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May 28, 2005

bye!

I will be gone from May 29-July 3. I'm off to Thailand and then in New York with my family (with a conference in there). Email has been shut off. My normal email addresses send a bounce message before proceeding to /dev/null; the ones for mailing lists, blogs, random mail, etc. go straight to /dev/null. I have no intention of blogging and i'm not taking a camera. It's time for yoga, meditation and beach. I intend to relax to the best of my ability.

Have a great June!!

Category: reflections & rants

Posted by zephoria at 4:20 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

May 26, 2005

podcasting: connecting directly via naming and practice

So, when podcasting first emerged and people told me that it was *the* answer to blogging, i rolled my eyes. I have zero interest in listening to random blogs. While i'm happy to scan across large quantities of text, there's no way that i have any desire to listen to blogs or produce a podcast. None.

From the beginning, i said that i would like podcasting when NPR was podcasting, when electronic music was podcast and when it was otherwise adopted by people who know how to turn voice into an art. In theory, amateurism is interesting to me; in reality, i don't want to listen to it.

This morning, i woke up to the word podcast coming out of NPR every few seconds. ABC is podcasting. Wow... i'm impressed. Podcasting is not that old but it has already reached mainstream news. But this actually make sense. They already produce large quantities of media ready-to-go for mobile listening. Why not just deploy it in a new way? This makes complete sense. They are doing their own TiVo for radio (and for TV). The practice is already there. While audio-bloggers have to develop a new practice, radio and TV folks have this medium down. Podcasting does what i've wanted Audible to do wrt radio for a while. And it is simpler and quicker.

Second, think about the value of the term "podcast." What was the number one device sold at Christmas? iPod. The term "pod" is hip, cool and yet mainstream as hell.

I'm super super stoked that the mainstream media has taken this and ran with it - this is impressively fast adoption. There's only one problem... how are they going to feel when we forward through the ads and NPR's annoying requests for money? Are we going to see the same TiVo fights on podcasting? Are deals going to be made such that podcasting is limited to just the mainstream folks or iPods are created to not allow forwarding? Goddess, i hope not. As much as i have no interest in listening to any audio-blogs, by all means, let those who do relish in it.

What are the costs of mainstream adoption during the early adopter phase? What does it mean when it fits so well with a practice and yet, allows for a different form of it?

Category: social software

Posted by zephoria at 10:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

ah, the magical touch

I know better. I know better. So, when i started down the path of bouncing my mail for vacation, i figured it had to be easy. This is me.

So, started out with SIMS bouncing per the suggestion. Nope, didn't work. Why? Couldn't get formail to get called to save my life. So, switched plans, figured out how to get vacation working so that it sent messages, overrided the time stamp and the To/CC rules. In the process, killed my procmail file which spun 600 messages into chaos. This was great except that everything forwarded from Netspace to SIMS (a.k.a. all danah.org messages) sent vacation to Netspace which was bad.

OK. So i tried to set up vacation on Netspace to mimic SIMS to do all of the danah.org messages. Vacation doesn't exist on Netspace. So we went back to formail which worked there.

In the process, of course, i was fucking around with my procmail files and managed to fubar everything. Procmail was going into autoloops, mail was going goddess only knows where, LINEBUF was filling up, bounces weren't getting sent. OMG.

So, getting everything set up only took a total of 16 hours and the unbelievably awesome help of Glenn, Adam, Greg, Kevin, Kevin, and Thomas. Oh, and a lot of bitching support from everyone else. Needless to say, this is not something i should've been doing today. But dear god.

The end result:

:0
| (formail -r -i 'From: Mailer Daemon Angel ' -i 'Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details'; cat /home/grrl/.vacation.msg) | sendmail -oi -t

(and)

:0
| /usr/bin/vacation -t1s -j dmb

with a .vacation.msg that says:

From: Mailer Daemon Angel
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details

----- All mail to danah is currently auto-deleted -----
Bounced: <$SUBJECT>
(reason: danah needs a break)

----- Transcript of session follows -----

procmail: Refused to save
550 5.1.1 .... User exhausted

Daemons have decided to destroy danah's mail so that she may rest without fear of returning to the dreaded INBOX. All messages sent to danah from May 29-July 3 2005 will not be delivered. If it is still important, contact danah again after July 3. Perhaps, if you feel so inclined, invite the Daemons to visit your server so that you too may rest without email.

----- Do not resend until after July 3 -----

Say bye-bye. Your message has just found a new home in /dev/null. ::wave:: bye bye cute message.... bye bye....

Category: techno doom

Posted by zephoria at 10:13 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

May 25, 2005

dr. toast : oz so late - music to chill to

In prep for vacation, i've been organizing my iPod. I went through the hellish process of creating genres for everything and generating Playlists. One of my favorite genres - psychill - was sadly lacking. It's the genre that i listen to the most because it's ideal calm music to work to. Yet, i only had three artists there - bluetech, Shpongle and dr. toast. Part of the problem is that i honestly don't know what else belongs in this genre.

So, i approached Toast to ask for good things in his genre and, bless his heart, he made me a mix of vacation music to chill by. In return, i wanted to do a shout-out for anyone who's looking for good music to chill or work to. His album oz so late is just beautiful and i've listened to it perpetually since it came out. Click here for some song samples.

Category: fun links

Posted by zephoria at 11:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

May 24, 2005

Lessig working to end child abuse

As head boy at a legendary choir school, Lawrence Lessig was repeatedly molested by the charismatic choir director, part of a horrific pattern of child abuse there. Now, as one of America's most famous lawyers, he's put his own past on trial to make sure such a thing never happens again. -- New York Metro

Pedophile inclinations result from an illness, but execution of those desires constitutes rape. And rape is always an abuse of power for which society must do everything in its power to eliminate.

Thank you Larry for having the strength to come forward with your story and use your privilege to put an end to this.

Ni una mas.

Category: gender & sexuality

Posted by zephoria at 10:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

May 21, 2005

vacation + plea to unix geeks

I wanted to remind folks that i will be departing next weekend for one month; there will be no email. If there's anything i need to take care of before i go, please let me know now.

