apophenia

digitalness entries

February 16, 2008

traductions de moi

A while back, Noel Burch kindly translated my 2006 AAAS talk on youth and MySpace into French for French Review Mediamorphoses (directed by Laurence Allard and Olivier Blondeau). More recently, Tilly Bayard-Richard translated my Pearson talk on information access and my Knowledge Tree article on public and private into French. In both cases, they approached me to translate these articles because they thought they should be made more widely accessible. I couldn't be more supportive of this effort. Both acts of kindness have totally taken me aback and I'm tremendously grateful of their time and effort. I want to share these translations in case there are other French readers who might appreciate them.

From time to time, I stumble across blog posts of mine that have been translated, but I do not know of any other translations of my articles. If anyone knows of any, could you send them my way? I would like to make them available through my page of papers.

Also, if you happen to speak multiple languages and feel as though someone could benefit from a translation, please go right ahead and translate any of my articles or talks; I'll happily post it and credit you. While some folks balk at being translated, I'm all for it if it can help others get access to ideas.

Category: digitalness

Tags: translation

Posted by zephoria at 4:10 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

December 14, 2007

valuing inefficiencies and unreliability

Two deeply embedded values in the world of technology development are efficiency and reliability. Companies pride themselves in maximizing efficiency and reliability and, for the most part, consumers agree. We like when our search engines produce results quickly and reliably. Yet, when it comes to social technologies, I suspect that efficiency and reliability are not the ideal metrics.

Let's start with reliability. In some senses, we want our social technologies to be reliable - we want to know that our phones will work when we need them and that our email will get to us. While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don't want to admit to our own weaknesses. In other words, we want plausible deniability. We want to be able to blame our spam filters when we failed to respond to an email that someone sent that we didn't feel like answering. We want to blame cell phone reception when we've had enough of a conversation and "accidentally" hang up. The more reliable technology gets, the more we have to find new ways for blaming the technology so that we don't have to do the socially rude thing. This is one of the reasons that LinkedIn is painful. Instead of blaming the technology, we have to blame our friends and colleagues when we don't hear from the contacts we're trying to reach. YUCK.

So, what about efficiency? Think about Facebook Causes. Think about how easy it is to efficiently spam everyone you know to join the Cause. Hell, the technology will spam your friends even when you don't try. Does this actually build social capital or convince your friends to participate in that cause that you love? Probably not. Likewise, an evite is less inviting than a personalized email trying to convince you personally to come. This is also the case when it comes to trying to convince your Congresspeople of something. Thanks to email, you can efficiently spam your congresspeople with little effort. But that there is the problem - with little effort. The more efficient a means of communication is, the less it is valued. This is why politicians take personal letter (particularly written ones) more seriously than email or forms that people can quickly fill out. (Of course, if you *really* want to be taken seriously, try sending your Congresswoman a bouquet of flowers. Not only did that take effort, it actually cost something too.)

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I've found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they'd give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.

When I talk with teens about MySpace bulletins versus comments, they consistently tell me that they value comments more than bulletins. Why? Because "it takes effort" to write a comment. Bulletins are seen as too easy and it's not surprising that teens have employed this medium to beg their friends to spend time and write a comment on their page. Teens' views on Facebook Apps reflect this same attitude. While they think they're fun at first, they begin to loathe them after a while because they're seen as spam that your friends send you. It's simply too efficient to spam your friends, even if you can only send 10 a day.

In the physical world, architects and city planners often build inefficiencies into the system for a reason. I remember a talk by Manuel Castells where he spoke of forcing people to stand on line at regular intervals in public places, even when the activity could be made more efficient through technology. He viewed these kinds of inefficiencies as critical to the well-being of society because they provided a context for people to interact with strangers and, thus, build connections that glued the city together. This worked especially well when people could collectively complain about the people in charge - it provided a reason for social solidarity. (Think about the social solidarity built in NY when there's a brownout or a transit strike.) Physical architects must constantly struggle with maximizing efficiency versus providing room for inefficiencies because of the social good that comes from them.

I have a sneaking suspicion that tech architects never even think about the possibility of creating inefficiencies to enhance social good, but I'm not sure. Since many of you mysterious readers are passionate about social technology, let me ask you. What examples of intentional (or unintentional) inefficiencies do you see in social tech? How do users respond to these?

Category: digitalness

Tags: efficiency reliability

Posted by zephoria at 7:49 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

December 4, 2007

musing about online social norms

Since the earliest days of Usenet and email, people have complained about how much easier it is to be mean online than offline. If you spend enough time on public forums, it's hard not to run into mean-spirited rhetoric: defamation, hate speech, flaming, etc. The latest story of helicopter parenting turning deadly highlights how easy it is to deceive to be cruel. Discussions of using mediating technologies for the purpose of bullying often rely on arguments about how technology aids and embeds malicious acts by reducing the consequences of breaking social norms. Governments often seek to ban technologies because of mean-spirited interactions that take place.

