apophenia :: digitalness

June 21, 2009

xkcd meets reality

Earlier this week, xkcd posted a fantastic comic about the apocalypse happening and the dead rising to walk the earth. In the comic, mathematicians scribbled frantically and raced to Paul Erdos' grave to get him to sign a document that is presumably co-authorship on a paper. (For the uninitiated, read about the Erdos number.)

Anyhow, I forwarded this to Henry Cohn - a mathematician friend of mine - who sent me the most hysterical email that I just had to share:

By the way, there's no need to wait until the end times to write papers with dead mathematicians. One example of this is the paper "Higher algebraic K-theory of schemes and of derived categories" by R. W. Thomason and Thomas Trobaugh, which Thomason wrote with his deceased friend Trobaugh after Trobaugh appeared to him in a dream:

"The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression. Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom's simulacrum remarked, 'The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf.' Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K_0 obstruction to extension. I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom's simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn't let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap. This work quickly led to the key results of this paper. To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor."

Category: digitalness

Tags: geek humor mathematics

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:43 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

March 6, 2009

I want to evolve to not hear the cell phone

Whenever I'm in a public space where folks are blabbing away on their phones, I want to scream. Trains, cafes, busses... they all drive me batty. I'm dreading the day in which cell phones are viable on planes. Or when VOIP isn't blocked. When I'm forced to listen to half of a conversation, I start fuming. First, I mentally grumble about how rude the person is. But then I start berating myself, lamenting my age, and wondering if I were younger or from a different culture if half-conversations wouldn't drive me so utterly insane.

Years ago, I read a study (that I now can't find) about why half-conversations are so disruptive. Your brain is pretty good about tuning out conversations in a restaurant, but it sucks at tuning out just half of a conversation. Y'see - your brain wants to fill in the other half. It worries that it's supposed to respond and so it listens even when you tell it not to. You can't just close your ears and blasting other sounds into them may not achieve the desired serenity either, especially if you're like me and the urge to dance kicks in with the music.

This all makes sense for those of us whose brains stabilized pre-mobile phones. But I can't help but wonder if this is changing. If you grow up in a world where half-conversations are everywhere, does your brain cope with it better? Does it learn to tune it out? If you grow up in a culture where everyone is always rattling on loudly in public, can you tune out noise better than if you grew up in a culture where silence is more than norm? I'm always fascinated by cross-cultural events involving people from more quiet cultures (say Japan, Finland) and those from louder ones (say Russia, Israel). Do these cultural differences affect your ability to tune out noise?

More importantly, can I be retrained? Can I evolve to not hear those blasted half-conversations? I know that I can learn to tune out car noise after a few weeks in a new apartment. What will it take for me to stop fuming? I feel far too old and crotchety before my time on this one.

Category: digitalness

Tags: mobilephones psychology audio public

   

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June 22, 2008

feeding quasi-"legitimate" trolls in an attention economy

In an attention economy, it's better to ignore than to critique. This drives me absolutely bloody batty. Anyone who's been online for too darn long knows has heard the expression, "don't feed the trolls." This stems from the general belief that trolls engaging in trolling for attention. Giving them attention by telling them off feeds into their goals. Thus, the best way to deal with a troll is to ignore them. We know this pattern from offline examples too. Schoolyard bullies are one example and if you stretch it far enough, you can see this concept in "turn the other cheek." Still, trying to convince everyone out there to ignore a troll isn't easy and being silent ain't all it's cracked up to be.

I'm deeply disturbed by the proliferation of troll-like behavior in contemporary life. Why are public figures increasingly appearing whose whole identity is wrapped around driving others batty? Why does it seem as though more people are starting to write controversial books purely to make money off of the attention they receive when others attack them? Why are reputable publications publishing these authors' tirades against others that are intended specifically to draw them out in a public fight? I guess we know the answer... Or at least the equation. Attention = money. And in the world of media, attention = advertising revenue.

Lately, I've found myself biting my tongue a lot. I'm not very good at being silent when I have a strong opinion. To make matters worse, I'm an academic and we're trained to critique and be critiqued. Yet, in an attention economy, publicly critiquing people whose sole goal is to get massive attention does them more justice than harm. This is understood in marketing as there being no such thing as bad coverage. In a world of blogging and pagerank, critiquing trolls gives them both literal and figurative capital. That's frustrating as hell. Lately, I've found myself encouraging people to not blog about something when it smells like an attention whore. But of course, someone's feathers still get ruffled and bark bark bark goes the blogosphere.

I have to imagine that folks in marketing land have thought about this, if only to manipulate it. What are good strategies for handling trolls in sheep's clothing?

Category: digitalness

Tags: trolls attention economy

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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January 12, 2005

Announcing the Apple iProduct

ROFL

Category: digitalness

   

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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

   

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December 7, 2004

Cobot and Data that Matters

[From OM]

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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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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

   

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October 11, 2003

genevieve in the BBC

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

Category: digitalness

   

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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

   

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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

   

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August 19, 2003

social scientists everywhere

With social software appearing everywhere, the news seems to be more and more curious about social scientists who are working in the digital domain.

SFGate ran an article today entitled Probing tech's heart: Social scientists seek technology's human side, focused on Marc Smith (MS - Netscan) and Josh Tyler (HP - email networks).

Continue reading "social scientists everywhere"

Category: digitalness

   

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August 9, 2003

duncan's six degrees

More work continues to emerge about Duncan's Six Degrees Experiment

New Scientist reports "Email experiment confirms six degrees of separation"

Continue reading "duncan's six degrees"

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August 4, 2003

Digging for Googleholes

Steven Johnson's most recent Slate article entitled "Digging for Googleholes" reveals the not-so-omni-present side of Google. One of the problems that Johnson targets is the dreadful synonym capabilities. Interestingly, on "Google Weblog" today, they referenced a new Google advanced feature that allows people to search for synonyms.

Category: digitalness

   

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July 15, 2003

i switched

I finally switched. Hurrah!

Of course, now i need to figure out what all one can do with a Mac.

Category: digitalness

   

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July 10, 2003

Google cache raises copyright concerns

Google cache raises copyright concerns is an interesting news.com critique of what happens when copyright lawyers realize what Google is doing. [When will we get that our copyright/IP laws need some major revising for the digital age??]

...

As seemingly benign and beneficial as it is, some Web site operators take issue with the feature and digitally prevent Google from recording their pages in full by adding special code to their sites. Among other arguments, they say that cached pages at Google have the potential to detour traffic from their own site, or, at worst, constitute trademark or copyright violations. In the case of an out-of-date news page in Google's cache, a Web publisher could even face legal troubles because of false data remaining on the Web but corrected at its own site.