Also, can i get a little help from the unix geeks out there? I have most of my procmail set up. All mailing list messages will be sent to /dev/null and that works like a charm. What i can't figure out how to do is get the bounce line working for everything else. A friend suggests that it's a combination of formail and sendmail and sent me this to plug into procmail:

:0
*
| (formail -r; cat "danah has turned off email for June 2005; please re-write in July if it is still relevant") | sendmail -oi -t

I feel lame because i don't know enough about either formail or sendmail (and the manpages aren't getting me anywhere - more lameness). Since that doesn't actually work, what do i need to do? Help?

(Once i get that working, i'll post it for all of the rest of you who want to kill email during vacation. There's no need to come back to hell and void your entire relaxing break.)

Category: techno doom

Posted by zephoria at 9:25 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

categorization negatively affects memory

Yo, Clay: "As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences." This article suggests that new research is revealing the complex relationship between categorization (of different types) and memory. In short, the more you categorize, the less you retain and the less knowledge you have about something, the more you pay attention to it because you are unable to easily place it in a comfortable mental model for categorization and forgetting.

In other words, maybe all of my psycho-flipout about labeling things might be my brain kicking into memory protection mode?

(Tx: Chloe)

Category: tagging

Posted by zephoria at 7:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2)

post secret

I can't remember who told me about PostSecret but it's become one of my favorite blogs. Each entry consists of a postcard that someone sent the curator to post. They are beautiful postcards with intriguing confessions.

Category: fun links

Tags: postsecret confession

Posted by zephoria at 6:53 PM | Comments (2084) | TrackBack (0)

16 hours

16 hours.... grading finals took 16 hours solid without breaks. As i imagined, some of it was utterly inspiring. One student created a question that showed how new media could be used to deconstruct new media (and its professors and GSIs). It totally took us to task and we loved it. Others showed new ways of combining work in this field that i had never considered. Of course, there were a few problems that broke my heart.

One thing that surprised me was how much pass/fail affects both group dynamics and students' attitudes. I took most of my classes pass/fail at Brown since i actively despise grades. Yet, it never affected my participation in a classroom. I never expected that i would simply pass by existing. I could never imagine screwing over a group of other students. Of course, i suspect that i got mostly As in P/F classes. I still worked my ass off. Much to my chagrin, i don't think that attitude is shared. My co-teacher (who only had P/F at his undergrad) and i were stunned at our anti-P/F attitude following this process. Both of us valued it immensely but it really wrecked a few things in our class.

Category: academia

Posted by zephoria at 3:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

May 19, 2005

programming an exam, teaching theory

My students' final exam is due tomorrow. I'm actually quite proud of the design of this exam because it plays on every aspect of new media, even in the design. First, it's combinatorial. Students write an essay for each artifact that they studied, choose two readings, two frameworks and one insight, write a question and answer it. It's not like most essay exams because it requires so much creativity and piecing together all that they learned. Yet, it will show what they're passionate about and help us see which readings mattered to them and which frameworks worked. Not only will it help us evaluate the students, it will let us evaluate the course itself. Conveniently, it's also something that can be done in takehome fashion without too much worry about cheating (because goddess knows i never want to prosecute another cheating case ever again).

The biggest problem i'm learning as students ask me questions is that they do not really know how to engage theoretical frameworks in an essay. In trying to explain this to them, i discovered a good method (which was recently confirmed by a friend who uses the same method). Tell students to imagine having a conversation with an author or authors about a subject. Ask them to imagine how that conversation would go, how they would offer different insights in the dialogue. Students have a tendency to treat texts from an external perspective, as though they just have to quote things verbatim. It's much more productive when they can think about how a theorist would deal with an issue and this results in much more interesting responses.

Students' exams are starting to pour in which is a bit terrifying. There are 60 students, 4 essays each and each essay is 500-1000 words. Plus, there are 12 final projects to grade. By the end of tomorrow, i need to have semester-long grades for all students. Teaching has given me a new respect for professors. I used to bitch about exams and essays but i didn't even consider how much work grading is. Luckily, the combinatorial final will mean that each essay will be new and interesting and i suspect that i'll learn a lot about new media from my students tomorrow.

Category: academia

Posted by zephoria at 7:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

visualizing news bias

Buzztracker is a visualization of the locations of Google News stories, letting you quickly see how litle of the world is actually covered by the news. This visualization complements Ethan Zuckerman's arguments about news coverage. What we need now are two maps - what the news covers and what the blogosphere covers. As much as Ethan's stats are useful, there's nothing like a map to let you viscerally get it.

Update:

Ethan has maps!! Check out:

The more red a country is, the more attention it's getting from the media source. The more blue, the less it's getting. The first map is of Google News over the past 14 days, the second is of blogs, surveyed by Blogpulse, over the last 90 days...

He has tons of these on his site.

Category: visualization

Posted by zephoria at 1:25 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

revenge of the sith

Yes, it is finals season and i'm on lock-down, but some rituals simply cannot be broken. On 18 May 1999, i flew back from Amsterdam (with a flight full of Star Wars fans) to celebrate Jon's birthday by watching the midnight showing of Episode I with a pile of friends in Seekonk. We had seen every re-release midnight opening night, celebrated by long goofy lines and various piercings (my piercer in Providence had a small Star Wars obsession). Jar Jar aside, we were dreadfully disappointed by Episode I. Yet, i returned for the sappy love story of Episode II, once again at midnight on opening night. Given ongoing disappointment, i had avoided even thinking about Episode III until i realized the release date. Jon and i giggled as we relived college years, celebrating his birthday by romping into the Metreon for a near midnight showing with a crowd full of light sabers and costumes, chanting and even executing "the wave" as people awaited dun-dun-de-dun...

When we walked out, we looked at each other and laughed. "At least nothing sucked" we both agreed. Light sabers galore, Episode III is nothing more than an action-packed filler piece to complete the puzzle. Little dialogue, no real passion, minimal substance. There's something strange about seeing a movie where you know the beginning and know the end and are just waiting to see the interpolation. It's been almost 28 years since the original one was projected - my entire life. What a funny end of an era. Of course, i don't think that anyone at the Metreon tonite saw the original release in the theatre. We all grew up with it and somehow, needed the finale. Maybe now we've grown up?

