Monthly Archives: September 2005

social and connected individuals

Anne Galloway: In my dissertation, I discuss the prevailing tendency of “social software” to define “social” in terms of connected individuals. This privileging of individualism, I argue, not only demonstrates cultural and class biases, but also points at some of the limitations of network models of interaction. To focus on connecting individuals along the lines of shared interests and practices is indeed a type of social interaction, but it shouldn’t be confused with public value. Even when artists and designers choose to focus on the “public” dimensions of “social” software, they often resurrect the sense of public implied in the “collective,” a form of anti-structure if you will, and sometimes a remarkably insular and homogenous one at that. In many cases, “social” software involves technology “for” the people or technology “by” the people, but only rarely do the two come together. Network models are uniquely amenable to connecting and maintaining such discrete pieces in part because they manage or control the types of connections that can be made, and so public wifi networks and other open or hackable architectures are never public in the sense of being “for” and/or “by” everyone.

::bounce::cheer:: Yay!

why culture matters even in math class

A friend of mine recently decided to quit his tech job and become a high school math teacher (a move that still has my jaw on the floor in awe). He’s been tracking the tough lessons of being a new teacher on a blog. This morning, he posted about why culture matters and his experience has had me smiling all day. For those who are link shy, i’ll summarize:

Homework question: “While in France last summer I bought a hat for 25.50. A friend bought a similar hat for 5 in the United States. What’s going on here? Explain completely.”

Expected answer: “something about different currencies and exchange rates. This question comes in the context of problems about length and area, so the importance of units in measurement is being emphasized.”

Student answer: “Two possibilities: 1, the hat your friend bought was fake. It said similar not same. 2, you got ripped off in France because your [sic] a tourist.”

ROFL! I just want to reach out and hug his student – that just rocks.

when mainstream media cite blogs

This morning, Google News informed me that i was referenced in a mainstream media article. Having not spoken to reporters for a while, i was curious what i could’ve said (and praying that it had nothing to do with Burning Man). Sure enough, i’m cited in a Sunday Times article called How they triggered war on the web. The Sunday Times never contacted me; they simply referenced something that i said on my blog. While this is pretty common practice in blogging journalism, i have never experienced this personally with mainstream media. What humors me most is that they cite my blog but do not cite the actual entry which provides much more relevant information.

Another thing that fascinates me is their choice of affiliation. The last question most reporters typically ask concerns affiliation – they want to know how to identify me in their article (and how to spell everything correctly). I typically use my Berkeley affiliation because my opinions usually stem from my academic research and may not reflect the values/ideas of my employer. In some cases, reporters print both. While i’m happy to be identified as a researcher for Yahoo!, that post has nothing to do with Y! And besides, when i wrote it i didn’t even work there. Strange strange.

I also find the reporter’s choice of tense fascinating. Rather than indicating that i wrote XYZ, the reporter states that i “maintain” XYZ. This sounds like it’s an active ongoing process, that i’ve been continuously proclaiming an opinion i wrote 2 months ago. While i do believe that 7/7 (and every major catastrophe in the last 20 years) pushes the evolution of media along, it feels a little strange to see words put into my mouth about my current opinion. I wonder what other past voices of me will become present.

::laugh:: There’s something funny about watching mainstream media pick up their reporting habits from bloggers. I wonder if we get misspellings next?

In any case, blogs must be super useful if you’re a reporter (especially if you have a propensity for procrastination). All of a sudden, there are millions of quotable opinions out there waiting to be cited. Of course, it puts a little jab into the ethics question about whether or not opinions on the web are public.

poverty is relative – update on Being Poor

Given that Being Poor has been critiqued by those who feel as though American poverty is nothing compared with elsewhere (including a fabulous re-telling from and Indian perspective), i feel the need to explain why Scalzi’s article is important. Even though we tend to demarcate poverty in terms of material good (including the necessities like food), the lack of and struggle for material items is only a fraction of the story of poverty. The more significant issue has to do with social status and the resultant impact on mental health, ability to contribute to society, and ability to provide for one’s family in terms of social status. Poverty is a relative thing. While a car is a luxury in some parts of the world, in rural America, it is your ticket to work and thus you are a complete outcast without one because you are seen as unable/unwilling to contribute to society. Poverty must not be measured globally, but instead measured relative to the local culture in which one exists; the impact of perceived poverty on social status and mental health happens locally. This is why we talk about SOCIO-economic class, not simply economic class.

Being poor is knowing you’re always under a microscope: Human Services, Housing Assistance, Social Security…but also, your friends, your family, and strangers who seem to think you’re lazy, unmotivated, or stupid for being in the situation you’re in.

