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« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 » October 31, 2005long tail camp and web2.0 humorLong-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it's the long tail, what can you expect? We're certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution... ROFL. I love geek humor. Oh, and while you're at it, go Roll Yo Own Web2.0 Company that will guarantee VC attention. Mine is Blinkoious and we create a greasemonkey extension for bookmarks via bittorrent. (There's also a good one for tag-based dating via bittorrent - Blinodidoo!) (Tx Barb) Category: web2.0 Tags: geek humor web2.0 longtail businessmodel
Posted by zephoria at 12:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3) October 30, 2005designing for life stagesPeople often ask me why designing for teens or older folks is different, why age matters. There are many different ways to slice up age and life stage. Mooshing together various theories, i have my own hypothesis about three critical life stages in Western culture that affect a lot of our social technologies. The first is identity formation; the second is contributive participation in society; the third is reflection and storytelling. Identity formation When youth are coming into a sense of self, they move away from the home and look to the social world to build a socio-culturally situated identity. In other words, they engage in the public in order to make sense of social boundaries/norms and to develop a sense of self in relation to the broader social context. Youth go to the public to see and be seen and they negotiate a presentation of self depending on the reactions of peers and adults. Public performance is about getting those reactions in order to make sense of the world. A main role of things like MySpace and Facebook is to produce a public sphere in order for youth to negotiate their peers and learn about the social world. People often ask me why teens don't just go out in a physical public. Simply put, they can't. We live in a culture of fear where most parents won't allow their children to go anywhere without supervision. Youth no longer have access to the streets or even neighborhood gathering spots. They are always in controlled locations where the norms are strictly dictated by adults - this is not a public sphere in which teens can make sense of sociability. Thus, they create their own. (Note: the production of a public and its implications is the cornerstone of my dissertation.) Peer groups are critical to identity development and the technologically-enabled always-on culture supports that process, especially when the bulk of youth's lives are spent having to play by adult rules with only 3-minute passing time for sociability. This process typically starts in the pre-teen years and goes strong through high school and into post-high school years with a fading of core identity development occurring mostly in the mid-20s. Contributive Participant in Society And then we become adults. The bulk of adult-hood is evaluated based on contribution to society, participation, what you can create and do. It's about being a good citizen, laborer, parent. It's about the act of doing things. Your identity gets wrapped up in how you contribute to society ("So, what do you do?"). We ask youth about their hobbies and friends; we ask adults about their jobs and children. When we speak, we think that we have to produce information, be relevant, be efficient, be contributive. (And people wonder why growing up sucks.) Nowhere is this shift more apparent than blogging land. While youth are doing identity production in terms of sociability, adults are creating new tasks for themselves - documenting, informing, conversing. It's all wrapped up in being part of the conversation, not in simply figuring out who you are. Reflection and Storytelling There comes a point when people stop thinking that they need to give give give. They're done and they want to reflect and share and just be. Older people are proud of what they did do and they tell stories. They share with their children and grandchildren and they find utter joy in watching them grow up. They talk about their children and grandchildren to friends with proud voices, sharing the joys of their stories. Older folks are no longer invested in working and being productive citizens. It's more a matter of life maintenance and reflection. While storytelling is the cornerstone of most social technologies, little has been done to engage them with the technologies or to make it relevant to them in a direct way. While youth are motivated to repurpose adults' tools for their own needs, older citizens have no investment in such repurposing. The way that it's always been done is just fine. Note: This does not mean that older folks are not being productive, just that they're not invested in producing for a broader society in the same way as the mid-range folks. For example, there is a lot of genealogy work done (and it's a big use of technology), but it's mostly about fitting one's life story into a larger narrative. Hobbies pick up (from knitting to gardening to traveling). It is not that life is over - priorities just change. Design Issues