Category: reflections & rants

Posted by zephoria at 4:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

May 18, 2005

random ontology thoughts

Clay finally posted a piece based on his recent talks entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags (discussed on many-to-many. It's a must-read although i suspect it'll make some of the librarians squirm. The essay is structured in a narrative style, making it super accessible and offering anecdotes to frame very logical arguments. Yet, somehow, i still cannot resist the temptation to respond, albeit in a rambly way since i'm focused on finals. By and large, i agree with the essay but i think that Clay is missing a few things:

- issues of one-to-one and many-to-one
- cognitive overload
- problems of retro-activity
- category splits
- exponential tag growth
- user interfaces from hell

First, it's important to note that there's extensive slippage in this essay between four different kinds of classification schemas:
- one to many (periodic table, card catalogs)
- many to many (group del.icio.us)
- one to one (individual del.icio.us, personal bookshelves)
- many to one (also present in tagging)

You cannot discuss whether or not ontological classification works well without contextualizing the source and recipient participants as separate entities. Clay does an excellent job of comparing the one-to-many classification with the many-to-many, citing all of the reasons and places where many-to-many is much more effective. Embedded in this is a set of assumptions about why many-to-many is much more effective than one-to-one. Collective del.icio.us has far greater value than individual del.icio.us. With this same logic, on an individual selfish level, many-to-one is the most advantageous. The individual has to do little work beyond finding others who categorize in ways that feel right. This is the lazy tagger who relies on others to do the work.

I am that lazy tagger. I upload pictures onto Flickr and let others sort them out. I never bother to put more than one tag in my del.icio.us posts or my blog entries. Actually, i'm not lazy so much as cognitively overwhelmed by the process. Herein lies another important missing piece in Clay's puzzle. Yes, i know that most things can be placed in multiple categories but my brain goes into spazz mode dealing with this. I'm really good at finding one keyword, but when i can present multiple, i go into an infinite loop. Which ones are best? What about synonyms? Do i use first name or last name or both or nickname or ...? How do i mark which are the most salient tags? What if i forget a tag? Ack! ::implosion:: Herein lies the reason why i'm a dreadful tagger - i cannot cognitively deal with the task.

This makes me think - what cognitive shifts are required when people are asked to tag as flexibly as they wish? Why we certainly run around the world building mental models of things, we are rarely asked to explicitly categorize and when we are, our task is usually to organize physical things. Physical things do not have flexible, infinite possibilities. Thus, what Clay is arguing for is not something that we currently do. Such a shift is not necessarily accessible if not everyone is comfortable with the task. This becomes increasingly problematic when entire cultures have difficulty with the task.

Finally, not all classification efforts can take advantage of many-to-X. There are also still tasks where bookshelf real estate is a contextual factor and needs to be optimized. I would absolutely love to have collective action descend on my bookshelves or file system and organize that mess. Like Blockbuster, i have two schemes operating: time and topic. The bookshelves may be organized by topic, but the floor is organized by time - things that need to be dealt with now. There are file structures but there is also my Desktop. And as much as i'd be ecstatic to get rid of the folder metaphor, the idea of retro-actively tagging this is haunting.

Retro-activity is another issue that Clay fails to address. While tagging solutions are often useful going forward, going backwards in haunting. I've already spent 10 hour trying to get my books and papers into citeulike, but i'm probably only 1/10 of the way there. Retro-activity is also not simply a matter of once and done. After loading 20 books, i realized i missed a crucial tag and had to go back and start over. The problem of retro-activity is disturbingly recursive and thus exponential in time.

Another issue in tagging concerns splits in categories. In hierarchical systems, if i have a category "Asia" and the bookshelf gets too large, i can split it into two, go through the items in that category and split them. With tagging, i am faced with a far greater number of potential items and tags. Rather than splitting Asia, i add a new tag so that now i have Asia and Japan. Now with each new insert, i need to remember to add Asia and Japan instead of just Japan which would include Asia in a hierarchical system. If i fail to do this, i cannot look at the Asia tag and see what is also Japan. Flat structures can be advantageous, but they can also be completely troubling when not all tags are actually of equal weight.

Watching people tag things, i'm also painfully aware that they are still playing the real estate game depending on their own values and conceptualizations. While i have broken the category of theory into tons of separate categories and have one technology category, others have done the reverse. Certainly, many-to-X solves this but it is crucial to remember that people, not just librarians, think in this way.

All this said, i do agree that tagging is a great solution but i would not go so far as to say *the* solution because i still think there are issues that haven't been worked out because tagging does not solve all ontology issues. But i do think that the arguments that Clay makes are crucial.

Of course, my biggest beef with tagging is not actually at a structural level, but at an implementation level. Not a single tagging system is built to deal with the retro-activity problem. Editing tags requires editing each entry; systems aren't built to let me do group operations. Let me search through my data, circle relevant entries and add a new tag or subtract one. Group operations. Quickly and without little checkboxes. Give me a visual aid to see how my tags are overlapping so that i can quickly assess if i failed to tag something appropriately. Let me build local hierarchies as i see fit. Let me auto-associate tags so that i can add synonyms or abbreviations easily because i'm tired of writing LiveJournal and LJ because i want to tag it both ways so that i can see what others have done.

Let me easily combine tags when i screw up and write both fanfic and fan_fiction and realize later that i want them to be the same. While context is important, my own inconsistencies are not a context that i want to incorporate into a system.

Another issue is that tags grow exponentially and they're really hard to manage. I forget about tags that i even had and figuring out how to make certain that i give all appropriate tags to a new entry is an interface nightmare. I look at the long list of tags in del.icio.us or citeulike and cringe because i can't keep them all in my head. The interface for managing tags is a wreck. At least with personally created hierarchical tags, it's easy to find the category. Alphabetical is not the answer. Here i run into the Elizabeth/Liz problem that i have on my phone (whereby folks like Liz Lawley are inconveniently entered twice because i forgot that i put her in originally as Elizabeth). The more tags i create, the less usable the system is because managing tags is a process in itself.

