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.
Note the paper makes mention of blogs once and isnt a component of its analysis, when its so close to what is envisioned.
Ross – there are definitely missing bits in both my paper and the ASN one, including blogs. On my part, i know that is because while i was paying attention to blog work then (researchwise through Cameron and general conversations on fashion), i needed to limit scope. Of course, the big blog bubble also hit after my thesis was written (as did wikis and the social networks systems that i’ve been actively watching since).
Thankfully, this work needs to be ever-evolving, paying attention to what people want, what they are doing and what designers are creating (3 separate worlds, even inside the same systems).
Doug i am a WebCabal(ASN) member not able to attend the Presido PlaNetwork event. Was able to blog the venue thanks to iCite {and the full site when uncrashed}. Thank you for all your kind words and let us work together theroy before creation maping well as we frontier an
Augmented Social Network; “free at last”
(Dr. King)
It’s OK that you didn’t mention blogs. At least somebody isn’t. And don;t let Ross push you around. He’s got “blogs-on-the-mind.”
🙂
::laugh:: I don’t think Ross is pushing me around so much as pointing out that contemporary memes are not part of the written discourse in this area. And he is correct.
Of course, i’ve generated a Marc Canter devil figure that sits on my shoulder screaming focus on implementation (translation includes focus on the now, focus on contemporary memes, etc.) Of course, the little devil also makes really funny sounds in general and is hard to be missed.
So, regardless of Ross’ blogs on the mind, i think that their usage in sociable contexts is really relevant and paying attention to them says a lot about ASN. But so will the next meme. Every generation of tools and how people coopt them teaches us something new about technology and something new about humanity.
Collapsing
We have relationships with every person we meet/know. We have relationship networks which connect all these people to us and to each other. We manage relationships by being nodes and establishing identities (identity facets). So if we think of ourselev…