Admittedly, this description is very coarse and not fleshed out (::cough:: wait for the dissertation!) but i still think it's relevant for design. How do these groups think about the public differently? How do they engage with information and sociability differently? Their practices differ because their needs and goals differ. What would it mean to design with life stages in mind? Of course, some folks are definitely thinking about this problem. I was ecstatic when i read Mena note that "it's not just about ease of use: I want to make a product that my mom actually wants to use." Mena's dead-on. It takes understanding the social practices and needs of a given group. It doesn't matter if it's usable if it's not relevant. (For those wondering about my dissertation, i'm working on the proposal... but this entry is a good teaser.) Category: reflections & rants Tags: design identity storytelling
Posted by zephoria at 10:38 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (2) October 28, 2005Facebook and MySpace used as site of mourning/memoryYesterday, Christine Dao (a junior at Berkeley) died in a fatal car crash. As an act of mourning, her friends wrote her dozens of comments on her Facebook Profile and MySpace Profile. These Profiles serves both as a site of mourning and a site of memory, showing Christine's life and the love of her friends. Christine your vigil tonite was beautiful; it's amazing to see how many lives you touched. I'm still reeling from it all...we miss you. -- Scott There is no good way to mourn the loss of someone young, but what fascinates me about these messages on Christine's Profiles is that they are all written to her but visible for everyone to see. A persistent, public signal of mourning. Her friends are speaking _to_ her, not about her. Her actual Profile is unchanged even though it looks so alive. Her photos show her in action and her interests include statements like "love going to Cal Football games. laughing. finding cool people who i can laugh with. cracking jokes. getting jokes cracked on me. music-ing. rsf-ing (need a work out plan like Kanye West). taking long walks. my hoes. having FUN!" What does it mean to write persistent comments for the dead? Is it a sign of respect, of public remembrance? I hope so. Rest in peace Christine. Category: yasns Tags: mourning facebook myspace
Posted by zephoria at 3:19 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0) October 27, 2005friendster is *finally* going to chargeWord on the street (a.k.a. trusted friends) is that Friendster is finally going to charge by the end of the year. The current version will be available to "elite" users who pay what sounds like $5 a month. There will be a minimalist version available for free. ::sigh:: It's kinda ironic given that some of the folks i know are slowly starting to play again but definitely not enough to pay that kinda money since they're not looking to get laid. They just think that the stalking aspect is kinda fun and playful. I guess the gay boys might pay. But who else? Who's still using it that addictively? Category: friendster
Posted by zephoria at 3:38 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) October 26, 2005pre-election partyOne of my favorite things to do each year is to throw a pre-election party where friends gather to discuss different candidates and propositions (because we live in California). It's a good excuse to hang out with friends, drink some wine and inform each other about the upcoming election. Each person takes a candidate or a proposition and researches the pros/cons and which organizations/people are supporting or opposing them/it. I'm a strong believer that every citizen in this country has a responsibility to inform themselves and vote. Last night, i threw one such party and we had a blast discussing all of the wacky Schwarzenegger propositions. It's a scary election in California because it's a special propositions election and i fear that a lot of people won't turn out to vote. If you live in California, please plan on voting on November 8 - there are some serious measures that could have long-term impact and i fear that many won't turn out. Here are a few that i'd like to highlight: NO on Proposition 73 (Parental notification for minors seeking an abortion) - this is another horrifying move by the Republican party to engage in anti-choice tactics by peeling away freedoms. It is a condescending ageist proposition framed as protectionist. NO on Proposition 75 (Public union dues) - this is an anti-union proposition intended to weaken unions by adding bureaucratic layers under the guise of giving union members choice (which they already have). Unions are the one group who can stand up to big business and vested interests want to stop them. NO on Proposition 78; YES on Proposition 79 (Prescription drug discounts) - these are competing propositions with the former being backed by the pharms and the latter being backed by every consumer group. Prop 79 requires pharms to help offset costs for low-income citizens in order to do business in California. 78 looks good, but there is nothing that mandates participation by pharms and could end up costing California millions of dollars to set up nothing.