Given this, i'm not certain that tagging is the solution to a large corpus - i think it gets equally as messy as with ontology. I also think that the problems of unstable entities are still present in tagging, only exacerbated by internal confusion.

Category: tagging

Posted by zephoria at 2:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

smart burnouts: my high school experience

When i first picked up Jocks & Burnouts, i was very reticent; the very terms in the title reflect outdatedness. But as i dove in, i realized that this was going to be a key text for my dissertation. It's an ethnography of American high school, looking at the categories that we all had. Jocks are the folks who participated in school activities and helped maintain the school's status quo. Burnouts are those who loathed the school's pseudo-parenting bullshit and did everything possible to rebel.

What i found painful reading this book is that i could not resist the masochistic desire to see how i fit into the picture. Interestingly, i found that it answered a comment that has haunted me for years. In the 9th grade, the school psychologist said that i had a 10% chance of graduating. In high school, i was neither or both a jock and a burnout. It has some history...

I spent my elementary school years in a working class townhouse neighborhood and was supervised by older kids in the neighborhood. My two closest friends were opposites - one would go on to become a national cello player while the other would become a complete burnout. I was already on the brink of getting myself into trouble.

In the 3rd grade, my mom got married and we moved to a shi-shi neighborhood in a new town. Again, i had two close friends - one troublemaker and one good girl who lived in my neighborhood. It was here where my troublemaking began. I staged protests at school and found new ways to visit the principal's office on a weekly basis. I was bored out of my mind and acting out.

By high school, we moved back to a working class townhouse neighborhood. I was dating the King Burnout, my best friend was the prom queen and i was involved with every activity on the planet while still regularly visiting the principal's office.

In my school, there was a third category - the smart burnouts. We certainly had jocks and burnouts but it was really the jocks and smart burnouts that maintained hegemony through their opposition, primarily because the full-fledged burnouts never even made it to school or votech to be a presence. The smart burnouts, on the other hand, were in the top classes even though they were always high as a kite. Yet, by senior year, many of the smart burnouts had dropped out or been institutionalized; the rest graduated with no record to speak of. A series of horrid events plagued them including a gang rape, a pen stabbed through one guy's throat and far too many arrests, one of which resulted in my boyfriend getting shipped off to the Navy in return for a clean record.

Here i was, straight As in the hardest classes, involved in every activity possible, spending most of my spare time outrunning cops, partying, doing drug runs, and otherwise on the brink of complete disaster. Yet, i was always sober and was able to negotiate both the smart burnouts and the jocks, although by the junior year, i had few jock friends.

Turning back to the book. The jock/burnout divide is most clearly correlated with class. Burnouts are poorer and their parents rely on older kids for childcare, resulting in burnouts having broad age-based networks that expose them to burnout culture earlier. Jocks' networks tend to be specifically age-based and their caretakers are adults. I went from having older kids in elementary to a grandmotherly babysitter in middle school. I went from knowing older kids in elementary to not in middle to once again in high school. Both my boyfriend and my cousin were much older and they were key features in my social life.

Unlike the burnouts in Eckert's book, the smart burnouts were working class but not neighborhood driven. That said, they smoked, partied and skipped school. They were regularly high in class and hung out in the parking lot.

Throughout this, my mother was an amazing source of support and she never pressured me in any direction, yet she was clearly a good girl, playing by all of the rules. I hated the school actively and let them know it, but at the same time, took advantage of whatever i could while there. Read through Eckert's lens, this mixture was undoubtedly confusing because i didn't fit into either category.

By the end of high school, with the collapse of the smart burnouts and my boyfriend forced into the Navy, i spent most of my time with five other people, none of which fit comfortably into the binary. We were all geeks but we also created plenty of trouble together, outside of the two categories. Yet, in one incident, my neighbor and dear friend was expelled. Since she was black, she knew she was going to be expelled regardless of whether she ratted out anyone else so she took the fall for everyone.

In reading this book, i can understand why they never expected me to graduate. From the school's perspective, i was one of the smart burnouts. The only difference was that i did activities instead of hanging out; i was also amazingly capable of doing homework during the class it was due so i never worried about that. The smart burnouts didn't make it. Interestingly, all of that small crew of six that i finished high school with did. The one who was expelled is now a professor.

It's weird to read a book and just cringe, knowing where it comes from. I still don't understand how i navigated those different worlds and ended up here and i couldn't give directions for anyone. I learned a lot by being on the edge of burnout land (or deep in it depending on perspective). That said, it made it damn hard to relate to people when i went to poshy ivy land.

I wonder how common smart burnouts are.... Eckert doesn't really account for them but they were the defining feature of the hegemonic dichotomy in my school.

Some notes on the first chapter

Category: reflections & rants

Posted by zephoria at 6:33 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

May 17, 2005

iPod help needed... automount issues in Tiger

I plug my iPod in, iTunes does it's thing and then it auto-unmounts. The problem here is that without it being mounted, Audioscrobbler doesn't let me update my iPod to tell it what all i've been listening to. This used to work but i have a sneaking suspicion that Tiger does everything via automount/unmount so that i can't stay connected to my iPod since they're afraid i'll steal something.

How do i manually mount my iPod so that i can run Audioscrobbler scripts on it?

(I've read the Apple docs but they don't solve my problem and are outdated.)

Category: techno doom

Posted by zephoria at 11:24 PM | Comments (223) | TrackBack (0)

technical updates

Yes, it's finals time. This means that i've done some sorting of my data resulting in new colors on this here blog. Also, i added categories although most of my entries don't have categories in them which is a bit of a problem. One day...

The main reason i did all of this is because of my alterity blog where i'm attempting to record some of the readings i do (although am reading faster than recording).

Also, in an effort to solve my increasingly problematic spam problem, Jay Allen installed a pseudo-captcha. Basically, at the bottom of my posts, it's going to ask you to answer a question that is obviously answerable. This should also work for visually impaired folks. If you have any problems with this, let me know!

