Monthly Archives: June 2004

“what did danah boyd contribute to sociology?”

A friend of mine wrote me, bemused that upon looking at her logs, someone had found her page with the following Google search: “what did danah boyd contribute to sociology?”

I’m not quite sure how to take this. And i’m curious who is at fault for folks thinking that i’m a sociologist. (Barry – can i blame you?) As for being at a point in my career where i’m contributing to any intellectual community in a meaningful way, please be patient. I’m trying. But for goddess’ sake, i’m a bloody PhD student who once again jumped fields; i’m still trying to fill in the holes in my knowledge!

Word Wars

Last week, i went to see Word Wars – a documentary on Scrabble competitions. A friend of mine helped make this fabulous movie and it is well worth seeing, whether because you love Scrabble, you appreciate documentaries, or you identify with anyone who has a compulsion towards the thing that they love. Also, if you saw Spellbound, you’ll especially appreciate Word Wars because it’s like what happens when obsessive kids grow up.

San Franciscans: it’s playing through this week at the Roxie.
New Yorkers: it’s opening mid-June.
Everyone else: ask your local art theatre to bring it.

my iPod won’t unlock – help?

::grumble:: Mac won’t help me restart my iPod without paying them $60 so i’m hoping someone here might be able to help.

My iPod’s software thinks that it is on hold (even though the slider at the top says otherwise). It fell under this magical state in the first week of April. I web-searched and someone on the web said to let the battery die to nothingness. I did this. To no avail. Whenever i plug it back in to power, it’s still on hold.

There’s no way to do the restart via the three buttons because it’s on hold. Isn’t there a manual restart somehow? Like one where i can erase the whole disk and get it to restart?

I have to admit that i’m *really* cranky with Mac about this one. You’d think that a noticeable defect in the software (documented by others on the web) would mean that they’d support you in fixing it. I’m a bit resentful by being demanded to pay $60 to fix it when i was thinking of upgrading at the end of the summer. Now i’m just questioning whether or not it’s worth upgrading because my iPod has been broken for half the time that i’ve had it.

Vegas…

Oh, Vegas. I went to Vegas with a bunch of girlfriends to celebrate one’s birthday. It was a complete trip. I left LA on Friday with a plane full of wannabe-celebrities including far too many models. The guy behind me in the Southwest line was rattling on and on on his phone about getting limos for this and tickets for that and making himself sound really self-important for one of the models in hearing range. She realized this and was rolling her eyes at this guy the whole time. Finally, she started talking to a perfectly normal looking guy, much to his shock. It’s Southwest. What multi-millionnaire flies Southwest to look important? Anyhow…

Got on the plane. The guy next to me shared his goal: to get as inebriated as possible without getting incarcerated. Of course, he didn’t use 5 syllable words. I was amused. I practice yoga breathing to remember that i was going to Vegas for my friends, not because i liked Vegas. Of course, framing it as an anthropological exercise *really* helped.

So, i spent a lot of time people watching and talking to folks. I watched a woman try to pick up 4 different johns of exactly the same time. One gave her a room key. I was impressed. He was nervous. I watched a pimp-daddy wedding party and a lot of midwesterners on their big vacation. The best were the kids – they were sooo in awe of the dazzle of Vegas – big eyes, lots of pointing. I was staying in the Luxor and the deck outside of my room looked down on the whole scene. Great for people watching. Another one of our party was in the same zone, finding out about teen curfews and culture growing up here. Perfect, considering the recent NYTimes article on American Dreamers: the Lure of Las Vegas. It really is a good people-watching town.

And it really is where regular America comes together in weird ways. Although i was not on a specific voting mission, i had quite a few political conversations by engaging people about the Patriot Act and the various anecdotes i heard about all Vegas visitors from the holidays being considered terrorist suspects. I used that to launch into discussions about where the country is going, what it means to have freedom. This was particularly easy given that in the land of sin, people are all about maximizing their freedoms and even the local papers/news covering Reagan’s death were talking about how much more conservative the Republican party is now. I love getting reactions equivalent to: “Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way before…” Oh so much fun. Changing political views one person at a time.

kids, oppression and social tinkering

One more on Kellogg… two framings, in particular, really made me think:

Mimi Ito (whose work anyone in socialtech should follow) is an anthropologist and comes at digital kids with that perspective. Using an anthro framework, the key is to think about kids in their terms, not trying to project or assert an adult framework on kids. In other words, the goal is not to save kids, but to respect them on their terms. She points out that age is one of the most oppressive forces in society, even more naturalized than gender. Because kids grow into adults and we were all once kids, people tend to treat kids as young adults. The goal is to get them to adulthood, not to be valued on kid level.