One of the ways you can see poverty is through the lens of what people do when they are desperate. Take domestic violence. This is an act of power that is executed usually out of a need for control when everything else seems so out of control. It should not surprise anyone that rates of domestic violence are very much correlated with socio-economic class. (Yes, domestic violence and rape exist amongst the rich but they are much more prevalent amongst the poor not because the poor are worse people but because their state of desperation makes them more likely to resort to horrific acts to gain control.) What this means is that in any given society, domestic violence is over-represented amongst the locally constrained poor, regardless of global measures. This is true for all sorts of behaviors that come out when people are desperate – theft, drug abuse, violent acts, etc.

One of the dangers of a global society is that you actually magnify the emotional impact and social experience of being poor. While poverty is primarily a locally relevant experience, as you start to participate globally, the understanding of where you sit globally starts to emerge. Given India’s increased participation in global economics and, in particular, the outsourcing structure, i suspect that the experience of global poverty will become very present there. This is quite unfortunate – it doesn’t alleviate the feelings of poverty amongst poor people in rich countries, but makes even well-off people in poor countries feel the pangs of poverty because the measurement of relativity changes.

Before judging the desperate acts of people in New Orleans (or elsewhere), it is important to remember where it’s coming from – it’s a need for gaining some form of control. Unfortunately, the people who were left in New Orleans are the most destitute and tragedy is undoubtedly going to magnify their desperation. The solution is not to simply punish people for their acts of desperation, but to alleviate the poverty that brings it on. More specifically, we need to reduce the distance between the rich and poor in any given culture; we need a dominant middle class to really reduce the acts of desperation. And if we’re going to move towards a global economic culture, we need to build a dominant global middle class.

health care in america – from myth to mess

I was 16 when i broke my neck and witnessed first hand what it’s like to not have health insurance. I often wonder if i would’ve gotten different treatments if i could’ve afforded it, if i wouldn’t lose vision/hearing like i do now. No small company can afford to hire me and one of the reasons that i find the idea of working for or creating a start-up laughable is that i could not risk the loss of health insurance. Not only could i not afford premiums on my own, i am not sure that i’d even be covered outside of a major institution. I live in fear because of American health insurance. And i’m a lucky one.

In his classically brilliant style, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker essay The Moral-Hazard Myth traces the routes of the American health insurance scheme, unveiling its implications through the stories of people who are less fortunate than i have been. At the core of my progressive politics is the solid belief in universal health access. In this country, medical access is a privilege where it should be a right. It is hard to respect this country when it fails to take care of its people at a basic level. And i’m sorry, but there’s nothing Christian about tiered health access.

george bush don’t like black people

When i first heard Kanye West say “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” my jaw dropped. It was so bold and yet went straight to the heart of what everyone felt. One of the things i love most about the hip-hop community is that they take events and mix it into song, remixing culture and sounds in a way that goes straight to the point. Earlier today, Xeni told me about The Legendary K.O. remix called George Bush Don’t Like Black People. Not only are the words poignant, the song itself is beautiful and filled of southern black sounds. If you haven’t listened to this yet, please do. It’s amazing.

upcoming conferences

I will be attending various conferences this fall/winter and i thought i’d share in case you want to join me.

  • Podcasting Symposium (Duke, September 27-28) – talking on performance and podcasting
  • ALA | LITA National Forum (San Jose, October 1) – keynote on blogging
  • Web2.0 (San Francisco, October 5) – attending for one day
  • State of Play (New York, October 7-8) – attending
  • 4S (Pasadena, October 20-22) – speaking on Fakesters and moderating on new media
  • AAA (D.C., November 29-December 3) – speaking on blogging
  • HICSS (Hawaii, January 4-7) – speaking on Friendster
  • AAAS (St. Louis, February 16-20) – speaking on youth culture

Also, a paper that i co-wrote with Jeff Heer will be present at InfoVis (Minneapolis, October 23-25) but Jeff will be doing the presenting.

being poor

being poor is paying a debt to the rich for being born in their world.

In response to New Orleans, John Scalzi wrote Being Poor, a list of statements about what being poor is like. In turn, hundreds of people left comments to add their experience of being poor. It is a truly humbling entry.

(tx kevin)

Update: Poverty is relative. Given the critiques of Being Poor, i decided to write an extended entry about how poverty is relative and why this article is important even though it’s talking about American poverty where people are economically better off than people elsewhere, but not socially better off.

Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

Recently, i found myself needing to explain Web2.0. Unfortunately, here’s a term that has been hyped up in all sorts of ways with no collectively understood definition. The Web2.0 conference talks about the web as a platform, a business-y concept that i find awfully fuzzy. Technologists and designers have differing views focused on either the technology and standards or the experience. Even Wikipedia seems confused and cumulative definitions are not inclusive. Buzzwords associated with Web2.0 include: remix, tagging, hackability, social networks, open APIs, microcontent, personalization. People discuss how the web is moving from a read-only system to a read/write system and they focus on technologies like GreaseMonkey, Ajax, RSS/Atom, Ruby on Rails. Of course, others talk about the paradoxical relationship between openness and control. The reality is that when people talk about Web2.0, they’re talking about a political affiliation with The Next Cool Thing, even if no one has a clue what it is yet.

Personally, i don’t find comfort in any of the business, technological or experiential explanations. Yet, i do believe that a shift is occurring and i find myself emotionally invested in it. So then i had to ask myself: what is Web2.0 and why does it matter? The answer is glocalization.

Glocalized Networks

In business, glocalization usually refers to a sort of internationalization where a global product is adapted to fit the local norms of a particular region. Yet, in the social sciences, the term is often used to describe an active process where there’s an ongoing negotiation between the local and the global (not simply a directed settling point). In other words, there is a global influence that is altered by local culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle. Think of it as a complex tango improvisational dance with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction.

During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs, different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their desires. We are faced with a digital environment that has collective values. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in search. For example, is there a best result to the query “breasts”? It’s all about context, right? I might be looking for information on cancer, what are you looking for?

A global village assumes heterogeneous context and a hierarchical search assumes universals. Both are poor approximations of people’s practices. We keep creating technological solutions to improve this situation. Reputation systems, folksonomy, recommendations. But these are all partial derivatives, not the equation itself. This is not to dismiss them though because they are important; they allow us to build on the variables and approximate the path of the equation with greater accuracy. But what is the equation we’re trying to solve?

On an economic level, globalization has both positive and negative implications. But on a personal level, no one actually wants to live in a global village. You can’t actually be emotionally connected to everyone in the world. While the global village provides innumerable resources and the possibility to connect to anyone, people narrow their attention to only focus on the things that matter. What matters is conceptually “local.” In business, the local part of glocalization mostly refers to geography. Yet, the critical “local” in digital glocalization concerns culture and social networks. You care about the people that are like you and the cultural elements that resonate with you. In the most extreme sense, the local is simply you alone. There is certain a geographical component to the local because the people in your region probably share more cultural factors with you and are more likely connected to you in network terms, but this is not a given. In fact, the folks who were most geographically alienated were the first on the digital bandwagon – they wanted the global so that they could find others like them regardless of physical location.

When the web started, the hype was that geography would no longer matter. Of course, we know that now to be utterly false. But the digital architecture did alter the network structure of society, allowing interest-driven bonds to complement geographically-manifested ones. Web1.0 created the infrastructure for glocalized networks.

Glocalizing Web2.0 Systems

Glocalized structures and networks are the backbone of Web2.0. Rather than conceptualizing the world in geographical terms, it is now necessary to use a networked model, to understand the interrelations between people and culture, to think about localizing in terms of social structures not in terms of location. This is bloody tricky because the networks do not have clear boundaries or clusters; the complexity of society just went up an order of magnitude.

Our first rough approximation at this was the individual vs. the collective. The personal is critical – it is the maximal localization and contribution stems from the individual first. Think about tagging – it’s all about starting with the individual and building into collectives. But the goal should not be universal collectives but rather locally constituted ones whereby one participates in many different local contexts. This is critical because the individual and the collective do not exist without each other; they are co-constructed and defined by their interplay. Individual identity gets crafted in context of a collective and collectives emerge through the interplay of individuals.

Social networks give us a vantage point for seeing the relationship between collectives and individuals. As such, they have been at the root of the Web2.0 narrative. We want to understand how people and collectives are interrelated in order to support local needs. Articulation was the first step but, more than anything, it let us understand how broken our questions are, how complex the structure is. These models are not good enough for Web2.0 but they are a decent initial approximation.

Reputation systems emerge to help localize the social structure, to indicate contextualized trust, respect and relations. Reputation is not a universal structure, but one deeply embedded in particular cultural contexts.

The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal “truth” approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.

Glocalized information access does not mean separate but equal. Instead, globally accessible information needs to be organized in a local context where meaning is made. Recommendations emerge as a way for local collectives to organize information, sitting on top of individual recommendations combined with networks and reputation.