For this reason, search experts and copyright lawyers expect the issue to come up in a court of law, joining the leagues of copyright disputes that have surfaced because of technology innovation.

...

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July 4, 2003

gorgeous images

An artist on a psylist that i'm on just sent out a link to new images that he created and they are utterly gorgeous. My favorites:

Perfect timing! I totally fell in love with Sidhi (on the left) and i was thinking about refreshing my art with my upcoming move. Yay for being able to support artists in my community!

Category: digitalness

   

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July 3, 2003

The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship

A friend of mine pointed me to a recent Phil Agre paper called "The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship." It deals with the interrelationship between networks, trust, and social skills as it relates to social capital and different forms of social structures.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 29, 2003

is google god?

Thomas Friedman asks "Is Google God?"

The answer is yes, increasingly so. Google is the ultimate bridge between all people and information and its power will only intensify. Perhaps their refusal to be a verb is simply to eliminate all but the Proper references to Google. No blasphemy allowed.

Continue reading "is google god?"

Category: digitalness

   

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Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com. This article shares a variety of people's perspectives on online dating. One paragraph particularly caught my eye:

Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities, families and schools once played.

This confirms my hunch that one of the primary roles of urban tribes are to provide people with the connections to mate. Of course, in areas where you don't have that type of intimate network, you need to find bridges to groups through alternate means. Digital dating does this, but it's hard to figure out what you have in common at the more fundamental levels through this mechanism. One of the nice things about schools and shared friends is that you can validate certain similarities in interesting ways.

Continue reading "Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com"

Category: digitalness

   

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June 26, 2003

fake characters in personal ads

I've always known that many of the women who post personals ads aren't real, but i never realized how many of them were adverts for porn sites. Basically, it seems as though porn sites create personals ads for average women and then when men respond, they respond with something like "check out pictures of me on my personal site" which is a link to a porn site.

When talking with a friend who used to work at a personals site, i learned that when they removed all of these "fake" people, their numbers dropped dramatically. It seems as though the loss of fake characters meant the loss of large numbers of decent looking attractive women, which made the site less appealing because there were seemed to be fewer options, even though the same number of real options existed.

Another point for deception being useful psychologically.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 25, 2003

why social statistics reporting is not always desireable

A lot of people think that reporting social statistics is a good idea. I mean, c'mon - we all want to know how many friends we have, how many people we know, who we talk to the most often, etc. This is fascinating, right? Yet, twist the conversation in a different direction... do we want those around us to know who we talk to the most? Probably not.

Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent is a great paper (by folks at AT&T) that addressed this issue head on. It's an old paper, but one that's really important for anyone thinking about the social implications of providing statistical data publicly. Basically, Cobot spent a bunch of time in the MOO, collecting information about people's social behavior and then spewing it back out at them. Problem was that it also told you how important you were to others, which while utterly fascinating to most people caused significant divisions in a way that did not build community, but divided it.

Category: digitalness

   

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second life

Today, Linden Lab officially unveiled Second Life, a rapidly growing and constantly changing 3D online society, shaped entirely by its residents. In Second Life, Linden Lab has pioneered real-time 3D streaming technologies and advanced compression capabilities to create a persistent, contiguous landscape where residents can discover a world of exploration, socializing, creativity, self-expression, and fun unlike any other.

Word on the street is that this is next-gen MUDs/MOOs... Of course, it's also interesting to pay attention to what is coming down the line from There.com

Category: digitalness

   

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June 24, 2003

Female Avatars Face Gender Bias Online

Female Avatars Face Gender Bias Online:

US economist, Edward Castronova, has discovered that female avatars, from worlds such as EverQuest, trade online at an average 10 per cent discount to their price were they male-designated.

...

"(A)bility seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount.

"The discount may stem from a number of causes, including discrimination in Earth society, the maleness of the EverQuest player base, or differences in well-being related to male and female courtship roles. We do know, however, that these differences cannot be caused by sex-based differences in the abilities of the body, since in the fantasy world of Norrath, there are none."

Category: digitalness

   

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June 22, 2003

Building Communities with Software

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments ["The Great Good Place", 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished...

This article argues that online communities have become third places for people, particularly programmers and others who spend a huge percentage of time online. It's an interesting article, but i still believe that most people use digital interactions to aid in RL ones.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 13, 2003

envisioning next gen tech

I've been trying to figure out why technology without deep consideration of social behavior drives me batty. There is no doubt that some of the best technologies emerged from tech geeks wanting to make really cool and interesting things. Of course, spending 3 years in a place that focused on inventing the next generation of cool things made me wanna curl up in a ball and die. Distruptive technologies come out of a special type of bubble... one that doesn't realize that it's unique or different, filled with people who are truly in love with the idea and not focused on whether it will make money or whether it will do anything or not even realizing it as a "product" so much as a "toy."

The problem is that the technology field has matured. Most ideas that are currently being discussed are simple technologies that expect fundamental changes in social behavior. Even the software ideas that people are talking about are new renditions of old systems. Blogs aren't new, but they've been repackaged. Social networking tools aren't new... None of the social software that's being discussed is revolutionary. It's simply trying to solve people's needs, their interests. Yet, what's the value in doing so without a deep and directed consideration of the impact? Software development has reached a new stage. Tools that affect social behavior can be easily used to marginalize populations; they can be just as easily distructive as helpful. We no longer live in a society where only the most intrigued play with computer or online. Impact is widespread and thus, so can abuse be. Even old technologies, developed with good intentions have come back to haunt people in odd ways. Things have definitely changed, and not completely for the better.

Now that we're beyond the tech boom, i find myself continuously harping on folks to step back and really reconsider what might happen when they construct their technology, particularly if it is socially directed. Kudos to those who were able to innovate and distribute amazing tools through pure passion. I just don't think that successful innovation in that culture is justification for not really deeply considering the implications of what is created in this one. I want to be surrounded by those who realize that they have the power to construct society and want to do so in a socially minded way.

Of course, the problem is that i can't fully articulate why i feel this way, but i'm trying to disentangle that gutteral knot that i suspect has some validity to it (in the fabric of my reality).

[This is partially inspired by Marc's perspective on the world.]

Category: digitalness

   

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June 10, 2003

disagreement in fotolog

Fotolog, the popular site for posting pictures went to a pay model, causing great outrage amongst many members, who showed their disagreement with protest photos. Underlying all of this is a discussion of high and low art.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 8, 2003

disney doesn't approve of metal

When i was working for Macromedia, we went down to Disneyland to meet with one of Generator's beta clients - Disney Online. The families of some of my colleagues came along, for the vacation aspect. One of them had this darling little girl who found my tongue bar utterly fascinating and she kept staring at my mouth. I hadn't been around many children for years so i had forgotten how cool tongue bars look to children and i started horseplaying with her. Unfortunately, she got so excited that she started sticking out her tongue and pointing to it to her mother who was not so amused. Somehow, i got coerced into washing my mouth out with soap (literally) along with her daughter to prove a point that sticking your tongue out in public was bad. ::sigh::

Five years later, i'm hanging out with the creator of Macromind (which became Macromedia) and his little girl who is equally entertained by my tongue bar. Of course, Marc had a lot more fun with this!