Category: techno doom

Posted by zephoria at 4:20 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

May 16, 2005

impression management: blogs as terrible representations

I spent the weekend co-running the Social Software in the Academy Workshop which was mighty fun and stimulating (with scattered notes on the wiki). As i was rushing out, one attendee said he was so glad he came, it was good to see people in person. And then he said something about how i'm much nicer in person. Hmmm....

This comment definitely stung, although i don't think he meant it to. One of the problems with impression management in situations with unknown audiences and impossible-to-read reactions is that it's really difficult to gauge how you're being perceived. I have no clue how people envision me based on my digital persona except that folks always say that i'm much different in person. Conversely, my friends tell me that my blog is clearly a projection of me. But they can probably hear my voice in my ramblings.

I need to think about this more, but it's a really interesting problem. I've written about the problems with coarse data before, explicitly talking about what happens when we build models of individuals based on feedback like A/S/L. Given Aronsons' work (in brief, first impressions matter and are near impossible to overturn), coarse data is highly problematic. The thing about blogging is that it appears to be rich data, not coarse data. Yet, at the same time, how are the mental models of an individual connected to them? And worse, how do our models based on digital interactions fail to prepare us for what happens when we interact? This has huge implications on our ability to get to know people online.

I don't know why but i don't hold on to names. Ever. In any situation. This is actually very convenient for the digital/physical separation. I email with hundreds of people a day and yet, if i don't know them in everyday life, i won't build a model around their name and face. Instead, i build a model around friendly@yahoo.com or whatever. So, when i see friendly's name in my inbox, i have a mental model. The thing that i don't do is connect friendly to Sally Smith so when i meet Sally, i never remember having emailed with that person. It takes meeting Sally and then moving the physical conversation back to the digital for me to start to connect the pieces.

Of course, this can be quite embarrassing too. For example, i've read Mathemagenic for a long time and have talked with its author on various occasions. Separately, i regularly heard about a blogger named Lilia who my friends raved about. I met Lilia last month and immediately connected her with the person that my friends talked about. It took me a few hours before a friend slapped me over the head for having disconnected models of the same person and thus failing to realize that i should love Lilia 10 times more. Oops. (I love you Lilia!) Of course, this really sent me for a loop because the model i built of Lilia based on friends wasn't far off but the model based on Mathemagenic was a different world. I realized that somehow, the Radioland style had made me generically build a model of all Radioland users which is not particularly helpful at all.

So what are the mental models we build based on blogs? For being so rich, i suspect that they're really poor representations of people we don't know. Has anyone else experienced disconnects between blogs and the RL person? Or is this just me?

Category: social observations

Posted by zephoria at 9:21 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2)

May 14, 2005

Flickr Peep Show

Oh sweet! A Flickr peep show!

(tx MindTheGap)

Category: social software

Posted by zephoria at 3:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 13, 2005

training my mother to be a terrorist

I have flown 10 flights since April 14, the day that they banned lighters on planes. Last night, having forgotten the bagel knife in my backpack, i got lots of attention by the security folks. Yet, they still didn't do anything about my lighter. In fact, i have yet to have a lighter taken away from me. After each flight, i walk out to the smoking area with all of the other passengers who take their lighters out of their bags and torch their cigarettes. Ever since this ban, i have been witness to absurd numbers of conversations on the topic.

The conversations are typically framed in a question of how one can hide one's lighter. One 30-something year old woman talked about how she hid it near her vibrator because the security people wouldn't want to look at that. Others talked about hiding it with their keys or other "legitimate" pieces of metal. All in all, the conversations are hysterical because they are coming from people who would never conceive of hiding anything, people who only commit crimes by speeding. It's almost laughable because smokers are suddenly linking their practices with drug users (who often talk about how to hide substances while flying).

Why does anyone think that taking away lighters is a good idea? The vast majority of people who take lighters onto a plane are not criminals and they have no interest in behaving. They want to be able to smoke and they're starting to think like terrorists, starting to envision how they can hide property from the authorities. This is not actually solving any problem, simply creating more people who doubt the practices of the authorities. In fact, it is most likely to be damaging for the authority of the TSA. When people doubt this authority, the culture of fear will start to crumble. I can't complain about that, but seriously, what on earth are they thinking?

Category: social observations

Posted by zephoria at 2:54 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

May 11, 2005

dodgeball -> google

A while back, Dennis was coming into San Francisco and i conned him into coming to Google to give a brief talk to folks there before we went back to the city for drinks. I wanted them to hear what happened when you had articulated social networks where the cost of adding people was greater than zero. I have been fascinated with Dodgeball since it was an ITP project and Clay encouraged me to give them feedback. Apparently, some business folks showed up at that meeting and negotiations began.

Today, Dodgeball announced that they are combining forces with Google. Congrats Dennis and Alex!!

Category: social software

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psychology of guilt - homelessness in San Francisco

Around 3AM the other night, i was walking home from "exercise" when a man asked me for a quarter. All i had in my pocket was a $20, some smokes, an ID and my keys. I shrugged and said, sorry, i didn't have any money. And then i spent the rest of my walk tormenting myself about my reaction, about having lied.

The homeless situation in San Francisco haunts me. Nothing horrifies me more than the privileged folks i know who look at the folks on the street with disgust as though they deserve to be there for something they've done. Of the groups that i've talked to, there seem to be three distinct homeless populations:
- youth who come from abusive environments and escape to SF because the streets are safer than home
- mentally ill folks who would be better off in a care facility but since we don't have that infrastructure, they're on the streets
- folks who don't have the network structure, skills or opportunities to get out of the perpetual state of poverty (think: Subdivision

I hate the part of me that immediately thinks "well, i earned my money; i deserve to keep it" because, frankly, that's bullshit and i know it. So then i'm confused about what inside me runs to that excuse. Or to the million other excuses that my brain generates to justify why i am (not) giving money in a particular situation.

There are days when i find myself spending an extra $1 to take MUNI to BART so that i don't have to walk by the homeless folks on 16th. It brings me great heartache to witness this level of struggle. And yet, what is that avoidance about? That's not a healthy response either. And where does it come from? I know i'm not alone; folks run to their gated communities and suburbs to not have to deal. Of course, ignorance increases the problem. The visibility is critical for people to realize that this is a real endemic problem and seek solutions. But yet, ignorance is bliss.