Category: politics Tags: propositions election california
Posted by zephoria at 12:33 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0) October 25, 2005if i had a billion dollarsAt a recent glitzy conference, a venture capitalist asked me what company i'd create if he funded me. I thought the question odd but it got me thinking. Lately, i've met a lot of genuinely rich people and a friend of mine pointed out that the only thing you can do with that kind of money is buy a private jet. Gross. So it made me think... what would i create? I know it wouldn't be a tech company... As a kid, did you ever dream of designing a country? Or a city? Or an island? Well, i did. As i got older, i got more practical. I want to design my own university. I'm fascinated by university structures. How architecture affects the ways in which people interact and learn, the ways in which collegiate social networks affect long term development of ideas, the ways in which disciplinarity divides, the incentives for teaching and research, the problems with competition for scarce funds, the relationship between formal and informal learning for students, etc. The problem is that i'm not interested in fixing a broken university - i want to start over. (Yes, i realize the problems with this desire...) But, i want to give people a reason to want to learn, give professors a reason to want to teach/research. I want to create a brand from scratch, truly design a system from the bottom up. Wouldn't that be fun? Category: academic Tags: design university
Posted by zephoria at 8:20 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0) Stanford at iTunesHow cool is it that Stanford is making many of its lectures available on iTunes? Yay for efforts to open up the knowledge production process! Now i want a podcast of distinguished lecturer series! Category: academia
Posted by zephoria at 5:53 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) October 24, 2005my Friendster publicationsVarious folks have been asking me about my Friendster publications and i thought i'd do a simple round-up for anyone who is trying to learn about Friendster. Below are directly relevant papers and their abstracts (or a brief excerpt); full citations can be found on my papers page. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.  "None of this is Real: Networked Participation in Friendster" by danah boyd - currently in review (email for a copy), ethnographic analysis of Friendster, Fakesters, and digital social play Excerpt from introduction: Using ethnographic and observational data, this paper analyzes the emergence of Friendster, looking at the structural aspects that affected participation in early adopter populations. How did Friendster become a topic of conversation amongst disparate communities? What form does participation take and how does it evolve as people join? How do people negotiate awkward social situations and collapsed social contexts? What is the role of play in the development of norms? How do people recalibrate social structure? By incorporating social networks in a community site, Friendster introduces a mechanism for juxtaposing global and proximate social contexts. It is this juxtaposition that is at the root of many new forms of social software, from social bookmarking services like del.icio.us to photo sharing services like Flickr. Capturing proximate social contexts and pre-existing social networks are core to the development of these new technologies. Friendster is not an answer to the network question, but an experiment in capture and exposure of proximate relations in a global Internet environment. While Friendster is not nearly now as popular as in its heyday, the lessons learned through people's exploration of it are increasingly critical to the development of new social technologies. As a case study, this paper seeks to reveal those lessons in a manner useful to future development. Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster by danah boyd and Jeffrey Heer - 2006 HICSS paper on how Friendster Profiles become sites of conversation Abstract: Profiles have become a common mechanism for presenting one's identity online. With the popularity of online social networking services such as Friendster.com, Profiles have been extended to include explicitly social information such as articulated "Friend" relationships and Testimonials. With such Profiles, users do not just depict themselves, but help shape the representation of others on the system. In this paper, we will discuss how the performance of social identity and relationships shifted the Profile from being a static representation of self to a communicative body in conversation with the other represented bodies. We draw on data gathered through ethnography and reaffirmed through data collection and visualization to analyze the communicative aspects of Profiles within the Friendster service. We focus on the role of Profiles in context creation and interpretation, negotiating unknown audiences, and initiating conversations. Additionally, we explore the shift from conversation to static representation, as active Profiles fossilize into recorded traces. Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks by Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd - a 2005 InfoVis paper about visualizing Friendster data (including arguments about using visualization in ethnography and recognizing the value of play in visualization) Recent years have witnessed the dramatic popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual "friendship" relations. Guided by ethnographic research of these online communities, we have designed and implemented a visualization system for playful end-user exploration and navigation of large-scale online social networks. Our design builds upon familiar node-link network layouts to contribute techniques for exploring connectivity in large graph structures, supporting visual search and analysis, and automatically identifying and visualizing community structures. Both public installation and controlled studies of the system provide evidence of the system's usability, capacity for facilidiscovery, and potential for