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June 7, 2003

javaone, the go game and booth babes

Life is odd. I'm going to be a booth babe. Does this mean that my feminism is going down the drain? Of course not. But i know i'm getting old because i don't care if the feminazis will discontinue my membership because i think that being a smart hott geeky booth babe sounds like an adventurous thrill.

The Go Game is going to JavaOne. Using fun little techy tools, conference attendees will get to run around San Francisco trying to solve problems while getting to engage with plants who are running around trying to make the task easier or more difficult. Of course, i'm voting that they get to enact the Tumbling Duke Applet.

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more on faceted id/entity and the ASN paper

I mentioned the Augmented Social Network white paper before, but after having attended the discussion, i'm in utter awe at the commonalities that emerged with no awareness of one another. Nancy Van House, one of the SIMS professors, attended the talk and poignantly noted that work along these lines is being done in a variety of fields using different languages and not properly connected. (Of course, this reminds me that an ongoing role for a researcher is to bridge all of the research going on in one's area.)

The ASN folks are completely engaged with the ideas of persistent identity from a conscientious people-centric approach, noting issues of trust, context, brokered relations, reputation, etc. Although i've had to defend why context matters over and over again, these guys saw this as obvious. They also *get* the issues of persistent identity and are not just looking at collapsing contexts to fulfill corporate desires. In effect, their philosophies clearly resemble that expressed in my thesis. One of the coolest things in the paper is Cynthia Typaldos' diagram of "12 principles of civilization" as a structure to analyze systems.

[Of course, while i love what they're doing, there are folks who think it's too pie-in-the-sky and not enough implementation. Ah, Marc... Of course, i still believe that theory is necessary before creation.]

Even while my thesis mirrors their work (while grounding it in social science research and providing implementation examples), i have a feeling that i need to get involved with these folks ASAP (and i think they'll get a kick out of the to-be-finished-soon paper on visualization tools for identity storytelling).

::bounce:: There's nothing better than getting your work validated in odd ways! Oh, and PlaNetwork has been fabulous.. finally putting actual faces and personalities to digital people (like Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, who breaks my assumptions of a business person by being exceptionally friendly). The collapse of people here is phenomenal... of course, it's also exceptionally exhausting to meet so many fun and interesting people who are willing to engage on issues of technology, environmentalism, politics, sociology, etc. I still want a utopian world where all of the interesting people are constantly engaged and physically together. Of course, the New Yorkers and the San Franciscans could never agree on location.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 6, 2003

doug engelbart

As an undergraduate, one of my primary roles as an A/V person was to create a library of all of the videos that Andy had. Usually, it required watching them to figure out what they were. Most of them were utterly painful, but there was one that always blew my mind. It was on such an old tape (pre-NTSC VHS) format, although i don't remember which one now. I remember thinking it was so fragile.

Plugged in and out comes this black and white demo of Doug Engelbart demoing the mouse for the first time, an interactive hyperlink, shared-screen collaboration and a variety of other things. 1968. It was a perfect demo - no flaws, not hiccups, clean as day and done on the first take, live. (If you've ever done a demo, you know that it's impossible to live up to that standard.)

Engelbart is a pioneer in computer science, a complete visionary. He invented so much of what we take for granted today. And all of his inventions focused on people's needs and designing for a civil society. His work is stunning.

And i had the amazing opportunity to hear him speak tonite. I sat there smiling with my eyes closed, listening to his voice which is unchanged in the 45 years since that demo was created. Flashbacks to crazy days in the overly ACed A/V room labeling and wandering through the library with utter awe and fascination.

Category: digitalness

   

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mobile asses

I just saw Mobile Asses today and i can't help but be stunned by the mix of shared cultural languages and frightening social implications.

Juxtaposition this site next to the case where abortion clinic patients were photographed and placed on the web. Of course, it's legal, but is it the society that we want to live in? Second, the site uses a shared web cultural language/norms by mimicing Hot or Not's format.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 5, 2003

cataphora

In an interview, Esther Dyson talks about Cataphora, a system that profiles email behaviors:

Then there’s this great company, Cataphora, which works with emails and other documents to do a much better job of searching for and analyzing emails. Their market right now is primarily litigation and [legal] discovery. For example, if you’re looking for emails in a brokerage house, it’s pretty rare that you find something that says ‘XYZ Company is a piece of shit.’ Instead, there’s something that says ‘This is an important accommodation for a banking client,’ and you don’t know how to look for that. There is no keyword that would get you to that. So you want to look at patterns of communication, who has talked to whom, and did the chairman of the company talk to the analyst before the analyst raised his ratings? Who talked to whom, before so and so sold their stock? It's not just the content—you want to look at communication patterns.

Cataphora lets you see how and when people are connected rather than what they said.. but that lets you know where to look for the content you want. It displays the communication patterns in a kind of flowchart that shows the progress of conversations over time, who talks to whom and so forth. So you can you say, ‘Look at all the emails between this guy and that guy on such and such a date.’ And you see who within the conversation suddenly stopped talking. As Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder, says, ‘One guy who usually talks to everybody is suddenly cut out of the conversation. Maybe they’re planning a surprise birthday party, but usually it’s something else….’

The question is whether or not the outsider can figure out the something else. For example, in my visualizations, sometimes folks broke up, sometimes people died, sometimes a project ended, etc. But the data owner always knew.

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June 4, 2003

planetwork

I'm very much looking forward to a conference this weekend in San Francisco, called PlaNetwork: Networking a Sustainable Future. I'm a big fan of any network research that is created to be socially beneficial. And i was even more fascinated when i saw a paper entitled The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust Into the Next-Generation Internet that will be presented there.

This paper argues for many of the thoughts that i have addressed (in my thesis most notably). In particular, they address an intelligent way to do identity management in a socially conscious way; they address the value of social networks when personally managed; and most importantly, they frame all of their arguments in the idea that you don't change social norms, you build technology to help people be social in the way that they see fit. It's a fabulous paper and i cannot wait to discuss it further this weekend.

