Check out the homepage for the RSA conference. The representation of masculinity and tech savior has me laughing hysterically. Drawing for the fears of prohibition, this savior/detective/corporate icon requires a gun to secure us all. And that red tie flowing – what on earth is that to represent?
Is this what security techies aspire to be like? Sooo funny.
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OMG. ROFL. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Has anyone done this???
Google Scholar is a fantastic new tool for the researchers out there. You can search citations and find publications. Yippeee!
Make sure to check out the Depressed Democrats’ Guide to Recovery by Mark Fiore.
[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.
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
and i’ve said too much already but i’ll tell you something more
to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
so girl if that shit ain’t up to you, then you simply are not free
cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs i grow to term
to the expression that i wear, all i really own is mei mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve
and in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age
feminism ain’t about equality, it’s about reprieve
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.
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.
A 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?
I’m declaring 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.
[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?