I’ve been in school all of my life. School has *always* had finals right before the holiday of the big fat white man in red adorned by the green guys in tights. The shrinking of the days is always aimed at finals. And as much as i pretend to prepare for that period of the year, i’m never prepared. And thus panic sets in. Panic hit today. The next 10 days will be hell.

Liz has a great article today on why graphic design is *not* essentially harmless.

All too often, technological/graphical designers have come to believe that they are working towards the *best* interface, as though there is a universal good. They fail to remember that design is culturally and politically situated. [If this is a foreign idea to you, check out some of the materials from Nancy Van House’s course – social construction of technology, configuring the user, bias…]

Love to Adbusters.

Here’s a great feature-style article on Friendster that shares anecdotes similar to what i’ve seen.

Note the Buzzlife community memorializing one of its own through Friendster. (When you can search on Friendster again, check out Sean Wisniewski’s profile.)

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Today, i was reminded of a parable that means so much to me. I remember the roots as being Hindu, but Google seems to have a million versions of it, so i’m not sure of the details. (What on earth do you do when Google is internally inconsistent? ::giggle::)

“The world rests on the shoulders of an elephant.” “What does the elephant stand upon?” “The elephant stands upon the back of a turtle.” “And what does the turtle stand upon?” “Oh, after that, it is turtles all the way down.”

Infinite recursion, closed nonorientable surfaces. Everything is interpreted… interpretations built on interpretations. No beginning, no end. No eternal truth, only process. The perfect mantra for all of my techno-“soci/anthrop”ology discussions lately. Chew on turtles for a day and the world looks much more whimsical.

Ellen Isaacs has an essay on work she did with folks at AT&T on IM in the workplace.

My initial thought is that it’s *great* that people are finally realizing that IM is more than just an organizational tool. My gut says that the earlier studies weren’t wrong, but that things have changed. IM use has changed over time and adults are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s better than email for many complex work discussions. (My CS colleagues & i knew this back in college as we did most of our projects over IM.)

One concern that i have over this study is this statement: “Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.”

I have no doubt that people do a lot of productive interactions over IM, but my gut says that 13% having any personal topics seems very low. Even in normal working conditions, it’s so common to start out an interaction with something like “how was your thanksgiving?” This is a social ritual that helps us relate to folks. It makes me wonder if these users knew they were being tracked and studied… or if they knew that their employers were reading their IMs.