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a missed connection

Despite my distaste of clubs, i had to break down to see my favorite DJ and i had a nice little mindshift, where i just wasn't going to let anyone get in the way of me having fun and bouncing crazily. With this mindset, i went all the way up front and actively demanded dancing space and disregarded any stupidity from the people around me (like the guy who thought to grind me from behind who i elbowed with joy in a flaling dance move). In the process, one guy smiled at me and started dancing goofily. After a bit, i kindly told him that i wasn't interested but that i was having fun dancing and that i hope that he wasn't hurt by this. He was disappointed but tried to keep dancing anyhow. Apparently, he wrote to Missed Connections on Craigslist and i have to admit that his note makes me smile:

Desert Storm fatigues at Infected Mushroom

You really are a kickass dancer! I keep thinking today the classiness with which you handled my advance. That was very cool. Everyone should be that cool. Hope you had a great evening...

Positive feedback for a needed shift in consciousness.

Category: digitalness

   

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everyone i know

I ran into an old article from the NYTimes:

Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 -- and he's now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of "People I've Known in My Lifetime" (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). "It's a way of helping me remember the past," he said by e-mail.

I can't help but think about the relevance of this to the HICSS paper that Fernanda and i've been working on. We realized that the power of our email visualizations was in part due to their power to operate as an artifact for storytelling, to provide a prop for one's memory. In effect, the visualization serves as a tabulation of email relations. I have to wonder what it would mean to be such a Connector that one would do this.

Of course, it also reminds me of friends of mine who take pictures every day as records and other systematic means of marking time, place and people. Of course, the irony of Patrick's system is that the public archive is tapped into search engines and thus helpful to a wider range of folks.

Continue reading "everyone i know"

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trepia

Trepia seems to have hit my social network, as i've received like 10 messages about it this week. It has also hit the press. I signed up in beta form but i'm very weary of it. For starters (as i've noted before), i'm never a fan of software that requires me to give age and sex information. I understand it in dating software (i.e. Friendster), but for general purpose meeting, why is this information required? So, i just tend not to log in. At least with Friendster, i can keep a certain distance from the strangers that write to me; in Trepia, i know that there in close proximity to me and i really don't want folks to know that. Or at least, i want to be able to control it in a safe manner. Hmm.. i need to think more about what Trepia makes me uncomfortable.

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June 3, 2003

email hiccups

In the last month, i've been privvy to a handful of email hiccups - individual messages that were sent out to a list accidentally, messages that were far too personal to be sent out as such and thus revealed some very disturbing aspects of the senders. It's also been interesting to see who has apologized and who has not and what form that apology has taken.

These messages, intended for one context and presented in another are quite powerful. They reveal the character of the individual and the importance of perceived context for written communication. More importantly, they are a clear reminder of how easy it is to accidentally shift contexts online and the potential reprocussions of that socially and politically. Of course, the easy RTFM answer is a reminder that all emails should be written as though they are public. In reality, no one ever does this. It drives me batty to think that some technologists think that overriding social tendencies is the best approach.

Category: digitalness

   

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June 2, 2003

sex and social networks

I met with my new advisor today, which is sooo exciting. The best part about conversations with him is that he is truely interested in issues of sex, race, class, gender and sexuality. And he doesn't think it odd to randomly go to a cafe and chat about ideas.

In talking, i started to wonder about the maintenance of social networks. I wonder if women are more likely to operate as bridges between diverse clusters. I wonder if this is true even online.

Category: digitalness

   

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May 30, 2003

finding nemo

There's nothing more charming that sitting in a rural moviehouse watching the brand new Pixar movie, Finding Nemo amidst crowds of kids, families, dates and other Americana. Of course, this quaint environment did not restrain my desire to sit and shout for my friends during the credits. As for Nemo itself... wow. I realized that i paid no attention to any of the CG, which is a good indication of how cleanly the film was done... one could simply get wrapped up in the wonderful story of familial love. I will always remember meeting Ed Catmull when i was 18 and him telling me that CG does not a movie make; the story is everything. He's definitely proven his point.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:49 PM | TrackBack (0)

a social network caught in the web

A social network caught in the web is a new paper out of HP Labs looking at social networks online.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:23 PM | TrackBack (0)

May 22, 2003

the familiar stranger

One of the more powerful concepts that i learned in the last few years is the notion of "familiar strangers." The term comes from Stanley Milgram and it refers to the people that we see regularly in a non-intimate fashion that we develop a sense about, but never directly interact with. A good example is the person that one sees on the bus every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice. What is cool about familiar strangers is that when we see them out of the context of non-interaction, we will immediately interact with them, because there is a presumption of shared knowledge. The further we are from our normal interaction with this person, the more likely we are to connect. Thus, we are likely to treat our bus buddies in New York as close friends if we run into them in Italy.

Underlying this behavior between familiar strangers is the function of multiple contexts in common. In common social introductions, we proceed through a ritual of figuring out what we have in common - what people/institutions/cities/interests we have in common. We do this to develop a common grounding. Likewise, when we see someone in an additional social setting, we feel as though we have exponentially more in common with which to bond.

The power of the familiar stranger is ringing loudly in my head right now because i continue to talk with folks about LinkedIn. I fear that too many of the social software folks don't realize why context is essential for giving folks a reason to interact, to connect, to bridge one's social network. People are not simply motivated by what they need or could give, but by what fundamental reasons they have to connect... Introduction rituals are essential for connections and to properly do so, one needs more contextual information than a limited version of one's resume. Social negotiation, even in the professional realm, is not limited to strictly business... it is inherently social.

Continue reading "the familiar stranger"

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:18 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)

messaging research

Nalini P. Kotamraju has a great collection of fantastic references concerning mobile phone/SMS/IM use. I've always adored Nina Wakeford's work on messaging and this reminds me of how badly i need to spend some time outside of the US. I'm still aggrevated that SMS doesn't really exist here. ::sigh::

Category: digitalness

   

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May 21, 2003

no contact jacket

The No-Contact Jacket is a wearable defensive jacket created to aid women in their struggle for protection from violence. When activated by the wearer, 80,000 volts of low amperage electric current pulses just below the surface shell of the entire jacket. This exo-electric armor prevents any person from unauthorized contact with the wearer's body. If an assailant were to grab hold of the wearer the high voltage shocking exterior would interrupt their neurological impulses which control voluntary muscle movement. The neuromuscular system would be overwhelmed causing disorientation and loss of balance to occur and of course pain. The pain experienced is non-lethal but is enough of a shock to effectively and immediately deter contact with her body and provide a critical life saving option for escape.

Category: digitalness

   

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May 20, 2003

smart mobbed

Social Network Fragments was just linked on the blog at Smart Mobs.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:35 PM

May 15, 2003

"Hot Tubbing an Online Community"

Clay Shirky posted a really interesting article on Many to Many today - "Hot Tubbing an Online Community"

No.. this has nothing to do with getting online community people together in a hottub. Read it - it's fascinating (particularly to those interested in what to do when a community gets too large).