Of course, what's at stake is fundamentally a philosophical question, the precise one that got me kicked out of my 9th grade English classroom: is "man" basically good or evil? (I argued that man was basically evil, but apparently this was the incorrect answer and I wouldn't back down.)

There are all sorts of forces that limit social behavior in everyday life: fear of legal consequences, fear of social consequences, fear of damage to our bodies, lack of functional capability, whether potential gains outweigh costs, etc. Our legal system takes these forces into consideration and this is where punishments like jail (or the death penalty) operate at disincentives. Likewise, we often try to regulate structures so that it is functionally impossible to commit an act that is perceived to be collectively "wrong" (legal or social). Yet, in truth, we rely primarily on the things that are essential to humanness: desire not to face physical harm and desire to fit in socially.

Mediated environment throw these forces for a loop. I can say anything I want here and you can't punch me. At least not while you're sitting on your computer reading this. And I have a reasonable expectation that your potential anger will dissipate before you see me again. Furthermore, this fear of bodily harm is very ephemeral - we are much worse about evaluating whether or not an act will result in _future_ bodily harm than determining if it will result in immediate harm. The lack of immediate harm is key here.

The bigger issue has to do with social consequences. I have no way of determining if you're nodding along or scrunching your face in disgust and violent disagreement. I have to imagine your reaction as I write this (and I'm imagining the nods). I have no way of adjusting the next paragraph according to your implicit responses while reading this paragraph, both because I can't see you and because you're reading this in a time-shifted manner. Furthermore, unless you explicitly provide feedback (like comments), I have no real understanding that you're out there let alone what you thought of my post. The lack of social feedback sucks, but the lack of immediate social consequences can be far more dangerous.

Impression management is a core process of human participation in social situations. I try to present myself in the way that I want to be received and based on your feedback, I adjust my presentation. This is not easily learned and teenagers often struggle with this (thus, an "identity crisis" is when one's imagined self doesn't mesh well with how one is perceived) but adults are by no means perfect at this. We all learn through experience which is why social interaction is crucial.

Yet, in mediated environments, impression management is stilted. There's no implicit feedback and explicit feedback is minimal at best ("nice picture" isn't really informative). The immediate social consequences are also not there because there's no way of knowing if someone just walked away. As a result, social norms aren't really enforced online and without this re-inforcement, it's easy to break them without even knowing it.

This gets even trickier when you remember that networked publics bring together people from all sorts of environments with fundamentally different sets of social norms and expectations. Many imagine a melting pot where a new set of collective norms evolves, but because it's hard to provide social feedback, that doesn't happen. It's more like a rotting salad bowl.

Now, add in the fact that people regularly seek attention (even negative attention) in public situations and that public forums notoriously draw in those who are lonely, bored, desperate, angry, depressed, and otherwise not in best form. Mix this with the lack of social feedback and you've got a recipe for disaster. There are few consequences for negative behaviors, but they generate a whole lot of attention.

The question remains: is this the fault of the environment? In some sense, yes because the architectural underpinnings of these environments don't allow for social feedback or meaningful social (or bodily) consequences. This is where legal folks get into a tizzy because they think that legal consequences will solve everything. For this reason, they often argue against anonymity, viewing it as a barrier to regulating social behavior online. Unfortunately, this argument is flawed. While legal consequences certainly limit some people from some acts, they certainly do not limit everything. If they did, we wouldn't need jails and murder would be a thing of the past. More problematically, most of what needs regulated in social environments online is not a rupture of law but a rupture of social decorum. "He's being mean" is not something that the law really wants to involve itself with.

So then how do we fix it? Is it a matter of design? Do we need to bake in social feedback loops and consequences into the core of our technologies? If so, how?

Alternatively, is there a way to socialize people into an environment where they do "what's right" simply because it's right? Of course, this question extends beyond the internet. I fear that as a society, we are relying more on legal regulation and less on social regulation and I can't work out why. But, perhaps the problem is not the internet but a general lack of collectively understood everyday norms. Older people certainly spend enough time bitching about "kids these days," but there are all sorts of contributing factors for building and maintaining collective social norms is hard: age segregation, class segregation, homophily more broadly. We can blame overworked adults, cars, lack of public spaces, single family social units, and other such bits on contributing to homophily and the lack of collective social norms.

