Monthly Archives: September 2003

the value of the prototype

When we talk about information categorization, we assume that our coarse categories have no impact on the people who deal with them. People need to adapt to the atrocious indexing that we do, right? If a category is wrong, it’ll be adapted, right?

But the thing is that if you believe Elliot Aronson’s arguments in “Social Animal,” you have to believe that our early categorizations play a significant role in how people relate to the material, as they are more likely to reinterpret current information to fit their early mental models than to adjust their early categories.

What does this mean for coarse categorization that is implied to evolve? How does Yahoo!s listing of categories shape the way we think about web information?

back in school

Now that i’m back in school, i’m going to be chewing on a lot of different ideas. I will probably post some of them here, although they will be very informal and not completely thought through. Still, it’s always good to have to put things down to really question what i’m thinking…

a real life buzz kill

In addressing the upcoming Fakester Revolution protest, Clay provides too very good points:

1) The real person behind a Fakester is never as much fun as the character. “Did these people never see the Wizard of Oz? Never let them see behind the curtain — the creator is much duller than the creation.”

2) At this point, Friendster will gain nothing by reverting its policy on Fakesters. The buzz kill has already happened.

I would love to disagree with Clay on the latter point, but i think he’s dead-on. At the same time, i think that there are fundamental lessons for social software creators embedded in this battle. Fundamentally, a successful digital space for social interaction must allow a diverse set of uses and personalities.

By creating a rigid “public” environment and controlling the types of social activity that go on, you inherently limit your audience and weaken your product. Just as in RL, there is value in having a “public” environment where a vastly diverse population can just live and let live. Diversity makes the world go round.

Secondly, play is really important. With play comes humor and creativity. This is the glue the helps connect people, the motivation for doing serious activities. Life is like a treasure hunt – it’s about finding those more subtle awe-inspiring moments. Connecting with people is not a dry mechanical task and to turn it into one will inevitably demotivate people.

One year from now, i suspect that the current incarnation of Friendster will have faded from people’s memories, a fad that was fun to play with and to find people. For the next evolution of said software, it’s going to be essential for designers to figure out how to provide an environment where people have freedom, while simultaneously empowering people to ignore segments of the population. In effect, they need to figure out how to model the variety of a good city. Social software must learn from social environments, not try to artificially construct them.

[Ever since Many-to-Many killed comments, i feel compelled to respond to posts there here… Yet, it feels like an odd form of disconnected dialogue.]

back in school

OMG. I’m back in school. I actually went to classes today. -bounce- I forgot how much i adore being in school. Also, i’ve been practicing new meditation techniques in class every time my mind wanders. And i decided to sit in the front row of every class. I’m determined to actually stay focused on school this time and not get destracted by all of the funny fairie adventures that run throgh my head.

The first class was a discussion of how we categorize information. It involved lots of Lakoff and i was actually able to recall Aronson’s “Social Animal” to argue that people will constantly adjust current infromation in order to fit their early categorization schemes (rather than adjusting those).

The second class concerned legal issues around digital information. I had a hard time not going meta on this class because the teacher’s style was sooo similar to the prof that i had back at the Berkman Institute and it made me wonder if all law professors teach in the same fashion (just as they learn to write opinions in the same fashion as law clerks).

Tomorrow should be the interesting day though as i’m hoping to get into an anthropology class. Time to catch up on all of that theory that i’ve been inadequately acquiring through scanned readings.

Types of Fakesters/Fraudsters

I realized that i never wrote down the different types of Fakesters/Fraudsters that i’ve been observing. Here are a few that i can think of right now. [Let me know if there are other ones that you’ve seen.]

Play Characters.. These characters are meant for fun and entertainment, and to allow people with common interests to connect.

  • Famous character or person. examples: Homer Simpson, Stanley Milgram, Drew Barrymore
  • Place (university, city, bar, etc.). examples: Brown University, New Jersey, Lexington
  • Objects, animals, creatures, mythical figures. examples: Salt, Giant Squid, LSD
  • Identity markers. examples: Black Lesbians, FemSex
  • Concepts. examples: Fear, Pure Evil, Infinity
  • Tribes (real life communities). examples: Infinite Kaos, Space Cowboys

Passable Characters. These characters are meant to appear real on the system.