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2003

On Liz's Bet

After waking at an absurdly early hour this morning, i briefly checked in with various blogs that i check in with only to find Liz's bet. Of course, it got me all contemplative, at 8AM and then i remembered that i was up at that hour to go to a meeting and had to rush off before being able to articulate why i think that Liz is correct - in 3 months time, women will represent only 10% of the participants in the top 500 of those on LinkedIn.

Frankly, i'd extend her bet to include all marginalized populations in the business structure (people of color, queer folks, etc.). I would bank that these populations would be farther underrepresented on LinkedIn than they are in the real world (where they are poorly represented to begin with). Personally, i believe that genuine changes are needed for LinkedIn to be widely effective.

In an ideal world, we'd live in a meritocratic society where someone's value in the job process is based on their previous jobs, which are inherently based on skills. But we don't live in that world. We live in one where social networks are everything. LinkedIn appears to be trying to allow people to find each other through their merits (under the assumption that you are connected) and then give you the the social network to contact that person; normally, this is done the other way around.

The problem is that their approach emphasizes a limited perspective of the individual. There is no consideration for a person's education, their personal interests, or most of all, presenting their character. The only character component is through the linkages. Since character is determined through linkages, you have to decide to request an introduction before you figure out through which path they are connected. This is problematic because people rely on their assessment of my friends' expertise to evaluate whether or not they would trust their opinion of a friend. While my HR friends could help me find a great HR person, i wouldn't trust their opinion on a programmer.

This is not specific to LinkedIn or job markets. In Friendster, i have added many people whose friends i would be wary of dating. On the other hand, through surfing the system, people whose friends i would automatically discount seemed to shed new light on my friend. But it is unreasonable to assume that i would trust any of my connection's connections.

LinkedIn does not allow you to navigate the structure. They see this as a feature, but i see it as a fatal flaw. Women, minorities and other underrepresented groups are notorious high self-monitors. Generally speaking, they are unlikely to put themselves out blindly, to cold call or to message someone without knowing the path that they're dealing with. They are unlikely to evaluate and then approach someone simply through their self-professed professional listing. There are no testimonials, no validation of the individual ahead of time. Mostly, there's little to grasp onto other than jobl listings. (Women are notorious for getting to know a potential employee/collaborator on topics other than work to get a common grounding for power purposes.) Yet, the biggest problem is that the mechanism for surfing the network emphasizes one's numerical worth because the system lists people in order of their number of connections. Searching based on anything meaningful is impossible; you can't even search by name to find out if a known friend is on the system. Frankly, most women don't feel the need to show their worth numerically, and often feel slighted in a situation where they are expected to.

Jessica argues that one of the problems is that networks are self-selecting. I would agree with her, but Friendster reminds me that women are quite comfortable inviting people and connecting them, but the first priority is social (although i've noticed that friends of mine have found job connections on Friendster as well as dates). For women, the social is inherently part of the professional. The problem is the format, the UI, the feeling that the system presents. My female friends were by far the more viral in their habits on Friendster than my male friends. Yet, even the most viral Friendster female friend of mine got bored and annoyed with LinkedIn within moments and hasn't logged back in since.

I suspect that, even with effort in inviting women, LinkedIn has little appeal for women. They are the most sufficient at negotiating their social networks, but they do so systematically and via the network first.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:40 PM | TrackBack (0)

May 7, 2003

us dept of art & technology

It's always fun to run across old friends and find out what new adventures they're up to. It seems as though Mark Amerika has his fingers in a collective called the "US Department of Art & Technology". The site, "Political Art Creates a Shadow Government," is a nice little play on our current government agencies, complete with lots of undersecretaries and directors (Mark is the Director of the Office of Freedom of Speech).

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:02 PM

May 4, 2003

keeping control of one's speech

I really like the Creative Commons project because it approaches the notion of copyright from the perspective that i believe it was originally intended. Copyright was to protect individuals so that they could keep producing more of whatever they produced. It was intended to go into the public domain after a set period of time so that it could be expanded and furthered. Likewise, original copyright laws protected those who wanted to comment on and build upon copyright, since it was for the good of all. With new copyright laws (most notably the Sonny Bono act), it seems as though the public good part of copyright is completely gone.

The web takes issues of copyright and IP to a new level. In particular, i'm fascinated by the impact of persistent data and archivability of data on the social quality of the web. The US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, but it does not guarantee that you own your own speech. What happens when you post your opinion to another site? Do you own your words or does the site owner (or the collector of public discourse)? Deja made lots of money off of selling its archive of Usenet posts. What control do you have over your persistent presence on others' sites? Do you own your Friendster profile? What about information about you that you did not authorize (such as videos of you going into Planned Parenthood)? Issues of databases and persistent data bring up new issues in data control.

Of course, this is where i'm fascinated by Creative Commons. Is it possible for sites to create an equivalent stating that anything that you post to this site is your property? Would this type of action be protected by law? Could it help build trust and safety (furthering TRUSTe)? Should they vow not to sell your data in any form (including in aggregate)? How would such a system work and be effective?

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 1:44 AM

April 26, 2003

clay shirky

I went to Emerging Tech this week, which was a wonderful opportunity to interact with hacker culture and technologists in general. It was also an odd reminder of what it's like to be one of a small handful of women in a space. Although my primary reason to be there was to meet interesting people, one lecture stood out. Clay Shirky explicitly addressed the hacker community and related why social issues were pertinent to them. It was the first moment i've been in a tech conference and wanted to hug a speaker.

But the bigger question is... why didn't i know about Clay Shirky before? He appears to be a demi-god in the eyes of some. Hmmm..

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:51 AM

April 8, 2003

Anita Borg, visionary computer scientist, dies at 54

Anita Borg was always a woman who inspired me. She was an intense computer scientist who was really interested in making technology more accessible to women. I am sad to learn that she died of brain cancer. May she rest in peace.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:55 PM

March 30, 2003

email social networks

Apparently, folks at HP are doing work on trying to uncover the distinct social groups within larger social networks by analzying email. They are doing so through simple network visualizations.

[nature article, more focus on communities of practice]

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:58 PM | Comments (1)

March 28, 2003

power structures in our habits

Through the graphing of email networks, researchers found that they were able to correctly identify structures and power hierarchies. Ah, communities of practice... Always feels good to see my life theories validated...

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:28 AM

March 27, 2003

social interaction online

"Social Software and the Politics of Groups" is a neat little article about the tensions between groups and individuals online. I don't agree that we're in a digital metropolis entirely, but a chaotic system definitely. And i definitely believe that all digital tools will be put to social uses fundamentally. Anyhow, good for the records...