fun and engaged social activity. Public Displays of Connection by Judith Donath and danah boyd - a 2004 BT Journal article on how people publicly perform their social relations Abstract: Participants in social network sites create self-descriptive profiles that include their links to other members, creating a visible network of connections — the ostensible purpose of these sites is to use this network to make friends, dates, and business connections. In this paper we explore the social implications of the public display of one's social network. Why do people display their social connections in everyday life, and why do they do so in these networking sites? What do people learn about another's identity through the signal of network display? How does this display facilitate connections, and how does it change the costs and benefits of making and brokering such connections compared to traditional means? The paper includes several design recommendations for future networking sites. Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks by danah boyd - a 2004 short CHI paper staking out what Friendster is. Abstract: This paper presents ethnographic fieldwork on Friendster, an online dating site utilizing social networks to encourage friend-of-friend connections. I discuss how Friendster applies social theory, how users react to the site, and the tensions that emerge between creator and users when the latter fails to conform to the expectations of the former. By offering this ethnographic piece as an example, I suggest how the HCI community should consider the co-evolution of the social community and the underlying technology. Category: friendster Tags: publications friendster yasns
Posted by zephoria at 2:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2) October 18, 2005"you can't blog this"So, i've gotten used to friends telling me that i can't blog something. And teachers. Professors always stare me down and say that i can't blog something that they said. Of course, every time someone says i can't blog something my ears perk and up. The weird thing is that the vast majority of times that they make that precursor, i wouldn't have blogged it anyhow. It's something personal, something vulnerable. And i'm just not that mean. Today, i got that statement from a reporter. She didn't want me to blog our conversation until after the article comes out. Baroo? I found this request startling. I probably wouldn't have blogged the conversation because the vast majority of what i said i've said here plenty before. But now there's a temptation. What does it mean that mainstream media wants to control my ability to speak for myself rather than through them? The threat there is that they won't quote me. That is less of a concern to me than my horror that they would think this is wise. I want the right to control my voice, especially given media's tendency to misquote. Why should i wait to react to their article? Why shouldn't i make it clear what i believe i said right after i said it? It's not like the journalist is only talking to me. My hope is that the journalist is doing synthesis. My role is to provide a particular voice so why can't i make it clear what my voice is ahead of time? Of course, what stops me from fleshing things out here and naming names is that i actually like the reporter concerned and have spoken to her before and enjoyed the conversations and what she writes. I don't want to embarrass her. But i am horrified that this is considered acceptable in mainstream media. Perhaps i should make it explicit and clear that i won't talk to reporters who want to control my blogging? Category: reflections & rants Tags: journalism blogging
Posted by zephoria at 4:59 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack (0) October 16, 2005articles on tagging (help?)I'm working on a literature review of tagging for a class. I am particularly interested in the collective action and cultural convergence aspects work. I've been traipsing through various articles and blog entries on the topic and i'm wondering if folks know of good pieces that i've missed. I'm looking for articles that analyze tagging either through data, through situated comparisons or through philosophical hammering. They don't have to be academic, but they do have to contribute something new. I'm not looking for how-tos or discussions of particular services. I'm also trying to focus on unique viewpoints as opposed to round-ups. I would also be stoked if anyone knows of any information management literature on the cultural underpinnings of keywords and indexing or anything involving collective action and librarianship in metadata. How do differences across libraries or across countries get resolved? Below is what i have so far. Any additions would be *very* much appreciated (and i promise to post what i write).
Category: tagging Tags: folksonomy
Posted by zephoria at 7:09 PM | Comments (36) | TrackBack (1) October 14, 2005"You are bidding on a mistake"
The question/answers are particularly hysterical (and offensive): Q: I'm confused, is Donna Karan a rock star or a transvestite? Category: fun links
Posted by zephoria at 3:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) October 13, 2005playful visualization
People often talk about visualizations having no value, but it is times like this when i want to balk. What does it mean that people want to play with data? What does it mean to support play instead of pure information access? Of course, this is part of the argument that Jeff and i made in our Vizster paper for InfoVis. Martin just confirmed it and took it to the next level. Well, actually bloggers took it to the next level and made data visible to Martin. The work-centered mentality of HCI kills me... it's always about the task, about productivity, about goals. Whenever i balk at activity theory mentality and talk about play, people tell me that play is a productive task with goals. Gah! No it is not! Play is about exploration, curiosity, fun, alternate realities, culture, identity... What if we make visualization about play? Recently, i've also become completely addicted to the Information Aesthetics blog - post after post of beautiful data visualization. I realize that i want to play with those systems, even when i don't care about the data. And what about when we learn to play through visualization? Martin talked about Thinking Machine 4 which visualizes how the computer is thinking about chess. I actually don't know how to play chess but i sat and played with that applet for quite some time before i realized i should be doing other things. Could that system teach me strategy, teach me to play by letting me see the game from a different dimension? ::sigh:: Whenever i see Martin's work or the work of Fernanda Viegas, i long to be making visualizations again. There's nothing more magical than watching data take flight and they make it look so elegant and beautiful. If only it didn't involve programming... Category: visualization