But here's where I think that there's an interesting sociological puzzle. What network structures result in strong collective norms? What forces are needed to create those kinds of social network? (This is a classic question of tolerance... we know fairly well that diverse networks have higher levels of tolerance, not surprisingly.) Given that universal unitedness isn't really going to happen, what are the structural changes that increase norm maintenance?

As for the internet, mass media hype aside, I bet that the internet is statistically nicer than it was when I was growing up. While many public forums and community sites like Slashdot are still bogged down with crud, most people are going online to interact with people that they know. There's only so much you can get away with when you're going to see the person the next day. Time delay might not be ideal for social feedback, but it certainly helps.

Category: digitalness

Tags: norms regulation trolls flamewars socialization

Posted by zephoria at 3:17 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

October 30, 2007

innovative TV ads

For quite some time now, TV channels have bemoaned services like TiVo for allowing viewers to skip over ads. I think that the TV stations are barking up the wrong tree. More importantly, I think that they're out of touch with viewers.

One of the fascinating things about teens and advertising is that they don't mind it. In fact, ads have come to signal "free" and so when teens see ads on websites, they assume that the service will continue to be free and that creates a sense of relief. Their complaint is not that ads are there, but that they are rarely relevant let alone interesting.

TV ads are the boringist. I have to admit that I watch them profusely in hotels and airport lounges because they are so fascinatingly bad. I have to imagine that people are trying to think up new TV ads, but do they bother for anything other than the Super Bowl? We all know that there are plenty of people who tune into the Super Bowl just to watch the ads. And there are certainly ads that people lurve and fans put them on YouTube. But most of them are le awful, especially those for political candidates and Save The XYZ causes.

For a long time now, I've been waiting for an ad that is directed at the TiVo crowd. Forget the 30-second forward people, there are still plenty who just use the 2X fast forward button. What if an ad only made sense using TiVo's slowed-down, frame skipping view? Wouldn't that be a trip? Rather than bitching about viewers, why not use the medium to play with them? Make something that they *want* to watch, are humored to watch? Am I asking too much when I ask TV stations to innovate?

Maybe a politician with a sense of creativity will try out a new tactic for reaching audiences through traditional media (cuz we all know that it's still the primary mechanism for reaching mass audiences)? OK, maybe I'm dreaming. But how fun would it be to create an ad that can be viewed at different speeds with different messages? ::giggle::

Category: digitalness

Tags: tv TiVo advertising

Posted by zephoria at 11:29 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

September 9, 2007

doing "nothing" online

Category: digitalness

Tags: youth

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

May 9, 2007

quality of Google searches?

Question: has the quality of Google search gone downhill in the last few months or is it just me? Every time i search for an event-based thing, i get crap from 2005 instead of what's relevant now. I suspect that this is because of the blogger impact on event-type items, but it's really annoying. It's also annoying that they've stopped correcting my atrocious spelling. I mean, it's all fine and well that lots of people in the blogosphere can't spell in exactly the same way that i can't spell, but the #1 type of search i do everyday is spell check. I throw something god-awful like Cziskentmihalyi into the engine knowing that it'll return Csikszentmihalyi. This still works quite well for names but it's stopped working for lots of regular words that i just can't spell to save my life. How pathetic is it that i've started opening up Word for the little red squigglies instead of relying on search? Or maybe both practices are weird...

I'm especially irked that when i search for addresses, they almost never come up. This evening, i searched for "1457 Third Street Promenade." No dice. I added Santa Monica, CA. No dice. I decided to see if Google Maps would find the address and to my shock, it couldn't find anything and kept giving me just Third Street generically. I went to Yahoo! Maps (which i prefer in old-skool mode anyhow, but hate typing in addresses to as i've noted before) and voila, that worked. I still desperately miss the days when addresses just worked in Google. I can't believe how many times a day i shove addresses into the searchbar.

Maybe i can convince myself to like the Yahoo! UI now that Google has even further screwed theirs up by cluttering the left-hand side. But i still can't decide... am i just being old and crotchety about change or has Google's search actually gotten atrocious?

Grr.. or maybe i shouldn't switch because Yahoo! wants to give me a support group for crotchedy people rather than tell me that the real spelling is crotchety. At least Google tells me that crotchedy is urban slang, making me feel a bit less crotchety.

Category: digitalness

Tags: search google yahoo

Posted by zephoria at 11:10 PM | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

March 26, 2007

safe havens for hate speech are irresponsible

I love Kathy Sierra. I think that her work is fantastic and well-needed throughout the tech community. So when i heard that she's getting death threats, i wanted to vomit.