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:46 PM

japan's mobile culture

My non-cellphone friends always ask me what the point is in having one. I usually recount what it took for me to convince a friend to get one: it means that you can procrastinate making plans even more!

But seriously, i've envisioned and wanted to live in a mobile culture for a long time. I love the fact that no one knows where i'm at or from (particularly since i live in California and have a Rhode Island phone number). I love that i can choose when and where i will answer my phone (and i've definitely developed a strict set of personal social norms that i believe everyone should follow... kinda like my road rules). That said, the US is still sooooo far behind in mobile culture (compared to, say, Japan). SMS, mobile web access and moblogging has not permeated US culture because of our corporate pricing structures. Cell phone are still predominantly post-18 year olds (the result of early credit card requirements). It pains me to realize that we continue to get further and further behind in mobile culture...

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:38 PM | Comments (2)

March 26, 2003

discover article...

It seems as though the Discover article has created some interest.

SocialText blogged it.

Abstract Dynamics blogged it.

PixelCharmer blogged it.

Roland Piquepaille blogged it.

And a variety of other folks linked to it.

Why is this interesting to me? Well, i want to know who these people are.. what are they working on? Ah... social networks invade one's life...

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:18 PM

March 6, 2003

is there freedom of speech in a chatroom?

Currently, there is a lawsuit working its way up the circuit as to whether or not the identity of a chatroom poster should be revealed. Not surprisingly, this theoretically pseudonymous poster wrote damning things about someone and that someone is pissed. And not surprisingly, someone knows who this person is (namely, their ISP provider, AOL). The defense is likening this situation to Tom Paine's pamphlet distribution, but even that comparison brings up the important question of this case: what kind of speech exists in chatrooms?

I would argue that most posters think they're babbling in the same fashion as they would on a street corner. Those who are being slandered realize that this is not the case since that record is a bit more permanent (ah yes, sticky data). Do we compare to front lawn babblings? To early press pamphleting? To newspaper slander? What will this mean for how the law sees cyberspeech? And will the law ever change the individuals' perception of their own speech?

[related CNN article]

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:30 AM

February 3, 2003

suicide website

ASH (alt.suicide.holiday) is over 10 years old. It's evolved into a website, a chatroom and a community by people who believe that suicide is a choice. Yet, over 10 suicides have been linked to ASH and folks are wondering if they are to blame for these deaths. They do have recipes for suicide, funeral arrangement directions, calculators that compare the pain of various methods and a variety of other resources.

I believe the suicide is a choice and expect that one day i'll be in enough pain to call it quits. All of the blame talk about getting assistance always bugs me because i think that there should be a way to leave this world with some grace and honor rather than as a vegetable. Because of this, i don't think that providing information about suicide makes you an accomplice (and frankly, i want a kind accomplice who understand my needs over the weird social values of the system). Therefore, how do you help people kill themselves when they feel the need to quit and help them see the point to life when it's really just not time yet?

Update: While I support the right to die, I do not believe that the decision to kill oneself should be made lightly or alone. Many people choose the path of suicide because the pain exceeds their resources for coping. Pain caused by terminal illness is different from pain caused by depression. The latter can be treated and there are resources out there to help. If you are considering the path of suicide and you are not facing a terminal illness, please consider seeking advice before you make your decision. There are many organizations out there that provide support for people who are facing this decision. Your options include:

• Send an anonymous email to The Samaritans
• Call 1-800-SUICIDE in the U.S.
• Teenagers, call Covenant House NineLine, 1-800-999-9999
• Look in the front of your phone book for a crisis line
• Call a psychotherapist in your area
• Carefully choose a friend or minister or rabbi, someone who is likely to listen

To learn more about suicide and to get a valuable perspective on being suicidal, check out Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:30 PM | Comments (52)

voyeurs google

A Nation of Voyeurs: How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should

This is another great article on the concerns raised by our past collapsing into the present. The writer uses anecdotes to explain why this can be troublesome, yet it's so appealing that we wouldn't want Google to disappear; he even shares the stories of revenge where people get hurt under the powers of Google. Unfortunately, i haven't really run across anything that suggests what *should* be done to way out the cons with the pros. (They just typically share the scary stories, the good intentions of the Google creators and the legal impressions of Zittrain/Brin/Lessig/Rosen.)

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:39 AM

January 24, 2003

Senate rejects TIA

Suprisingly (to me at least), the senate rejects the Total Information Act. Unfortunately, this does not mean that Poindexter has lost since it needs to be rejected by the House and vetoed by the President to truly go away.. ::sigh::

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:32 PM

January 15, 2003

lessig's supreme court case

High Court Upholds Law Extending Copyrights by 20 Years. That means that Lessig lost his case. It's a very sad day.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:15 PM

January 5, 2003

TECHSPLOITATION: Reputation System

I just ran across a funny little article about reputation systems in blogs.. no startling revolutions but cute none-the-less.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)

December 23, 2002

identity control

It always makes me smile when i run across other folks with similar views on identity control and the loss of privacy. And i do love the powerful thought of disinformation.. Maybe i should start normalizing my own site?

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:09 AM

December 16, 2002

googling

Although i've read notes on Googling potential dates before, i really like this latest by the Ethicist at the New York Times (even though i don't completely agree). It's a tough conundrum, and the technology has certainly changed our expectations of privacy and awareness of one another. Then again, should this information be so readily available? How does it change our lives when we have to always operate as though we could be Googled by dates, by potential employers, etc.? How do we stand up to inaccuracies that do not go away because someone else owns the site that throws libel against us? Interesting ethical questions... [Of course, Google realizes they're in a tough place too.]

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:18 PM

November 22, 2002

wimper

I am often told that i'm a bit to hypersensitive about the Department of Defense's interest in Social Network Fragments. I mean, c'mon, it's money, right? And there is no doubt that i've suffered some consequences from disagreeing with this connection, such as a terrible stake between my old advisor and myself. And everyone's right - they can always repeat the work and ideas that i've been doing. But it makes me terribly miserable to think that my research might aid their objective directly:

The goal of the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) program is development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources. EELD is developing detection capabilities to extract relevant data and relationships about people, organizations, and activities from message traffic and open source data. It will link items relating potential terrorist groups or scenarios, and learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to identify new organizations or emerging threats.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 7:30 PM

November 20, 2002

graphical browsing

As much as the notion of graphical browsing pains me for its inefficiency, i have to say that i appreciate the elegance of the system (mmm.. circles) and i realize that many AOL users only browse the web through clicking on items at the portal front site. Scary, isn't it?