Posted by zephoria at 8:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) October 11, 2005fucked up blog mash upUpon doing an ego search in Technorati, i came across a disturbing blog: Dominos Pizza. One entry begins with "I talked on the phone today (why yes, I do still use analog communication media…) with danah boyd." At first, i was like no you didn't. And then i was like, wait, i know that statement. It comes from a post on mamamusings. But it's not the whole post. And then i started searching for parts of the rest of the entry and figured out that it's a mash up of different blog entries from different places. No citations, no references. All just out of place. There's no clear link spamming going on (although there are some strange linkings). There is though a statement about why Dominos Pizza is the best (which makes me cringe since i've been boycotting them for 8 years running given that the CEO funds violent anti-abortion organizations). So what gives? Any other sleuth out there have a good sense of what this blog is about? Weird weird weird. Category: blogging
Posted by zephoria at 11:14 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0) October 10, 2005graveyard gamesWhen: Saturday, October 15 at 1:30PM Hint: COME! Category: fun links
Posted by zephoria at 5:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) October 8, 2005remix is active consumption not production (when media becomes culture, part 2)After great comments and good conversations, i want to take a second stab at explaining the shift i was asking for wrt copyright and remix. My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we're remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society. Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story. (tx Kevin Bjorke) Think about IKEA consumption. Isn't it great that they lay out entire rooms for you to look at? Do any of you have rooms that are exactly like the ones in IKEA? You take furniture, you mix and mash it up until it suits you. You may paint it, you may add a different bedspread, you'll add your own books. You then invite your friends over to show them what you've done. Are you expected to consume clothing or IKEA exactly as prescribed? No. These items are made to be personalized, made to be altered to meet your needs. So what is fan fiction? I take a story and i alter it to tell my story. What is hip hop remix? I take a bunch of different sounds and put them together in a way not prescribed by the mannequin. From clothing to songs, we consume and we connect it to our lives. We've always done this with media. We've made collages out of magazines, we've put together pieces of songs in a new sequence for our friends. Of course, now, the cultural bits that we consume are more accessible Lego blocks. It's possible to play with them in new ways. And there are so many more choices that we can be really creative with that play. We can consume culture in new ways and what we shit out in that process actually gets to be digested and mixed together with other bits of culture that we consumed. There's a problem though and that has to do with distribution. When i parade around the public square in my remix of the Gap and Nike (well,...), i am sharing my remix with the world. Yet, there's nothing persistent or searchable about it. What happens when my friends snap a photo of me? They are making the remix more permanent but, still, no one from those megacorps sees what i've done. What happens when my friends sell that picture to the tabloids for a bazillion dollars because Britney and her new baby are also in the photo? And they are also wearing a different remix of various megabrands? I wasn't remixing clothing for distribution. Of course, even that does happen. Ever seen pictures of celebrities in magazines where it says the top was made by Ralph Lauren and the skirt was made by Versace or whatever? When Jonah Peretti sent his conversation with Nike to a few friends, was he distributing it? What about when it got forwarded to millions of people and got him spots on TV? In digital world, our intentions and the potential results might not be the same. You might be speaking to six people in your blog. It might feel like the town square but what happens when millions of people apparate there like it's a Quidditch match? Only witches know this instant appearance of beyond imaginable audiences with some of them under invisibility cloaks. Yet, online, we're living like witches. Is it distribution when we're performing to beyond imaginable publics and lots of people are taking pictures? What about when we're intending to share to our friends just like we've always done? Why do corporate interests get to tell us that our sharing with our friends is now bad even though we've ALWAYS done it? Is this only because they get to be the voyeur in the room? Who gave them that right? Sure, it's a new public, but yuck. I can't imagine growing up with a RIAA rep perched in my school bathroom. A huge part of the identity process is to consume culture, mix it and personalize it, and share that with our friends because it has identity implications. We even share in public so that we can get parents to scrunch up their noses. Just because technology puts the elephant in every room imaginable, why do we have to accept their dictation of how we should consume their products? Why can't we consume for identity, for culture, for life? Why can't we recognize that remixes are active consumption where we've made culture personal and for our friends? We live in a world where accidental distribution is always possible, where everyone has the potential to be a celebrity in public - everyone wants to copy them. That's weird. But that doesn't mean that the acts we're doing aren't what we've always done. We just have different technologies now but the practice hasn't changed. Category: culture Tags: remix identity copyright