  • Unwilling friends. i.e. my friend Andy refuses to create an Friendster account so i’ll create one for him, use a picture of him that i have, and link to all of his friends
  • Friend supporters. i.e. a group of guys create a girl to give them good testimonials and introduce them to other girls.
  • Bait. i.e. a passable character, often female, meant to see if “she” can pick up tons of other characters in the system by flirting.
  • Clones/Spite-based Fraudsters. i.e. Jonathan Abrams needs to learn a lesson so i’ll create an image of him or his friends and try to communicate with various friends of his to toy with the system.

Note: Cloning is pretty common now. “Fake” characters as well as “real” characters are often cloned. There are tons of Jedis, Jesus Christs and Jonathan Abrams.

There are also Collectors – people who collect one type of fake character.

There are also Friendster whores – people who simply collect as many people as possible, including Fakesters.

[Revised on 9/13 based on lots of good feedback.]

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HICSS paper accepted

Fernanda Viegas and i wrote a paper for HICSS called Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments and the draft was accepted. This means that we now need to edit it based on the reviewers’ comments and resubmit for publication.

I’m quite excited about this because i think that we’re getting at some interesting points in that paper. Basically, we stepped back from the two email visualization projects and reflected on their value. We realized that we have all of this social interaction in digital spaces without meaningful artifacts for remembering. Photographs are such valuable tools for sharing events in real life, but those same elements don’t exist online. When we created SNF and PostHistory, we realized that they ended up providing that opportunity accidentally. This is interesting because it makes us reflect on the value of such artifacts for social interaction. While digital communication allows us to have all of the archives of our experience, it doesn’t give us the quick coarse snapshops that let us reflect in a meaningful manner.

One of the things that i love about submitting to HICSS is that the reviews are always so meaningfully critical. Needless to say, all of the reviewers commented on our failure to evaluate our tools. And they are right: we didn’t. Of course, i still think that the value in what we built was more in the thought element than in any suggestion that this is a meaningful tool for distribution. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for not having had time to evaluate. But i really am not sure what a meaningful evaluation for SNF would’ve been. I certainly don’t think that it is a distributable tool (even if people keep asking to download it). Another common thread in the reviews was that they didn’t understand why anyone would want to use this tool continuously. This makes me think that we didn’t make our arguments strong enough. Just as people don’t use photographs regularly, they wouldn’t want to use any such tool as a means of information retrieval. Instead, these are artifacts to bring out during times of sharing or curiousity, not as a daily ritual. Aside from these two common threads, everything else in the reviews was inconsistent. Some reviewers loved our writing; others despised it. Some thought we were on to something; others thought the tools were pointless. Still, the various perspectives were quite valuable and certainly motivate me to want to publish there more often, even if attending the conference is a *huge* dent in the pocket.

stone butch blues

For the last year or so, Stone Butch Blues has been out of print. This has made me utterly frustrated since it’s one of the few books that i constantly buy for others to read. I went to hear Leslie Feinberg (the author) speak once and she said that the purpose of SBB was to communicate gender theory through life experience. The story is so poignant, revealing all of the emotions that one feels when experience gender confusion.

I still remember the night that i read it. I was in undergrad and working for the summer. I felt really ill so i went home early from work to sleep. I picked up SBB. Every hour or so i had to put it down because i was crying so intensely, but i could never put it down for long. I watched the sun rise the next morning as i finished the story, forever moved.

Anyhow, i just got an email message from Leslie Feinberg:

I’m happy to announce that a new edition of Stone Butch Blues is being published by Alyson. The book will be available in stores by spring 2004. Copies may be in the warehouse as early as November 2003.

The distributor is Consortium. Their phone number is (800) 283-3572. The ISBN for Stone Butch Blues is 1-55583-853-7.

It’s a must read.