The brief story is that three prominent bloggers got annoyed at another female blogger for not permitting mean-spirited comments in her blog. They created a site called meankids.org as well as a spin-off. These blogs encouraged people to say terrible things about others and it spun out of control. The content by the sites' creators (again, prominent bloggers) was completely unacceptable - misogynistic, racist, and horrid speech. Their words were bordering on hate speech so it's not that surprising that anonymous commenters took it one step forward.

There's nothing illegal about what the prominent bloggers did, but i think it is unethical at every level. This is not an issue of censorship, but an issue of social responsibility. What does it mean when the most prominent bloggers are encouraging speech that divides, particularly that which divides along the lines of race and gender? What kind of standard does that set? How can anyone support their practices, even as a "joke"? I believe in moral responsibility and key to that is a level of social respect, even for those with whom you disagree. Without social solidarity, the moral fabric of society erodes. When you allow room for intolerance, you breed hate.

This is not just an abstraction for me. When i was in college, i was the recipient of unbearable hate-motivated speech, forcing me to leave Brown for a period of time. In the computer science department, there was an anonymous forum called "rumor." It was the space for everything from critiques of professors to offending links to descriptions of how some women should be raped. It was disgusting. The speech from rumor spread beyond the anonymous forum; i received blackmail phone calls. My students received notices that they were not wanted (these were minority students and it was clearly racially targeted). Then, one day, i came in to find that my private emails about a lawsuit were posted to the forum. I was accused of having left them around but after a series of investigations, we learned that /dev/kmem was world writable on a machine in one of the labs and that root su-ed to my account on that machine. We learned who was logged into the machine before root, but there was no way to guarantee that this was the person who took my files.

The police (and various members of my department) asked me to pursue legal action. I declined because i realized that the cost for each email stolen was 30 years and i did not feel confident that i would ever know for sure who really was behind that machine. The person logged in was a friend of my boyfriend's and i just didn't want to go down that path. It didn't matter. Everyone in the department blamed me, telling me that i deserved it. People speaking with me in mind (during the time in which i had left) asked for the destruction of rumor; i was accused of censorship. Truth was i never thought that rumor should be destroyed technically. I believed that it showed a failure in the department, proof of the destruction of social solidarity, proof of the intolerance that was bred. I believed that it was a failure on the part of all who participated and allowed that forum to breed. In other words, i didn't want a technical solution - i wanted social responsibility. I never got it.

That incident had long-lasting effects. There were classes that i could not take because of it. I was not allowed to hold positions in the department because of it. Many people did not respect me. I remember sitting outside a TA room listening to two of the friends of who i suspected discuss my exam. They were shocked that i had aced it; they assumed that i had some guy do my homework for me. I remember going home and crying for hours.

I will never forget the descriptions of how me and my friends were to be raped. And Kathy will never forget the descriptions of how she was to be harmed. That's what it means to be terrorized. How can we live in a community that permits that? How can we allow spaces like that to foster under the guise of "free speech"? We have a responsibility, a moral responsibility, to help generate spaces that breed tolerance, to speak out in support of those around us, and to bite our tongues rather than spit hatred when we're frustrated. The web is persistent. We bitch about what young people write on the web but how dare we promote it.

My hope is that this incident, as it spreads its way across the web, will make people think twice about the racist, sexist, homophobic, hate-filled, mocking, and otherwise cruel speech that they make space for. I'm all for deleting mean-spirited commentary; i've done it time and time again on my blog. I think that we have a responsibility to do our best to make the web a safe space so that we can make society a better place.

Category: digitalness

Tags: hatespeech censorship

Posted by zephoria at 8:20 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

February 19, 2007

musing on making things real

"The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves." -- Hannah Arendt

Have you ever found yourself not saying something that is on your mind because you're afraid that if you say it, it will become real? This is a really interesting conundrum in the context of blogging because it has to do with the ways in which public performances make ideas real. Arendt argues that one of the primary roles of the public is to make things real. People seek out witnesses to validate their emotions, ideas, actions, or mere existence. Our stories become real when we have other people to share them with, when other people saw and experienced what we experienced. Having no access to public life can be maddening (literally) because everything might as well be a fable with no witnesses to validate what took place. Ah, Pan's Labyrinth.

The Internet has allowed us to take the most "intimate" thoughts and ideas and perform them in a public before witnesses. This makes real every neurosis and stupid act - stuff that might simply have slipped away before. It makes it possible to be heard. But at the same time, when you know you're going to be heard, you have to think twice. Do you really want that fleeting thought to be that real, to be that present for collective memory?

