giving a talk at Sosial og Digital. It is 10AM in Norway and 3AM in Chicago. I spent the last hour talking into the ether about Friendster with virtually no visual and absolutely no audio feedback. It was a very very very peculiar thing. Here's a segment of my pre-amble for everyone's amusement: There's something very odd about this situation. It's 2AM in Chicago. I'm sitting in a musty hotel room by myself, talking into a camera that is being projected into a different time zone. It is dark outside and even with all the lights turned on, it is still dim here. The ethernet cable is screwed into the table so that i won't steal it. As a result, i'm sitting at a wooden desk which faces a very large mirror. Of course, the first question i got was to prove that i'm not just a Fakester talking to them from next door. I love it! Category: reflections & rants
Posted by zephoria at 1:10 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0) November 9, 2004Flash Forums and ForumReaderIf you don't believe that visualizations can be used to navigate large bodies of data, you MUST check out the work done at IBM called Flash Forums and ForumReader (Kushal Dave, Martin Wattenberg, Michael Muller). Kushal presented the work at CSCW and it without a doubt the most compelling work i saw here this year. Their ForumReader is ideal for addressing forums with massive audience participation and a need to navigate crazy amounts of data with varying levels of quality (think Slashdot). FANTASTIC work! Category:
Posted by zephoria at 8:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1) apologiesI've gotten quite a few messages from folks concerned that i stopped blogging. I didn't. I'm just traveling and not able to blog this week. Apologies! Coming back soon! Category:
Posted by zephoria at 8:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) November 3, 2004Scoping "Social Tools"[From OM] I've never enjoyed coming up with pithy terms, labels or titles. While i loathe this form of production, i recognize that articles need a title and a phenomenon needs a label. We need common language to talk particular issues or sites. For this reason, i have acquiesced to the term "social tools" even though my deconstructionist tendencies cringe at the limitations of this particular term. Instead of deconstructing the term, which will inevitably lead to dismissal, i think that it would be proper to begin this project by scoping what i believe we are addressing. I would like to begin by scoping "social tools" in the context of this blog's intentions. Perhaps doing so will provide a framework for future discussions or at least articulate the boundaries that i will use in constructing my posts. Let me begin by acknowledging that this term has striking parallels in intention and consideration to "social software." For this reason, i think that it might be prudent to consider Christopher Allen's attempt to trace the evolution of the term, my concerns with the term, and Clay's disagreement with me. This should provide the right amount of angst and echo-chamber behavior to begin. Now let's add the positivist spin. When one is social, one is inevitably interacting with other people, whether they are intimate friends or strangers. Sociability may include (non)verbal communication, shared behaviors, movements towards community creation or productions that lead to the creation and maintenance of a society. To be social is not simply to communicate, but to engage in practices dedicated that will affect the relationship between people. Social tools (or software, technologies) are fundamentally the tools dedicated to helping people be social. Tools for instant messaging, blogging, emailing, social networking, photo-sharing are all tools to help people be social. One could argue that tools that help people create content generally may help them in sociability. For example, if emacs helps me build software that ... I respectfully disagree with this approach. In scoping social tools, i am only interested in the tools that not only allow for and encourage sociability, but are designed for such. Furthermore, social tools are seen by their participants as first about sociability and second about content production. Of course, there are always exceptions - there are certainly bloggers who have no intention of being sociable. For this reason, i see social tools as a radial category and i am only interested in the prototypical tools and behaviors. When appropriate, i will address the non-prototypical cases, but that is not going to be my emphasis. There are a series of features that many prototypical social tools have: - textual, audio or visual communication capabilities - opportunity for identity formation and projection (not limited to profiles) - social networking (exposed or unexposed, articulated or behavioral) - "speaker"/audience relationships (and thus, power dynamics) In most social tools, the content might be the most visible production, but for most participants, it is these features that motivate participation, as these allow for sociable interaction. These are also the features that signify the context in which content production is occurring. For this reason, my posts will be centered on these features first, the social tools' participants second and the actual technologies third. Category: social software
Posted by zephoria at 4:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) the mourning afterI voted in SF before heading to LA to watch the returns with Justin, Mary, Barlow and Friendz. As the night progressed, depressing returns made it hard to engage. I watched Jon Stewart instead. I went to USC where i ended up in an intersection with ecstatic Bush/Cheney fans celebrating. Onlookers hung their heads or scowled at their audacity, shocked at their value system. I just started crying. I boarded the plane which was on its second leg with folks from Ohio, Move On folks were on board, somber. DNA sampling deteriorating innocence until proven guilty, institutionalized homophobia, a country divided. This land is not my land. The free are no longer home here and what does braveness have to do with war? My friend Jo Guldi sent the following to me this morning. I thought it would be good to share. In one of those sunset-rosy history-channel specials, the imperially-jawed Simon Schama says that in the 1930s the British could see the specter of history stalking among them like a wooly mammoth, parading down the streets of London, as soldiers and civilians blinked and realized that their world had changed. Category: politics
Posted by zephoria at 1:58 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (4) November 1, 2004Vote!I will be voting tomorrow morning. I realize this election is going to be absurd, but i feel as though it is my duty as a patriot to cast my ballot. I hope everyone else who has the privilege to vote in this country takes that responsibility seriously. What we do here will affect us and the world we live in for years to come. It is a pity that so few people stand up for their values and beliefs. My hope is that everyone who can will join me in voting tomorrow, in saying that our future does matter to us. I support John Kerry. (See Technorati). Category: politics
Posted by zephoria at 8:17 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) |
I'm declaring ostrich.