I often give out food to folks, but sometimes i think this is more to assuage my guilt than to actually do any good. And that makes me feel more guilty.

What can one do? Homeless issues tend to be the key factor in my local voting choices, but look what good that is doing. ::sigh:: How do other folks resolve their emotions around this issue? How do you actually do something?

Category: social observations

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May 9, 2005

Perpetuating Intolerance: Microsoft and LGBTQ issues

I was horrified when i heard that Microsoft withdrew support for an anti-gay-discrimination bill. At first, i didn't believe it. I always thought of Microsoft as being super queer friendly. They had won awards for civil rights issues; many of my friends at Microsoft are LGBTQ-identified. Only a few years ago, when i was thinking of going back to industry, Microsoft had done an amazing job of recruitment, involving my girlfriend in the process (and in a trip to a spa), introducing me to other LGBTQ employees and giving me a nice queer guide to Seattle upon arrival. I was exceptionally impressed.

As i dove deeper, i became outright angry and horrified. The justification offered to the LGBTQ group at Microsoft was that they chose to take a "neutral" stand on controversial issues. WTF? "'cause if you're not trying to make something better / then as far as i can tell / you are just in the way" - Ani

Needless to say, queer folks everywhere got pissed. A prominent employee quit. Outrage poured in everywhere. Succumbing to pressure, Microsoft reversed its stance stating: "After looking at the question from all sides, I've concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda."

On one hand, i'm glad to see that pressure worked. On the other, i think that some education has to happen here. Whenever issues of marginalization come up, folks often fuck up and when the marginalized population gets pissed, they evaluate if they cries are loud enough. This is not actually a progressive approach. It requires marginalized people to demand their rights, to work extra hard, to always fight rather than forcing privileged folks to do a privilege check and think about what they are doing.

This is particularly problematic in queer issues because the common refrain from the straight world is "keep your sex life out of the professional sphere." It's often accompanied by "I don't bring my sex life to work, why should you?" There are a *lot* of problems with this. Most obviously, take a look at photos on people's desks, who they bring to company events, who they talk about going home to. "But that's not about sex!" Neither is a queer identity. The only reason straight folks think it's about sex is because in order to grapple with a queer identity, they have to bring sex into the picture. Queer issues at work are rarely about sex - they are almost always about identity. It's about being comfortable with who you are, having the right to love and be loved, having the infrastructure to support your loved one, etc.

There is a hegemonic assumption of straightness and it penetrates this culture to the core. Last week, at the airport, a little girl with her mom looked up at me (traveling alone) and asked "Where's your husband?" What was i to say? Instead, i stammered.

Straight folks ask me why queer folks always have to remind everyone that they're queer. Guess what? Every marginalized population consistently reminds you of their identity. Queerness just isn't written on the body in the same way. We remind you because we're tired of being invisible. We remind you because invisibility is damaging at every level of society and the more invisible we let ourselves be, the more oppression occurs.

Companies think that they have no responsibility in social issues. Bullshit. Companies are societal infrastructure and when they choose not to get involved, they maintain status quo in the most conservative ways possible. Not getting involved is an act of making people invisible. Companies are hegemonic in their very nature and to be a progressive company, to be a company for the people means to recognize the inequalities and intolerance embedded in society and work to overcome that. It requires action because inaction perpetuates intolerance.

sitting in the boardroom
the i'm-so-bored room
listening to the suits
talk about their world
they can make straight lines
out of almost anything
except for the line
of my upper lip when it curls - Ani

Category: gender & sexuality

Posted by zephoria at 11:40 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

May 8, 2005

The Significance of "Social Software"

This is an abstract of a paper that i would like to eventually write (although i don't know for where). In the meantime, i thought i'd throw it up here for critique.

In 2002, Clay Shirky (re)claimed the term "social software" to encompass "all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline, e.g. Meetup, nTag, etc." (Allen). His choice was intentional, because he felt older terms such as "groupware" were either polluted or a bad fit to address certain new technologies. Shirky crafted the term while organizing an event - the "Social Software Summit" - intended to gather like minds to talk about this kind of technology.

Although Shirky's definition can encompass a wide array of technologies, those invited to the Summit were invested in the development of new genres of social technologies. In many ways, the term took on the scope of that community, referring only to the kinds of technologies emerging from the Summit attendees, their friends and their identified community.

The term proliferated within this community and spread on all fronts where this community regularly exercises its voice, most notably the blogosphere and various events, including the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference (Etcon). These gatherings, most notably the social software track at Etcon serve to reinforce the notion that social software primarily refers to a particular set of new technologies, often through the exclusion of research on older technologies.

Although social software events include only limited technologies, people continue to define the term broadly. Shirky often uses the succinct "stuff worth spamming" (Shirky, 10/6/2004) while Tom Coates notes that "Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking" (Coates, 1/5/05).

Given the emergence of blogging over the last few years and the large audiences of many involved in the community of social software, this term and its definitional efforts have spread widely, much to the dismay - if not outrage - of some. The primary argument is that social software is simply a hyped term used by the blogosphere in order to make a phenomenon out of something that always was; there are no technological advances in social software - it's just another term that encompasses "groupware," "computer-mediated communication," "social computing" and "sociable media." Embedded in this complaint is an argument that social software is simply a political move to separate the technologists from the researchers and the elevate one set of practices over another. Shirky's term is undoubtedly political in that it rejects other terms and, in doing so, implicitly rejects the researchers as irrelevant.

While the term social software may be contested, it is undeniable that this community has created a resurgence of interest in a particular set of sociable technologies inciting everyone from the media to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists to academics to pay attention. What is questionable, and often the source of dismissal from researchers, is whether or not the social software community has contributed any innovations or intellectual progress.

In this paper, I will explore the contributions of social software. I will argue that there have been notable technological advancements, but that their significance stems from the rapid iteration of development in ongoing tango with massive user participation. In other words, the advances of social software are neither cleanly social nor technological, but a product of both.

