Comments on: obsessively recording and sharing our vacations

By: Lee Provoost

Lee Provoost — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:51:37 +0000

Just noticed that I commented to this blog a half a year ago. Many things have changed since then, moved to London and work now for a company that is highly focused on this topic. The thing that I learned is that the excessive production of information is an absolute gold mine of data. The problem is that we get an overflow of data, kind of a “signal noise”, which makes the whole data set useless for the average person that tunes in. So the challenge for us is to develop tools and find ways to extract only the meaningful data to you in your given context. This applies both for private life (for instance I tune out certain apps and certain people in Facebook to make my data stream more relevant for me) and in professional life (carefully selected activity streams in my Enterprise 2.0 app).

We still have a long way to go, but in the meanwhile I bought a 30 yr old Polaroid SX-70 camera which basically forces me to think like 10 times before I take that one picture. With a cost of 3 pounds per polaroid, you produce far less but much more precious pictures than with the DSLR camera

let me come back in another 6 months here

By: ERic

ERic — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:23:08 +0000

Your posting reminds me of, triggers my memory of, something said recently: when you buy something it can be either fantastic or crappy but invariably over time it becomes an ‘oh that thing’ akin to a wooden spoon, and taken for granted or disposed of. So we buy something else, in blue. This lack of everlasting satiation is what consumerism is built upon I guess.

In contrast, trips which are life experiences – new life data! – can either suck royally or be instantly great but the memories and experience always over time becomes great and fantastic regardless of how it was at the time. For example: “Remember that hotel room with a dripping ceiling and scurrying cockroaches!” “Yeah wasn’t that great! That time I broke my ankle, and you puked for two days!” “I loved that trip!”. Trips become fantastic. It is no wonder people go overboard.

SNS are interesting because they are in this zone of experience context, while the remainder of the WWW is largely about consuming… and so is largely forgettable.

By: Barbara Miller

Barbara Miller — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:07:25 +0000

I like the connection between twitter and social grooming. Studies of nonhuman primates demonstrate that social grooming has many positive effects on well-being and its absence has negative effects. It’s also important in restoring relationships in post-conflict situations. Anthropologists Robin Dunbar (UK) and Robert Sussman (US), among others, have published important findings on the functions of social grooming among nomn-human primates. Does anyone know of studies demonstrating positive health/mental health effects of twitter on humans? Barbara

By: Hadass Eviatar

Hadass Eviatar — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:44:26 +0000

Enjoyed this, as always, danah. Thanks so much for helping me feel better about my photo-viewing habits – yes I will go through 50 pix on a friend’s site, but not 200. I’ve tried to edit and filter what I post (and yes, I waited until I got home to post!).

I probably would have tweeted from vacation if I’d had convenient access. But I hope not Too Much .

Thanks so much, as always, for your clear-sighted, eloquent words!

By: S

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:33:48 +0000

The disdain of observing people who tweet their vacations not only arises from observing the act of tweeting but also how much time is invested in anticipating and addressing the tweet responses. At what point does tweeting or waiting for a response from a tweet become more fulfilling than enjoying the time of vacation?

By: Gabriel Green

Gabriel Green — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:53:02 +0000

Does anyone think it is interesting that this article is an opinion piece about opinions?

It’s like meta-data in a social context.

By: Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:30:17 +0000

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. A beautiful straddle of the annoyances and possibilities built into ever-changing technology.

By: Thomas Lawrence

Thomas Lawrence — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:08:16 +0000

So, how can we use social media to flag that we were bored by content? A bored audience is the audience least likely to engage with the content in any way, after all, so waiting for comments or email that say “this article was boring” is clearly self-defeating.

It would be nice if it was possile to track how far users got with a piece of content – how many users only made it to the first paragraph of a blog post, for instance – but it’d be invasive and/or require tech that isn’t widespread yet.

Television media uses focus-group audiences with dials to measure engagement, but that doesn’t seem practical either (I imagine a Digg-style website where users record their level of engagement throughout a piece of content). A more simple measure might work (I imagine a site called ReadToTheEnd.com or TL;DR.com , where users simply answer a yes/no question based on whether or not they got to the end).

Perhaps the best measure is simply to observe a lack of engagement and assume that anything that hasn’t engaged anyone (in the form of comments, email, trackbacks, Diggs, whatever) was probably pretty boring.

By: AJ Cann

AJ Cann — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:58:46 +0000

Surely the reason some perceive a problem with tweeting on vacation is that that view Twitter as “work” rather than lifestyle. For me, there are no vacations (until I finally check out

By: Tasha

Tasha — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:13:44 +0000

On our recent 3 week holiday, we had internet sporadically and tended to upload a few pictures every couple of days, because of limited bandwidth/speeds in the hotels. Quite a few friends viewed these photos on Facebook and commented, but when we got home I’ve been scrapbooking these photos and more and adding context you cant get with a photo of a random building or temple, whatever. I think there is benefits to having access to technology on vacation, i mostly used the internet to check my emails (as it was over the end of semester and xmas break) for necessary communication, to email my parents we were safe and having fun, and to keep the ‘casually curious’ masses at bay.

I know scrapbooks have the same “TMI” factor, as do slides and videos, but i think people are getting better (or maybe consistent) at evading looking at them for extended periods of time, or maybe thats why scrapbooking has taken off so much recently, its the art of making your otherwise boring photos (especially when you’re dealing with thousands potentially) interesting, and they usually come with a story.

Good work Danah, as always.