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 7:45 PM

July 25, 2002

Google & collapsed contexts

Oh! Oh! So, i've been bitching about the problems with Google for quite some time, the concerns about privacy, how it collapses contexts, what that means, etc. And every time i say something about that, people remind me that Google is a fabulous company (which i'm actually certain it is) and that everyone is speaking to the public so get over it. But, it's not that simple. People aren't speaking to the public like they do in the physical world. The ability to archive, search, etc. collapses contexts and leaves people fundamentally vulnerable.

It made me realize that people aren't aware of the underlying differences between the physical and the digital. And while my initial flip-out was quite incoherent, i'm starting to have a better grasp of how to address this, how to break it down and discuss the issues in terms of context, faceting of identity and presentation.

And i'm glad to hear that i'm not the only one who thinks that this is a problem that must be addressed! And there's even a metafilter discussion going on!

[And of course, more on /., which is a quick reminder that /. geeks don't get social issues or context... too much libertarianism, not enough reality and way too little self-monitoring]

Continue reading "Google & collapsed contexts"

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

July 18, 2002

agoraphone

Kelly Dobson, one of my labmates has this great project called Agoraphone that is up and running outside of the Lab. The basic idea is that you can call it and speak to a public forum, expressing things that you might not express in private. The people in the public space can respond to you while the anonymity is maintained. It's fabulous, and so related to the kind of storytelling that V-Day encourages people to do, to start expressing their ideas, concerns and depression. If you want, give it a call (617-253-6237) or stop by the Media Lab to check it out (daytime only; it's in the grass across the courtyard).

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:17 AM

July 15, 2002

yahoo destroys communities

Once again, i am reminded why i am offended by Yahoo. Last fall, they decided to delete all of the content of the V-Day listservs that i moderated, for no reason, with no explanation. The best answer i could find was that we were denounced as pornographic (since we talk about vaginas) and a terrorist organization (since we talk about helping Afghani women). ::sigh::

Continue reading "yahoo destroys communities"

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 7:15 AM

July 11, 2002

single online id

More corporate distrust pops up every day, and they still don't get why a single online id is a bad idea... ::sigh::

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:08 AM

July 10, 2002

google graph

Raffi posted a neat little google tidbit... mmm... networks...

he also pointed me to a nice little article that interviewed john underkoffler on Minority Report's technology.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:21 PM | Comments (3)

July 9, 2002

nitemares on the web

I have to admit that i find it more unbearable to deal with the Internet every day. Rather than being a utopian environment, it brings out the collective worst in humanity. And yet hides the abusers behind a digital curtain, allowing them to be unapologetic and invasively abusive without any form of regulation to stop them. I've noticed a trend in my mail lately.... It used to be the case that my email was filled with messages about crazy new ideas, potential, excitement, check this out, wow, yippee. Good conversations, engaging thought, people becoming aware of the digital realm and its possibilities. Lately, it's become the same bitchy environment that i live in on a daily basis. The he-said she-said has gotten out of control and the abuses are horrifying. My email is no longer primarily positive, but primarily negative or concerned. And for good reason.

On today's list of interesting additions:
- spammers have stopped being apologetic 'cause the regulation just ain't working, so they won't suffer the consequences
- Microsoft is moving to a mandatory panopticon, with no user choice
- video games reduce brain activity (and what about TVs?)
- Carnivore continues to get more vicious
- surveillance is not just a sci-fi idea

Ok.. that's enough. At least there are still some things out there to make me smile:
- a VW bug transformer!
- mathematical/multi-dimensional legos!
- Google's mirror

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 2:35 PM

July 5, 2002

contextual lightening bolt

I just had one of those thoughts that makes me go yay! Y'know - when something clicks and things make a bit more sense.

Postmodern theorists constantly refer to the fragmentation of the individual, seeing it as a modern day crises. This has always bothered me because the individual is not inherently fragmented, only their social presentation of self, or their social identity. The individual has a coherent sense of self, yet they negotiate multiple social selves depending on a given context. With little consciousness, people can quickly evaluate the context of a given situation, determine which facet of their identity they wish to convey, and construct a face from which to perform this identity.

The crises of self doesn't come from the fragmentation, but the increasing loss of control over the contexts of a given situation. Technology has made it possible such that contexts collapse - spacial, temporal and personal. People don't know how to properly perform their social identity because they're not sure to whom and for when they are performing. Architectural cues no longer indicate what is appropriate - are they being recorded? at what time is this conversation being had? Contexts are collapsing.

One place where this is increasingly obvious is in fashion. Postmodern theorists see fashion as proof that the people are in a crises state. There are no longer social rules for when to wear what clothing, retro has gotten to a point where it's nuovo, and fashion looks like the collapsing of all time, fabrics, and social roles. Perhaps this is not a crises in the individual, but a recognization that contemporary society flaunts collapsed contexts.

Yet while we hail such collapsing, we are simultaneously confused by it, particularly as we have increasingly separate roles in our lives. Society requires us to present an acceptable social identity in all situations, but in a collapsed world, this means presenting an identity that is uniformly acceptable, across all time/space/people. Such requires homogeneity. Perhaps the crises in the self is a rebellion against such a generic norm, where there is no individuality. People aren't afraid of their fragmentation, they are afraid of the collapse of it.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:17 PM

June 25, 2002

access to websites

Ok... so, i've never been a fan of web profiling by corporations for advertising agencies. So, for most sites, i use one of two tricks. Either, i use cypherpunk [most sites can be accessed with cypherpunk/cypherpunk or something similar, allowing you to go in as a group]. The other thing that i tend to do is choose the top choice of all items, with 20500 as my zipcode (White House). So, often i am a male executive in the financial sector, living at 20500 making <$20,000 a year. I don't want their adverts; i will not comply; i am not a sheep.

Well, today i heard about another way to get to NYTimes (since i keep having to make new cypherpunk accounts - latest is c1ph3rpunk): random account generator.

Also, on a related note, i really like one of the cypherpunk links, an interesting old research bit on using crowds to create privacy online... If you are part of a group, you're activities become the conglomerate.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:29 AM

fascinating times...

Ebay is offering health insurance to merchants that make over $1000 a month! Talk about an interesting loyalty program. I'm fascinated... Maybe that's how i should get health insurance... $1000 a month, eh?

[cypherpunk login for latimes: cypherpunk/cypherpunk]

Thanks to memepool, i've just learned that you could also use your bidding skills to bid on your own medical care...

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 1:11 AM

June 23, 2002

never xp

Reason to never use XP #n-teen billion: XP Search (Start menu->search) sends data to Microsoft

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:24 PM

June 18, 2002

thesis outline

ok.. i have a rough sketchy version of my thesis outline together... have any thoughts????