Posted by zephoria at 10:52 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (3) October 4, 2005san francisco housing marketDriving from Mission Dolores to Noe on Sunday, i saw over a dozen different "Open House" signs for houses for sale. On one corner, a block from the park, there was literally an open house sign on each corner. Baroo? Walking around on Monday, i saw a bunch of For Sale signs. And then today, two more popped up on my way to work. What on earth is going on? It's October, not May. I've never seen so many For Sale signs in this city, let alone a bazillion in my shi-shi neighborhood. Now, i don't know shit about housing markets except that San Francisco's is terrifying and that it costs a lot more to buy than to rent on a monthly basis, even if you can get a 20% downpayment together. Are things actually erupting? I always thought the bubble conversation was bullshit. But what is going on? Why are there soooo many houses for sale? Category: social observations Tags: sanfrancisco housing
Posted by zephoria at 5:54 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0) somewhere in-between the ALA and Google is harmonyAs far back as i can remember, i've found utter joy in being able to understand opposing points of view. Most of the time, this is useful in being a mediator between two warring individuals or groups; i used to wonder if should become a shrink. But, this week, i had the fortunate opportunity to hear two institutions talk past each other: American Library Association (Michael Gorman) and Google (Sergey Brin). Let me back up... I was invited to Keynote at the ALA's Library and Information Technology Association national conference. At first, i was befuddled - why me? And then, when i looked at the other keynotes, i knew i was in trouble. I was sandwiched between someone speaking about "how librarians can still vanquish Googlezon and win back our rightful place as the guardians of the world's knowledge and all that is good" and Michael Gorman (the President of the ALA who upset quite a few people with his essay on "those blog people"). Oh shit. So, i prepared and delivered a call-to-arms-esque talk. By and large, i think it went over well. Some people were upset that i was critical of members of the community as an outsider; others were ecstatic that i was challenging the status quo. The biggest disagreement was over whether or not Google, as a corporate entity, can really do the same kind of work as librarians. I argued that money always biases and limits but librarians are more indebted to their funders than Google is to theirs. Still, i understand their point and frustration, which i tried to make clear in my talk and in answering questions afterwards. After my talk, Michael Gorman of the ALA gave his keynote. OMG, i wanted to die. At some point, he started talking about the Tower of Babel and how we need to return humanity to a common language. So much of his idea of librarianship is focused on control and power. He talked about how Google returned terrible results that no one wanted because it was all so random. Librarians know how to give you value. Gah. And then, today, Sergey Brin of Google appeared in my Search class as a surprise guest (webcast will be posted). I realized i had never heard him talk except for when i was working for the company and then, he could say whatever he wanted. In public, he was clearly trying to negotiate what he was and was not allowed to say. He made quite a few in the audience twitch over their response to China. Still, i understand (although don't always agree with) the stance that some in China is better than none. He really rattled some feathers though with his response to the semantic web, tagging and librarianship. He took the techno-centric point of view that is so Google. Tagging inverts the relationship between man and machine. Tagging is only of interest and valuable if machines do it. Technology is just as good as experts and it's a waste of the expert's time to bother trying. (A good quote from this section was "Experiments like Esperanto have failed.") One of my professors was really outraged by all of this - i thought his head was going to blow off. God it was painful. Will Google ever understand that culture has value? I guess not so long as technodeterminism is profitable. Gah. So in less than a week, i got to see the most stubborn and power-hungry sides of two institutions who see no value in the other. And yet, so many of those in the trenches want to build bridges because we know that there are important lessons to learn. Yet, there are issues of prestige, power and money. The Google boys would definitely rather re-invent the field than learn from the librarians. The old skool librarians would rather stick to their ways than acknowledge that there are reasons why search companies have reached the mainstream. I understand where both side is coming from but their stubbornness and lack of foresight is excruciating. I find myself wanting to shake them both. Somewhere in-between the ALA and Google there is harmony, but i wonder if they'll ever be able to find it. Right now, i'm so thankful to be at a school of information that revels in the possibilities of technology and a search company that understands the culture has value. If i had to deal with the top of the pyramid at either the ALA or Google, i'd want to shoot myself on a daily basis. Instead, i want to circumvent both in order to innovate. Category: academia Tags: librarians google hegemony lita
Posted by zephoria at 12:43 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (4) |
Yesterday,