I will explicitly address three case studies central to the narrow scope of social software - Friendster, blogging and Flickr. I will discuss how tagging, audience management (such as ACLs) and articulated social networks are neither technological advances nor social features, but emerge as a product of collective action and network affects. While parts of these technologies have been built in research, the actual advances are impossible to construct in a laboratory due to the sociological effects necessary for maturation.

Social software represents a new generation of social technology development - a generation that is dependent on moving beyond the laboratory and into mass culture. Its manifestations are already staggering - ABC declared 2004 the Year of the Blog as blogging challenged everything from political discourse to identity production. Social networking services in the hundreds have motivated millions of people worldwide to construct and negotiate profiles and grapple directly with the social awkwardness of being more public than one thought. By allowing people to easily stumble upon the work of others, media sharing services have prompted new ways of organizing information and playing with the intention of producing media. These advancements complicate critical theoretical ideas about the nature of the public(s), the role of relationships in sharing, and the collective desire to organize information.

In this paper, I will explicate those advances and unpack their implications both for digital social life and for our shared knowledge project. I will also argue that technological research's unwillingness to account for the advances, contributions and challenges of social software have significantly limited their own advancements. While social software's advances must be acknowledged, I will also present some of the limitations of the current approach - namely its inability to fully understand the sociological implications of its advancements. Reflexive failures limit the potential of social software since so much of its significance comes from the interplay between the technology and the use. Herein lies a question of our responsibility as researchers - when should we simply study these emergent technologies and when she we directly involve ourselves with the iteration?

Allen, Christopher. 2004, October 13. "Tracing the Evolution of Social Software" _Life with Alacrity_.

Shirky, Clay. 2004, October 6. "Blog Explosion and Insider's Club: Brothers in cluelessness." _Many-to-Many_.

Coates, Tom. 2005, January 5. "An addendum to a definition of Social Software." _Plasticbag.org_.

Category: social software

Posted by zephoria at 5:55 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (4)

updated the Ani site

Somehow, whenever finals come around, i find myself going through the bazillion lyrics corrections that people send me for the Ani DiFranco lyrics site. Usually, i'm much better at getting the new songs up but this semester has kicked my ass and i found myself putting up five new songs tonite, many of which have been out for a while. Still, thank you to everyone who has written with corrections and new lyrics! I really appreciate it!

The new songs are:
- All of Nothing
- Decree
- Millennium Theater
- Spade
- 78% Water

I'm particularly fond of the three political songs - Decree, Millenium Theater and Spade.

digital whiplash
so many formats so little time
while out in TV nation
under darkening skies
the resistance is just waiting
to be organized -- Millennium Theater

Category:

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May 7, 2005

seeking early Friendster screenshots

When i started "studying" Friendster, i wasn't studying it. I wasn't in school and i had vowed never to go back. By the time i started back in school, i had stopped studying it. The result is that while i have amazing amounts of data, i was not very good at collecting all of the data that i would like to have. One of the things that i'm missing is screenshots from early days of the service, such as when there was a popularity contest on the front page. Does anyone have a collection of screenshots of various Fakesters, front pages, anything? I would be stoked if anyone could send me any material they have from 2003 - friendster [at] danah.org

Category: friendster

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identity crisis: the curse/joy of being interdisciplinary and the future of academia

"Who's the future?" It was a simple question that my friend asked but it has now bugged me for months. He wanted to know who the future of academia is, who will shift academia as the likes of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. We started thinking of current scholars who really made huge shifts in academia - Butler, Haraway, ... There are some brilliant scholars out there, folks who have really dove in and clarified an area of academia, developed new algorithms, etc. but have not really exploded the intellectual sphere. The last big explosion was really the French scholars circling around in 1968. Of course, there was a lot going on that year, a lot of reasons to really rethink everything.

As the conversation unfolded, we started talking about interdisciplinarity being the key to the next intellectual shift. The problem with disciplines is that they're too narrow and all you can do is improve in one little niche arena. The key to intellectual shifts is the key to creativity. Ronald Burt talks about how social network bridges are super creative because they draw on ideas from disparate parts of the network. Of course, this is why i love the idea of apophenia - making connections where none previously existed. It's all about building synaptic connections between things that were otherwise unconnected.

So, i've attended 10 job talks this semester in two purportedly interdisciplinary departments. I have to say, i've been utterly disappointed. Each scholar talked about a very very niche body of research that, at best, simply didn't fit into other disciplines. None were revolutionarily new ways of thinking, not even close. These were job talks at a premier academic institution and some of the candidates couldn't even make an argument. Only one did i really think that i would learn quite a bit by (although i disagreed with the premise of his argument and thought that he was fantastically utopian in his understanding of sousveillance). Why aren't there scholars right now who make my jaw drop?

I think that it's hard to be interdisciplinary. I think everyone *wants* to be interdisciplinary but that seems to mean draw haphazardly from different disciplines, throw into the blender, add a few spices and voila interdisciplinary gazpacho. I want a chemical reaction dammit.

The problem with being interdisciplinary is it that means staying in a state of perpetual identity crisis. I think that this is fundamentally hard for academics. Many of us grew up as ostracized freaks and geeks and felt such glory in fitting in. There's something desperately comforting about fitting it, about being amongst peers. Staying in-between, outside and perpetually bridging any dichotomous definitions is exhausting. I think about how many people i know who identify as someone in-between (fe)male but eventually chose to identify as one or the other. Alternatively, i think about inter-racial identities and how some of my friends happily proclaim the identity of hapa. When no identity out there works, you end up developing a new one. Of course, this happens in academia all the time. There are new interdisciplinary departments popping up daily in academia.

Of course, what does this solve? Most of the times, interdisciplinary schools spend years trying to resolve their identity. I've taken place in plenty of these conversations because they're intellectually engaging - what is information? what is hci? what is performance? what is new media? They never actually get resolved.

I think that i relish staying in a perpetual state of identity crisis. Well, i go back and forth. Sometimes, i desperately want a cohort, a community. But every time a journalist asks me how to label me, i laugh. I'm certainly not a computer scientist any more. I'm definitely not a librarian and while i can swallow labels like sociologist and anthropologist, i'm sure that everyone who actually identifies as such rolls over in their graves when they see that label placed on me. Maybe my label should be a symbol - i can be the Prince of academia.

