SIGGRAPH has officially begun – yay!
It’s great to be back here… it’s kinda weird though since i’ve been to this convention hall soo many times. Passing the Figueroa gave me jitters. So many crazy nights there. Welcome back to SIGGRAPH!
At SIGGRAPH!
danah boyd | apophenia
making connections where none previously existed
what is it like at siggraph?
are there submeeting or lectures that are informative or is it more the person to person networking towards understanding blogging?
i would imagine person to person talking would be more interesting then a lecture: i could never stay awake past 20 min.
Danah:
if i have a question for Professor Donath in terms of applying some of my research done in assisted living with elderly patients with what was done over in boston at that museum, should i just email her, or should i add it to her wiki page before her class tomorrow. its a serious question that touches on fall prevention, and image processing, crowds, and number of walkers and canes per area of space.
stef
also the idea of social context software and the elderly: the idea of using multimedia to get people engaged as a form of occupational therapy…
i got 35 volunteers for a show on august 31.
how the heck can you keep up with blogging, text messaging, seeing old friends, and breating?
ok, this looks cool
AK peters and the NIVIDIA thing looks technically the coolest thing.
the psymobiote stuff is weak: and the spoken word is not that good. monologues that effect the enviroment by being viral fragments in an ubiquitious enviroment would be cool.
Judith Donath is very interesting: by getting persons to think about a surveillanced space, they are changing there relationship with internal grammer…i think the linguistic issue she is posing very interesting: how one handles the same experience after a stroke to the broca’s area would be interesting: where does the brain percieve time? does social software warp time, or can that warping help re route ones perceptions into a peripheral memory and thought system (thought prosthetic). ah, i’ll spare judith from my questions…
stef
something i learned here: perhaps forgotten words
“While i may feel attacked here, in my own digital home, i feel outright demolished at misbehaving. Unlike many group blogs, this one has an identity. It’s a blog about women and tech. It’s a blog by women involved in tech. It’s a blog by thinking women who think, say, and create far more than a few posts a month on the site. There is an unspoken context. These are things that i take for granted. I try to keep posts short, but in doing so, i fail to lay out the framework and thus i’m attacked both for what i say and what i don’t say. Instead of creative suggestions, “perhaps you forgot this,” i usually see you’re wrong/foolish/inappropriate. Sometimes i wonder if we created misbehaving as a tool to increase our masochistic lashings. It’s certainly not a forum for interesting conversation in a safe space.
One thing that we’re missing as disconnected souls reading each other’s words is a shared social structure where we can intuitively understand when to critique and when to support. The blog world too easily lends itself to a forum for attacking each other, purportedly to critique ideas. How often are anonymous critiques truly constructive? How easy is it to tear apart someone you don’t know? Stanley Milgram learned that ages ago… if you feel like your responsibility is to critique, you can do so infinitely, regardless of how another might feel. And the further removed you are from witnessing the horrific reactions, the more you can continue on. Sometimes, i think we’re all a bit sadistic.
But it truly saddens me that blogs aren’t safe space. They don’t sit in a context; they don’t have a set of shared norms. And sometimes, it’s just simply not fun to constantly fight for the right to speak from your own perspective. It’s in moments like this where i remember why some people have no desire to speak up, no desire to fight. I remember asking my mum why she didn’t run for office; she laughed and reminded me that not just anyone is willing to be put through the ringer for the chance to spend every day being hated.
I continue to reconsider whether or not i should blog, or if i should only post uncontroversial material. While i’ve met some amazing people this way, i’ve also seen the increase in my insecurity about sharing what i know. Yet, often, my attackers are anonymous and i should know not to take them seriously. I can intellectually tell myself that it is foolish to let them affect me, but anonymous attackers hurt my soul even more so than actual people. With actual people, i can have a conversation, attempt reason, understand where they’re coming from. Anonymous attacks are just there, unable to be addressed personally, unable to find resolution in me. I will never forget the girl who asked me why i blogged, why i wanted to be a public target? I still can’t answer her.”
What is SIGGRAPH like?
http://www.siggraph.org/conferences/reports/s2004/
P.S. do you find Ani DiFranco a little self indulgent? Like that laughing and falling off the stool?