I was going through some notes i took when interviewing bloggers and teens about the things that they did to try to erase relationships that once existed. They went through a series of public and private erasures. De-Friend on every site imaginable. Erase all blog entries and profile posts professing love. Change from "in a relationship" to single. Erase from address book and block on the buddy list. Erase all SMSes. Erase all emails. Erase all comments. Burn all letters. The goal of course is "out of sight, out of mind" but the problem with the entwined nature of technology is that it doesn't work out this way. People stumble across their exes on others' profiles, in their friends' comments. They pine away, obsessively checking their ex's blog/MySpace to see if there's any sign of misery that will make them feel better because even if they know better than to track them down in person, they can't resist the anonymous stalking online, even if it prolongs the hurt.

Relationships are funny things because while they are extremely intimate, they are also quite public. Going back to the horrid holiday of pink confetti, it's interesting to think about how relationships are to be performed in public through romantic dinners, PDA (even holding hands), and simple physical proximity. People want to be seen to be in an intimate relationship - no matter how rough that relationship is in the backstage, there's a desire to make the frontstage look all rosy. Yet, when it ends, the desire to erase all is confounded by the public performance of it. Sure, Amy can erase all of the "I (heart) Kevin" comments on her profile but the effects of a public performance of a relationship can outlive the documentation of it. And the publicness of each person means ongoing heartache and reminder. This, in many ways, is the flipside of being able to continue friendships after one moves or goes away to college. Relationships continue even when one wishes they wouldn't.

I can't help but wonder about the "realness" constructed by networked publics. How does persistence of some performances screw with this? How does the intertwined nature of things not allow for forgetting? How do people respond by refusing to acknowledge aspects of themselves in networked publics? Why is it that some people desperately want to make real the most sordid "intimate" details?

Enough musing... back to work...

Category: digitalness

Tags: reality public

Posted by zephoria at 3:16 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

June 2, 2006

spatial nature of MySpace

Over on Networked Publics, Kazys Vernelis asked Is MySpace a Place? I wrote a comment in response that others might find interesting. (And perhaps prompt folks like Anne to put me in my place.)

I would argue that MySpace is a 'place' in that it's a locatable site that people "go to" and it has structural walls regulated through being logged in, being inside the domain, etc. But i would argue that this is not that important. Instead, i would focus on how MySpace is an 'imagined space' (stretching Anderson's 'imagined communities') where the space is framed by the perceived rituals, norms and acts that constitute MySpace participation. [I would also argue that MySpace is a 'medium' in a McLuhan sense because of its role in 'extending man' into the virtual for social engagement. In this way, participation might destroy the platial nature of MySpace by letting people participate in imagined communities where MySpace is simply a channel through which communication and performance occur. But it does not destroy the spatiality invoked.]

I think things get confused by bringing Habermas into the fold because his definition of spatiality is rooted in the public sphere which is entirely framed by discursive engagement. He sees identity as constructed in private such that the public sphere is the gathering of private individuals for the purpose of verbalized communication. Nancy Fraser is useful in this way because she argues that a core component of publics is the way they allow individuals to negotiate identity. Pulling in Goffman in response to Fraser, spatiality is constructed by shared situationalism through which impression management can take place.

This is where i end up talking about 'digital publics' because the nature of public life in a new networked age relies on architectural properties not normally present in (unmediated) social life - persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences. While we can turn to celebrity culture and mass media's role in collapsing contexts (Meyrowitz) to get a grasp on what's going on, negotiating these types of publics is new for most people. Digital publics are tricky because they rely on a networked structure, not a group structure dictated by audience or location. The same turn that complicates digital publics complicates issues of spatiality. In short, what are the boundaries? This is why i'd argue that it's an 'imagined space' instead of a space as we normally conceptualize it.

[How terribly am i misreading theoretical ideas of space and place?]

Category: digitalness

Tags: space place myspace publics

Posted by zephoria at 3:36 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

May 10, 2006

digital mirrors

My favorite quote from the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium appeared in the backchannel on the last day:

Scott Golder: "We build digital mirrors. And when you see a digital mirror, what do you do? Fix your hair, and straighten your tie."

Category: digitalness

Tags: digitalmirrors

Posted by zephoria at 10:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

January 13, 2005

Mac mini for the masses

I've decided that the Mac mini shall be bought by Mac fetishists for the people in their lives for whom they provide all technical support. This includes parents, grandparents, siblings, bosses. etc.

For this to work effectively, Mac must include one key application when they release Tiger: SOLITAIRE.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 12:37 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (2)

January 12, 2005

Announcing the Apple iProduct

ROFL

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 11:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

December 12, 2004

google suggest and traces

"What's the value of Google Suggest?" This is a question that keeps coming up. The title certainly implies that the service is to help suggest queries based on other people's queries. Frankly, this is not why i find the service compelling. When we walk around physical space, we leave traces of our activities, marks on the floor that let others know people have been here. As much as we may despise graffiti, we all get a little bit of pleasure out of reading the markings in the stalls. We may not follow footprints in the snow and sand, but we love seeing the path they take. There are no visible markings in digi-space, even though we know people have been there before.