We also talked about technological tinkering and how many kids learn to explore technology that way. Liz Keith pointed out that a lot of digital participation by kids is social tinkering.

I think that point is really key because we tend not to value the social tinkering or give kids the framework to value that, even though it’s such a key feature of their lives. [And there are nice parallels to my Etcon rant about social hacking vs. technological hacking.]

vulnerable youth

I’m at a meeting with the Kellogg Foundation talking about vulnerable youth. They are interested in how technology can help at-risk kids take an alternate path. A few things keep coming up for me.

Situated learning. Folks have passions and if you can situate the learning they are doing in the scope of those passions, would learning be more effective? Fan fiction communities seem to be learning how to write and edit. What about teaching physics on the field to football students? What can be done with consumer media? What are the different ways to engage with passions?

Follow the drugs. Crystal meth use goes up amongst youth between 125% and 200% every youth. Educators and governments keep talking about the addictions and are screaming for it to stop, but they aren’t looking into why people are using it in HS. They think it’s only about peer pressure. When i was talking to kids doing meth, i kept hearing about how it gave them motivation, a relief to boredom, the feeling that they were doing something in this world (even if it was only scrubbing a tile floor with a toothbrush). Boredom is literally killing the youth.

What’s the point? Many kids i knew growing up had no motivation to live; where the hell were we going? Health, the future… these are all products of an optimistic life view. When you’re working a job till midnight, dealing with parents who are abusive, dealing with gang culture, what the hell does school have to offer that’s at all helpful? More than anything, it’s a place to just release all of that tension, anger and get attention for it. I mean, if you release that on the streets, you’ll get the shit beat out of you. At school, teachers give you attention.

In other words, how can education get out of philosophy and work in spite of all of what’s going on? Better yet, how can education be situated in the chaos that’s going on rather than thinking it’ll go away?

internship, health and sanity

So, i officially took an internship for the summer yesterday. I will be working for Blogger (Google). I’m still figuring out what i will be doing, but it’s a great way to build on the new blogging ethnography that i’ve been doing. And i’m *SUPER* psyched.

Over the last two months, i did a lot of thinking about my life, reflecting on the last semester. I was running on speed mode and i paid a price for it. By the time i hit Tokyo, i was having blackouts every day from the lack of muscles in my back causing my fractured neck to spasm and crush those little discs. I was taking more Aleve than vitamins. Not good. My body was a wreck.

I looked around at the people who were also on the speed-track with me. They too were a physical wreck. It was a scary scary thing to realize that i was going to kill myself if i kept this up. Furthermore, i realized that i wasn’t being nearly as productive as i used to be because i was always exhausted and caffeine/sugar-cracked-out in order to keep going. I had no focus, no sanity, etc.

When i thought about what i needed to do, i realized that the most important thing to do would be to focus on one thing, do it well, but calm the fuck down and focus on getting healthy again. I decided that i needed to stay home in San Francisco for the summer. Nothing was more appealing than a 9-5 (a.k.a. 10-8) schedule.

When Google approached me, i felt as though somewhere in the universe, someone was prepared to help me get my shit together. A research project directly in line with what i love with a team full of the coolest, kindest folks at a company with massage therapists, a fully-functional physical therapy-style gym, physical therapists, pilates, organic food, etc. and a pay that will let me survive grad school. My biggest concern was having to drive, but Google even solved that, offering a shuttle from Glen Park.

I am so beyond thankful.

did United sell their mailing list?

I’m pretty used to spam, but i also track it pretty vigilantly. I have a unique email address given to each company on the web and most of them i never send anything from. Some have ended up on spam lists for different reasons. Cheap Tickets sold my address within a month. Some get distributed because of invitation policies. I stoppped reading email to my LinkedIn address because someone with a virus problem managed to send that into spamming hell.

But today, a new entry into my spamming world emerged. United.

Email addresses that are used by companies that will then send my address to others (i.e. YASNS) are human readable. They have the company name in them so that the recipient will get a clue and realize that this is a site-specific address. Not all do. But the ones given to companies like United (receipt-only) have coded numbers in them to track them over time and place. My coded United email started getting spam today. As a Unix email reader, i have never experienced a virus. I can’t conceptualize any other way in which that email address was acquired by anyone. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I guess they really are going bankrupt.