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:39 PM

netochka nezvanova

speaking of digital entities, before i lose her name one more time, let me blog the story of netochka nezvanova for all of my future headslapping cries of forgetting her name once again. for those who don't know her, she's quite fascinating... and sometimes, you can see her through her art/hackery - always a m9ndfukc

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:53 PM

June 17, 2002

closing of internet

FIRE CLOSES CHINESE INTERNET
"A fire in a Beijing Internet Café has prompted officials to order the closure of 2,400 cafés around the city, ostensibly for safety inspections. The closures, however, coincide with a nationwide crackdown on Internet cafés meant to tighten government control of Web use. While the government encourages the use of Internet to promote commerce, it contends that the minds of children and teen-agers are being polluted with pornography and subversive material. The Chinese government requires Internet cafés to track customers' Internet usage - a law not enforced by thousands of cafés. It is expected that only 200 of the Internet cafés closed will be allowed to reopen."

Wow... what will this result in?

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:10 PM

social networks

it's so great to see social networks become more and more discussed, particularly as i've been playing with them so much lately. the latest is a great orielly jon udell post about visualizing social networks and other social behaviors.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:31 PM

June 14, 2002

Letting Web Users Fib Scientifically Is Key

IBM Scientists Rely on the Principle of Uncertainty To Develop Web-Privacy: Letting Web Users Fib Scientifically Is Key ... hmmm... this bothers me.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:25 PM

May 25, 2002

exhibit coming along

In less than a week, a collaborative piece that i have been working on will be going up at the Artists Space in NYC (feel free to join me at the opening May 30 6-8PM). I'm quite psyched, actually - it's going to be absolutely gorgeous... I don't have actual screenshots from my work quite yet, but as i was websearching, i found the most intriguing image that shows the kind of thing that we're showing: clusters of people, partially colorcoded, interacting with other people:

(only ours is all text representations of people instead of actual people.. although it would be absolutely fun to have real people)

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:19 AM

May 21, 2002

when spam provides humor

For four years, i dated a boy named Jon and my name has no 'h' on it. Yet, when Jon's roommate received a piece of spam this morning, it took him a bit to realize that it was exactly that, not a real piece of mail. Why? Because the message was from "Dana" about her evil ex "John." The mail was an advert for a porn site, and a bloody hysterical one at that, particularly considering that it was most likely randomly chosen names. (see email inside)

Continue reading "when spam provides humor"

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:19 PM

May 17, 2002

entertaining log files

I'm sitting at work, coding away, when my partner-in-crime notices that subscriptions to his daily readings are going through the roof (gotta love scripts that mail you things, push media style). So, this means a plod through log files. Sure enough, CNN is doing a story on Star Wars websites and his Find Your Star Wars Twin survey is linked directly from there (mmm... personality tests).

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:33 PM

May 16, 2002

packet sniffing fun

Ooooh.. Raffi just posted a bitty note on using the packets that go across the 'net to do interesting visualization/audiozation, creating the awareness for the general population. It reminds me of the silly things that i want to do... Take Social Network Fragments and start mapping out the entire population's social network (since email headers are read by gov't) and make people aware of what they know... I love the idea of packet-sniffing to create awareness/empowerment.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:29 PM | Comments (2)

animation

I just went to a fun talk by Bob Sabiston (Media Lab alum who is a software designer for A Waking Life) - what great fun to see how the movie was made, to see the ease in which the animators can create that look & feel. I have to admit i'm such a sucker for seeing how animation techniques work; oh, how i crave to go to SIGGRAPH this year...

In my mail this morning, i also got a fun rendering from Karrie, using a basic edge detection technique. I think that i look better sketchy:

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:02 PM

May 11, 2002

cartooning my thesis...

wouldn't it be fun to turn in my thesis as a series of cartoon plates? yes, i'm having a bit of difficulty in the writing stage. but anyhow, i couldn't help but appreciate the fact that User Friendly is choosing to use the @ symbol to represent an individual's digital avatar in Nethack.

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 2:33 PM | Comments (1)

May 10, 2002

SecureId: a working demo

so, i've spent the last 1.5 weeks slaving away at building a working demo of SecureId. it feels like i'm back at Brown - 6000 lines of code in under two weeks. damn. poorly commented, utterly hacked and in need of a desperate cleanup, but it's the best i could do with such little time.

but i have to admit that i'm kinda proud of myself... who would've thought that i could put all of that together so darn fast? wow.

unfortunately, i also have to move on to a million different things asap. eek. so much to do, so little time. i'm so angry with myself for letting everything slip. ::sigh::

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:00 PM

March 25, 2002

good tech articles of the day

Nelson was right-on with his thoughts of using images as passwords - it seems as though Microsoft thoughts of that. People have much better visual memories that verbal ones...

It scares me to realize the approach that our government is going in copyright protection. I think that we've lost a sense of the purpose of copyright. The idea is to get more information to the common good in a way that protects the creators of the ideas. Alas, we are now seeing bills like the SSSCA/CBDTA. Of course the tech-industry is up in arms - this is against everything that we stand for, and it's just not reasonable for the common technologies.. talk about a way to make all but the monopolies have no chance...

And remember all of my worries about consumer agents being automated, meaning that you could prioritize your customers in scary ways. It seems as though more and more companies are using bots to replace customer service folks. And i thought Sprint's Claire was annoying... Shit... How can you make a bot realize that what you need is important or doesn't fit into the previous protocol? How will i be treated as a young person without enough credit?

And isn't it funny that the government can order websites to delete data, but consumers and general people can't? I really hope that archive.org works here...

Oh.. and it's really funny to think about artificial societies- how do you grow them and what can they tell us about the future? I think that my problem is that i want to have my own society, my own rules, my own system.. i keep thinking that i should start my own country.. i wonder if i would be a bad dictator.... i still believe that the best countries are run by benevolent dictators..

They just announced that CNN Student News will remain commercial free - thank goodness!! To me, this situation is a *big* sign that capitalism has reached a point of being absolutely ridiculous. I mean, isn't it a bad sign that everyone needs corporate sponsorship in order to be functional in this society? Corporate sponsorship means corporate control which means limited control. If a site is supposed to be educational, supposed to teach students (which means is supposed to give multiple perspectives, not just the ones desired by that corporation), isn't it dangerous to imagine corporate sponsorship? It reminds me of the battles that Ms. went through when they were battling whether or not to have advertisements. They couldn't get food-related ads because they wouldn't put recipes in their magazine; they were denied makeup-related ads because some of the images on their cover had women without makeup on!! If educational material was all corporate-sponsorship, would students not be able to hear conflicting perspectives? Would they not hear about oil spills because Exxon was a sponsor? Eek!

Category: digitalness

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:02 PM