What i see as the most valuable aspect of Google Suggest is the tracings - the reminder that thousands of other people are searching Google, looking for things of interest to them. There is an appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies, a visibility to our actions that we feel are normally so isolated. There's a sociable quality to our searches, a feeling of participation in society. This is why Google Suggest is fascinating to me.

Please note: i know nothing of Google's purpose wrt this application. This is all my own personal opinion on the matter.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 1:51 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (2)

December 7, 2004

Cobot and Data that Matters

In Implicit or creepy?, David is dead-on and i would like to expound on this.

First, if you aren't familiar with the lessons of Cobot, you should be. Cobot was a nice friendly little bot that sat in LambdaMOO, collecting data for its masters. Members of the MOO were bothered by this and felt that Cobot should give back to the community it was observing, like any good social scientist. So it did. You could ask Cobot anything about the social patterns going on and the data it was collecting. People started asking ego-centric questions: "Who do i talk to the most?" and such. And then, people started asking who other people talked to the most. Trouble emerged from there. All of a sudden, human jealousy reared its head. People were irate that those who they spoke to the most did not speak to them the most. What did this say about reciprocal value? Gah!

Cobot's willingness to provide social data created a social rupture because it was evaluating data, not its meaning. Yet, people who were accessing the data were deriving meaning. They were using coarse data about social relationships to imply something much deeper. Sound familiar?

I talk to Phil from the corner deli more frequently than my best friend or my mother simply because of proximity. Yet, they play a much more central emotional role in my life than Phil. Quantity and quality are often not correlated. Yet, if some system were to rank my relations and Phil came out above my mom, damn straight she'd be pissed.

The way that systems and users of systems interpret our data often affects how we interact with them. When Viegas and i were visualizing email data, we often joked that our systems motivated you to write more messages to the friends who had strong emotional connection but apparently not frequent email connection simply so that they played a more visible role.

In the case of David's metadata, this is particularly true. How many of us can truly list our favorite books? We know that this will be publicly displayed. What we list is a performance where we try to select titles that convey something meaningful about us for the viewer. We count on that audience, on that interpretation in selecting our titles. We are performing for that human audience to interpret, not the system. Yet, if the system starts interpreting our data, we may shift our scope of audience. But then what is it that either the system or the humans are interpreting? Are they capturing essence? What happens when the system re-projects its interpretations back to a human audience? How do we then deal with this doubly-mediated projection of self to a human audience?

It is not simply creepy, it's outright destabilizing.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 6:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3)

November 18, 2004

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a fantastic new tool for the researchers out there. You can search citations and find publications. Yippeee!

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 10:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

October 29, 2004

Happy Birthday Internet

The Internet turns 35 today. I have the fortunate position of being the youngest speaker to present at the Birthday Party. I spoke about what it meant to grown up with the Internet being a given and what it is that youth are doing with the tool today.

It's amazing to sit in a room full of people who completely revolutionized my life and those of my peers and of the generations to come. Being here has reminded me of how much we have taken this technology for granted. The stories have been beautiful, full of the chaotic process of creation, including crashes.

Happy birthday Internet... we're glad you're alive and well.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 4:28 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

October 1, 2004

why i love my sidekick

I ran into a skater kid on the BART yesterday who was sporting the newest Sidekick. I peered over with envy. He told me it was fucking rad and that a friend of his worked at T-mobile and snagged him one before it came out.

I keep seeing kids wearing their sidekicks around their neck on chains. At the X-Games this summer, there were tons of sidekicks. The Hiptop is definitely appealing to the hip-hop youth crowd. And for good reason.

First, look at the device. It looks like a gaming device. It says: you will use me for play and textual communication. Forget the phone - who talks on the phone anyhow? Certainly not you... you don't want to shove a piece of toast up against your ear now do you? And besides, if you want to talk, you'll use an earpiece.

Next, look at the interface. There are no horrible menus, no poorly named programs. It's simple: scroll on the right and find everything you need. AIM is obvious. Email is obvious. SMS is obvious. Everything you need with simple scrolls. The feedback mechanism is purrfect - little icons in the upper corner no matter what screen you're on. And if you're away from the device, it'll buzz for certain messages and turn pretty colors for others. Feedback. Constant feedback.

Three things would make it beyond perfect for me: a longer battery, a retractable ear piece (i always forget mine) and the ability to add programs to the ones available. I hear synching is improved with the latest version, but i haven't tried it out. That was previously on my list.