Institutional Structures

In addition to the techno-social systems that are being developed to allow for glocalized information access, there are institutional structures at play. While Open APIs certainly have political cachet, they are also critical to glocalization. People want to slice information for local cultures; this means that the local cultures need to be able to do the slicing rather than rely on institutions that are more likely to create universal organization schemas. No organization has the diversity necessary to build all of the different glocalized systems that people desire.

The structure of companies is also critical to Web2.0 and there is going to be an interesting relationship between innovative start-ups and big corporations. Startups can focus on particular technologies and build for specific cultural contexts, but they do not have the resources to build the larger infrastructure. This is where big companies come into play because they will be the ones putting the pieces together. Yet, the responsibility of big Web2.0 companies is to provide flexible glue to all of this innovation, to provide the information infrastructure that will permit glocalization, to allow for openness. Big companies span multiple cultural contexts but if they try to homogenize across them, they will fail at Web2.0. They need to be stretchy glue not cement. Cement works when you want a global village, when you want universals but it is not the way of Web2.0, it is not the next wave.

Conclusion

Web2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible. Technology and experience are both critical factors in this process, but they themselves are not Web2.0. Web2.0 is a structural shift in information flow. It is not simply about global->local or 1->many; it is about a constantly shifting, multi-directional complex flow of information with the information evolving as it flows. It is about new network structures that emerge out of global and local structures.

In order for Web2.0 to work, we need to pay attention to how different cultural contexts interpret the technology and support them in their variable interpretations. We need to create flexible infrastructures and build the unexpected connections that will permit creative re-use.

It’s important to realize that Web2.0 is not a given – it is possible to fuck it up, especially if power and control get in the way. Web2.0 is a socio-technical problem and it cannot be solved in a technodeterminist way. Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies for control. We’ve already seen plenty of digital architects try to control the flexibility of their artifacts rather than allowing them to morph and evolve.

Web2.0 requires giving up control and ownership of information; information is meaningless to someone else if they can’t repurpose it to make sense of it in their context. It is for this reason that technology is not enough – there will be political features of Web2.0 as technological development and cultural desires run head-on against legislation and political support of old skool information organizations. This is why IP and copyright issues are also critical to Web2.0.

Web2.0 also requires keeping local cultural values consciously present at all times. There is a great potential to be problematically disruptive, to destroy local culture while trying to support it. We all have a tendency to build our needs into technology but the value of Web2.0 is to allow everyone to build their needs into the technology, not just those doing the building. Trampling culture would be devastating.

For Web2.0 to be successful, technology and policy must follow glocalized needs and desires. This will be a complex and challenging process full of complicated issues as technologists, designers, social scientists and politicos engage in an unknown dance with very different values and pressures. This dance can and probably will disrupt nation-state and institutional structures; these groups will work hard to stop the destruction of their power. Neither China nor the RIAA really wants Web2.0 to happen and folks like them have the potential to really foul it up.

Those who believe that Web2.0 is the way to go must take on the responsibility of focusing on the people first, to keep them and their needs at the forefront of your mind while you design and build, re-design and re-build. Let the technology and business follow the desires and needs of people. Otherwise, Web2.0 could completely collapse or simply become a tool for the maintenance of structural power.

I will say, it’s an interesting time to be in the Valley. There’s so much potential and i really want to see Web2.0 go as far as possible in supporting a meaningfully distributed glocalized society.

Special thanks to Barb and Marc for helping me think through this.

hurricane in the desert

My lips and hands were cracking with desert dryness when i heard about the devastation of the south via the brutality of Katrina. Removed from all news sources, i could only pick up information through word-of-mouth networks with new news arriving with each fresh Burner. When i reached cell range upon leaving the playa, i called everyone i knew with connections down there and scanned for NPR and other radio news. But nothing prepared me for the photos that i saw once i reached my laptop.

What surprised me was not the massive flooding – i had been prepared for that by the news that flowed. What surprised me was the constant stream of black faces amongst those stranded and missing. It should’ve been obvious but it was not something that the radio discussed once as i scoured for news on my drive home. While the city had ordered a mandatory evacuation, not everyone had the means to leave. And in this country, poverty and skin color are painfully aligned. The radio was actively covering the looting but as i looked into the photo faces of those stranded, i couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were just trying to survive. Are they “looters” simply because they’re black?

I still don’t know how to react to the devastation that occurred while i was off in my privileged playa bubble. But i do know that a conversation on race and class is desperately needed in this country and my hope is that Katrina will allow us to begin that discussion. In the meantime, i pray that we can get our acts together and take care of the people who are in desperate need.

Question: i know that the National Guard is not letting the Red Cross into New Orleans. Has anyone done the research to determine where donations are the most effective right now?