So, if i think about what the next revolution in academia will be, it will have to be interdisciplinary. It will not be possible to label the next round of revolutionary scholars and they won't be trapped up in conversations and defining disciplines or securing methods. You still can't really label Foucault and if you talk about his methods, it all gets very hairy. I like to say that he does hypertext. But seriously, who is the next Foucault? Who will help me see the world from an entirely new perspective? And what is the future of being interdisciplinary?

Category: academia

Posted by zephoria at 2:28 PM | Comments (33) | TrackBack (2)

May 4, 2005

"Move Over Friendster..."

One of my favorite aspects about MySpace is how little attention it has gotten during the whole YASNS thing. It has in many ways grown organically, based on actual networks, usage and whatnot. It is far less of a fad than any of the other services because those who joined it weren't doing so because of mainstream fad behavior.

So, waking up to the Mercury News exclaiming Move over, Friendster. There's a hotter site on the Web made me ROFL. Hotter? To who? By what standard?

If you follow this space, you know that MySpace has had more traffic than Friendster for a long time. They have fewer accounts, more loyalty, more freedom and generally a much more youth-friendly culture. Their popularity is mostly amongst users who never got into the fad of Friendster: goth kids, indie rock kids and youth. In the last six months, most of the urban teens i talk to talk about MySpace. If you're in college, you're on Facebook but if you're in high school, you're probably on MySpace. The only reason to say "Move Over Friendster" is because Friendster never really recovered its hyped status in the States and while its popularity overseas continues to grow, the media here has declared it a fad.

I must say that it's funny to see things circle back again and again in this space. Was this was the Boom was like?

Category: myspace

Tags: myspace facebook

Posted by zephoria at 2:02 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack (4)

May 3, 2005

crashing Tiger, hidden dragons

I should know better than to upgrade things. I was all proud of myself for succeeding in getting Tiger working, no problem. I had heard all of the Mail.app problems but given that i had already destroyed Mail.app on my Mac and had never succeeded in getting it working, i didn't let this bother me - i'm still using pine. I love the Dashboard, i love the iCal/Addressbook connections. I still don't get Safari RSS but so it goes. Everything seemed fine, seemed totally cool.... And then it didn't....

Firefox and Safari both seem to crawl trying to load pages and i can't figure out why. OK. This is irritating but so what. And then the worst thing happened. I can't print. I try to print from Preview or Word and down they go, crash bang booom death. Why? Why on earth can't i print to any IP printserver? It reminds me of when i used to crash the fileserver using Photoshop - it just crashes the program and doesn't explain why or what's going on. Grrrr. Is anyone else having this problem?

Category: techno doom

Posted by zephoria at 11:02 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (1)

May 1, 2005

activism and violence

This afternoon, an activist friend of mine who has been very involved in Critical Mass approached me concerning my stance. Unfortunately, due to the context of our interaction, the conversation escalated unnecessarily and i found myself unable to articulate my feelings. So instead, i brought them home to chew on.

Her key points are all exceptionally valid and i agree with her wholeheartedly:

1) Critical Mass is an "open source" activity where you cannot have a central organization with rules.
2) Many people have had their eyes opened by Critical Mass to the issues of bicycles in cities, probably more than have been negatively impacted.
3) Cars exercise violence on bicycles every day - running them off the road, not looking when opening doors; car culture also exercises power through the law and norms.

The combination of her points helped me clarify where i stand on activism in general these days and why the situation on Friday still upsets me.

I am definitely one of those people who had my eyes opened by Critical Mass' activities - i learned a lot more about biking laws, situations through 2nd hand accounts of their activities. Having lived in Amsterdam, i'm perpetually horrified by the car power that goes on in this country and i'm very much supportive of non-hierarchical structures of change.

All that said, i can never ever support violence. At the core of my body, i cannot accept violence because violence has been committed against you. I will never forget being 13 and deciding to not punch back as one of my classmates threw punches at me. Nothing would be gained by returning the blows - only increased hostility, a deepening of sides and an increase in intolerance. I cannot support activism that permits violence as one if its tenants. I was so disgusted by some of my classmates who felt as though they became activists when they brawled with the police; at the last protest i went to, i gave the police donuts and talked to them about the protest from their perspective.

No matter how much i believe in revolution, no matter how much i want to see changes made, i can't accept moving in that direction through deplorable means. I also cannot support pack behavior on either side - what the crowd does under and umbrella name is often terrifying. As much as there are thousands of non-violent Critical Massers, the idea that the name and event has a violent side to it is enough to alienate me. I can't stand behind events that accepts violence as even a minority group or where that group has the right to use the name to instigate their pack behavior. I think that this is how folks who would believe in the cause of anti-WTO folks get alienated by the violent protests.

As much as i appreciate my friends' point that i should not disrespect a movement for the behaviors of some, i have a hard time actually feeling that way. Those few aggressive voices go far which is why they need to be actively squelched in a non-violent movement - the two cannot go hand in hand.

How can we move forward activism that doesn't use violence? Am i a fool for thinking that's possible and for not supporting groups that allow violence to occur?

Category: politics

Posted by zephoria at 10:32 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Vizster

When Jeff Heer and i started talking about Friendster, we talked extensively about the practices of users - what they were trying to do, why, how, etc. Jeff used my ethnographic findings to build a visualization of Friendster that would enable users' practices while giving them a new view of the data at hand. We used my data and his data (everything that was visible to our accounts last year) on top of Prefuse to build an interactive visualization that we deployed at Liquidate. The result is beautiful and those who were very active Friendster users found the tool utterly fascinating as they reinvestigated their networks. Of course, those who were never impressed by Friendster simply saw Vizster as another pretty toy. My favorite quote from one of our non-heavy users in the user studies was "Friendster gives you your two hours of fun, and this doubles it."

Anyhow, it's a great experiment in the ways in which visualizations can be connected to ethnographic work and then reinserted into the community. For those interested in more, here's the Info Viz paper we submitted and the Vizster project page.

Category: friendster

Posted by zephoria at 8:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)