But the fact is that using the Sidekick makes me feel like a subculture kid. And even as the mainstream kids are picking up on them, only a few adults are. Adults don't get the importance of text, particularly AIM text. And the Sidekick understands that American kids are mostly on AIM and it's a central feature, not a pain in the ass add-on. This is what texting looks like in the States. Turning AIM texting into a gameboy and voila!

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 12:31 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (7)

May 6, 2004

Genevieve has a profile in the NYTimes

Today, in the NYTimes Circuit section, there is a profile of Genevieve Bell (a dear friend and mentor). As a anthropologist at Intel, Genevieve has been traveling the world to understand how different cultures consume technology. In turn, she has been challenging Western assumptions, most notably in areas concerning ubiquitous computing.

"We thought, there's a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives," Dr. Bell said. "I was fairly certain that wasn't going to be the case. I'm an anthropologist. Culture matters."

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 10:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

April 20, 2004

community awards

The Webby Awards were announced tonight and i know folks are currently in Linz trying to narrow down the Ars Electronica Prix. Both groups have an award for best community and i've found this to be exceptionally problematic for my own processing.

- Is the nomination supposed to focus on the site, its design, its intention, etc. or the resultant community?
- Who is being nominated? The creator or the community? What if the community hates the creator?
- What practice is being validated? The expected one or the successful one? What if the successful one is subversive?
- How valuable are communities that transcend the site? Do you count the transcendence?
- How do you address invisible communities whose only proof of existence is their end-result?

Let me couch this in how i feel about the Webby Award nominees for community:

- FictionAlley (a fan fiction site). The site is not particularly innovative, but the practice of fan fiction is and the community that has evolved through that practice and have become situated at that site is mindblowing.

- Friendster. The technology is somewhat innovative, but what is impressive is how much everday communities transcended geography to make a community out of the site and how new communities (ahem, Fakesters) emerged even amidst their presence being despised.

- LiveJournal. The structure of journaling with a community, for a community has been so powerful for different groups, so stunningly powerful. In many ways, this is a true community site - the result of design that is meant to support the community that already exists there and to help that community take things to the next level.

- SuicideGirls. A community has formed amongst these girls that has transcended the site that supposedly brings them together. You see them on Friendster, on LJ, on other sites. There's a layered community - that of the girls and that of their audience. What's truly innovative about SG is not its porn component but how a noticeable community can make the site have so much additional sex appeal.

- Wikipedia. Here's a site where most participants do not know one another at all. The tool is simple. But a ghost community with shared notions of activity and goal works to produce a masterpiece. The masterpiece only hints at the underlying invisible community and its power and motivation.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 2:04 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (3)

December 24, 2003

die puny technologists

On Die Puny Humans, a selection of folks have created statements for 2004. I was pleasantly surprised to read Cory Doctorow's call to the toolmakers of 2004:

Stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.

Now, i don't know much about science fiction, but i read it once in a while to understand the models that technologists are trying to mimic. When i asked Cory about the relationship between scifi and technology, he told me that scifi is not supposed to be prescriptive. Scifi is modeled after what exists today and is not a representation of the future. Quite often, very little in the way of technology is fully fleshed out. In this regard, he's quite accurate. Even his own Whuffie (which i hear about in way too many meetings on reputation) is barely detailed in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Still, while scifi shouldn't be prescriptive, many technologists interpolate the ideas presented and flesh it out to be beyond problematic. Often, they have the nerve to refer to the fiction books as their model for why it is a good idea.

Given his role as a science fiction writer, i'm quite pleased to see him call out to technologists. All too often, the omniscient technologies that appear in the science fiction novels are not representations of good things, but embedded in a discussion of the pros/cons of changing social interaction through technology. Take Cory's Whuffie and his examples of people scorning others because they are not worthy enough of interaction. C'mon now. All of us geeks have experienced a form of that, being chastised for not being cool enough, good looking enough, whatever enough. Why on earth would we want to develop a technology that encourages that? Oh, right, because if _we_ build it, we can be the ones in power, right? Hrmfpt. Seriously now, such a creation creates a whole new level of social awkwardness, new hierarchies that constrain us. Just because it's an idea for a novel does not make it an idea for life.

So, in fleshing out Cory's call to technologists, i'd ask all technologists to consider not only what problems a technology solves, but what new ones could emerge. Start thinking like a writer or an abuser of technology. Imagine how people could misuse a technology to hurt others. Consider who gains and loses power from such technology. It's a fascinating exercise and far more fulfilling than just thinking about who benefits from something. And besides, then you won't always be thinking "but the users shouldn't do THAT with this technology."

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 12:49 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (3)

November 21, 2003

google archiving IRC?

After a bot belonging to a Google IP address kept appearing in various IRC channels, folks started blogging about it.

No one knows for certain if Google is archiving IRC interactions or otherwise tracking behavior, but it does continue to raise the question if Google realizes that taking information out of context might be more a disservice than a useful enterprise.

Even if Google was not inside the IRC channel, many people log these things (just as they did Usenet, in which Google was also not inside). Yet, just as people's notion of "public" in Usenet did not include persistent & searchable, i'm guessing that most IRC folks are also not really constructing each message as though it will go down on their permanent records.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 5:46 PM | TrackBack (0)

November 4, 2003

Diebold

I love my friends. And i love the fact that they enjoy standing up to authority to challenge their power. This week, Joe Hall decided to mirror the Diebold code to express his outrage of the abuse of copyright. And he got a cease and desist. And now he's in the NYTimes expressing his disagreement. Go Joe!

Continue reading "Diebold"

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 8:58 AM | TrackBack (0)

October 29, 2003

Institute for the Future

Today, i spoke on a panel at the Institute for the Future's gathering of its sponsors. It was odd to be there because it had a flavor of Media Lab sponsor events, only i was an invited speaker not a slave doing demos who had been up for weeks on end. The Institute is a great resource for thought on technology - where it's headed, what people are doing with it, why... Basically, it's a collection of really really smart people who get to think through tough problems. [Needless to say, it sounds like an ideal job for a researcher.]

The whole event was around the ideas of cybernomads... how is mobility changing the way we operate?

For the panel, i had the great opportunity to ask questions of Schuyler Earle. He's been working on this project called noCat Wireless which is a community of people in Sebastapol working on gaining wireless. It's fascinating because we always talk about technology letting us remove geography from the equation, but this project allows us to connect to people in a given region. It's also built a "community" through a traditional form... diverse collections of people gathering for a shared need.

The other fun thing about the panel was that i actually had the opportunity to speak with Howard Rheingold (who was on my panel). I very much enjoy Howard's synthesis of ideas so having the opportunity to get face time was just fantastic.

Anyhow, it was great to spend the last two days thinking about the future, critiquing conceptual models. I felt like i was back at Intel. I forgot how much fun that was.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 7:42 PM | TrackBack (0)

October 24, 2003

Amazon was sent from the heavens

Older friends of mine gasp at the realization that i've never done research without the web. Yet, despite the web, i've always had one problem that has haunted me. Sure, i can read many computer-related journals and articles, look up any book and read anyone's college essay on most topics, but there are so many books that i just stare at and scream grep.

Grep.

I just want grep to work on my books. Well, gosh darn, Amazon went and invented it. They were sent from the heavens i tell you. This will revolutionize the next generation of college students.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 1:50 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2)

October 11, 2003

genevieve in the BBC

Genevieve's fantastic findings from her work in Asia are partially chronicled in the BBC.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 10:36 PM | TrackBack (0)

September 10, 2003

my iPod killer app

When i got my Mac, it came with an iPod for a few extra dollars (ah, student discounts). Since my computer two computers ago crashed with all of my MP3s, i haven't bothered to re-rip them. I listen almost exclusively to online radio when i'm listening to music off of my computer. Thus, i couldn't think of a reason for why i might want an iPod, but for $30, why not?

So, i scratched the darn thing before i even figured out how to use it. I didn't have a single MP3 to put on it and i certainly didn't want to go through the process of ripping my CDs again. So i procrastinated. Eventually, someone was telling me of an amazing Infected Mushroom live set. This finally motivated me to download Limewire and track down a bunch of live DJ sets from Israel. Thus, my iPod quickly turned into my little reminder of when i had enough of a life to go dancing.

Well, i was reading a friend's blog today and s/he mentioned listening to NPR recordings via Audible.com. Having missed every "This American Life" for god only knows how long, i was curious. In i wandered, where i found the perfect little gift for my iPod. Not only did they have copies of NPR reels, but they have tons and tons of books on tape. And not the kind of books on tape that i've grown accustomed to renting at trucker stops (how much Louis L'Amour must one read.. i'm still damning my 5th grade history teacher for that one). No, they had a copy of most of the "to be read soon" books on my for fun bookshelf. What finally convinced me was realizing that Eric Schlosser is reading his own books! Since "Reefer Madness" is high on that list, i decided it was a must do.

I've found my iPod killer app...

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 11:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

September 9, 2003

3 degrees

Melora Zaner from 3 degrees came to speak at Intel about the Net Generation. She had a variety of interesting approaches to the Neg Gen and since i can't find a meaningful reference, my notes from the theoretical hafl of her talk are contained within.

Continue reading "3 degrees"

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 4:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (7)

August 19, 2003